A girl in my class came screaming out of the cubicle in the toilets. She was 10, bleeding, and thought she was dying. She wasn’t; I will never forget telling her that she had taken her period.
She had no idea what I was talking about. I took it upon myself to explain to our teacher what had happened, and ended up in the principal’s office for my efforts.
None of my teachers could believe that, aged 10, my mother had ‘had the talk with me’. In fact, she had told me when I was nine.
Puberty can start physically and hormonally in children as young as eight.
Vulnerability sets in and it’s a confusing time even if what’s happening to you has been only half explained to you. It is a time of confusion and vulnerability sets in. The hormones, the puppy fat, and for young girls, there’s the pain and wrongly, the paranoia of the bleed to deal with.
Karo Omu is from Nigeria, now based in Essex. She recently launched her book called The Little Red Spot which she hopes parents will use to start and continue the conversation about periods. Karo was inspired to write the book after a normal enough incident involving her five-year-old daughter.
Anyone who has had children will know that when they are young, there is no such thing as privacy, especially in the bathroom. A while ago, Karo’s daughter walked in on her in the bathroom, saw blood and got really upset because she thought that her mother was hurt.
Karo was put in a position many of us have experienced and in that instance, decided that she needed to explain things to her daughter in an age appropriate manner, and so her book The Little Red Spot was born.
Some might wince at the thought of having ‘the talk’ on any level with a five-year-old, but perhaps acknowledgement of a fact of life rather than its dismissal benefits everyone?
Normalising these kinds of conversations is empowering.
Sex education was non-existent when I was at school. We had ‘pastoral care’ once a week for the first three years of secondary school. Thirty years later, I reflect on those classes and think that neither the teacher nor the students knew what pastoral care was supposed to mean. I just remember the classes feeling a bit uncomfortable for everyone.
I do know that there were teachers in school who I really knew had my back, but I’m not sure if I would have ever brought a question about sex to them. Good old Catholic guilt meant that I was too embarrassed to even say the word (I always spelled it out S E X because that somehow detracted from it’s severity...).
How would I have reacted to proper, fact-based sex education in school? I will never know, I suppose. I imagine that I would have squirmed and felt just as uncomfortable as the teacher who was explaining it to us.
But that was in the 1990s – a time when my granny used to insist that I changed channel saying ‘Get rid of that filth’ if she saw anyone kissing on screen, Home and Away was deemed a bit racy and forget about watching Dirty Dancing. That film was rated 15 and I had to wait until I was 15 to watch it. Access to film, television, magazines, anything of a sexual nature which described or explored sex was limited.
As giggling, insecure yet hormonal teenagers, we weren’t great at talking about ‘that sort of stuff’ amongst ourselves, we were far too innocent. The height of the conversations were about who we fancied.
I remember the shock when one of my school friends admitted in upper sixth that she had been reading Jilly Cooper. She, and all my friends know who she is and we still slag her about it to this day. The shame...
Or was it curiosity? Of course it was. Curiosity killed the cat, information made it fat. It’s one of the oldest cliché’s going and it fully applies in the case of sex education. Let’s talk more openly about the uncomfortable stuff.
