Periodically Honest

* trigger warning. Those who struggle with maturity, empathy or reality may find this blog hard to process. 

 You wake up knowing something isn’t right. Your abdomen is sore, your back aches and tears are ready at the back of your throat. Reaching down you realise that it is THAT TIME OF THE MONTH!!! Your first job is to stem the immediate flow. With this done you start the unpleasant task of stripping your bed clothes, remaking your bed, putting on washing and, finally immersing yourself in a scalding hot shower to try and remove the icky feeling of waking up in such a way. You are already late. A headache throbs at the edge of your vision and the squeezing of your womb means you are feeling sick so you skip breakfast. It’s 6am when you finally step out of the door having completed a marathon of cleaning, replacing, inserting and padding. You are aware of a slight clamminess that comes from wearing a sanitary towel and an uncomfortable awareness of your own nether regions. Arriving at work you nip to the loo to check all is well but the act of peeing slightly dislodges your tampon so you have to replace it. Bugger. You only put two in your handbag. Never mind. Holding back tears that have appeared from nowhere you head to your class. The noise and bustle seems ten times louder today. Your sense of smell is heightened and so the lingering odour of teenage sweat, aerosol chemicals and canteen food makes your already unsettled stomach churn. You can actively feel yourself bloating and even the elasticated waste you deliberately chose is biting into your sensitive flesh. The morning passes with the usual events but your body is just so tired. Every part of you aches and you want to sink down, hug your own knees and cry. Instead you swallow an ibruprofen (dry because you drank your cold tea two hours ago) and plaster on a smile. Somewhere during second lesson it happens. The moment when you reach up to get a djembe drum off a shelf or crouch down next to a student's desk and feel your sanitary product fail in its mission. Knowing that you cannot possibly leave those 32 kids unattended whilst you sort out your potentially disastrous flooding issue and so it will be approximately three hours before you can get anywhere near a toilet.....if you are lucky. Because at break you are probably on duty. Breaking up squabbles, dealing with bullying, picking up litter, comforting the injured whilst painfully on alert for the tell tale trickle of warmth down your thigh. So you have to wait until lunch..... except lunch is choir/orchestra/drum club or WORSE....DRAMA CLUB (cue rolling on floor and exaggerated confidence and enthusiastic "teacher in role" modelling)! and you must energetically throw yourself into 45mins of waving your arms, jumping up and down, sitting on a suspiciously clammy leather piano stool or wedging a wooden drum between your thighs. So lunchtime tampon/towel changes are usually a write off. Then it's back to the classroom full of teens. So you tie a cardi around your waist and pray for a light flow. After crawling around on the floor at the end of the day picking up half eaten sandwiches and ripped up paper so that your cleaner doesn't have a meltdown and go on strike you have the option of spending more time in school and going to the staff toilets at the other side of the campus or just making a dash for it and hoping you can avoid the repremanding stares of those judgy colleagues who have noted that you left before 4.30pm and now consider you a slacker. Especially if you are childless because have NO VALID EXCUSE to leave when all your womb does is excrete stuff painfully. 

So, after adminstrating clean tampons and pads at 6.00am, nearly 12hrs later you get to deal with hideous, demoralizing and sickening job of making yourself feel remotely clean and comfortable again. Oh and then you can do it again tomorrow, the next day and so on for the rest of your working week. 

Sorry. Moan over.