Wings!

Ok, so now I’m going to the ooky factor.

LG sent me a little email joke earlier, which I forwarded to Princess Fred and a lady here at the office…a joke about using sanitary napkins aka pads to make Christmas slippers (they were cute, in a sick, lime green sanitarium kind of way). Honestly, I would post the photo if my IE and blogger issues weren’t so darn…darning!

Princess goes on to comment…”who uses pads anymore? What a good way to get rid of the extra ones :-)"

Which got me thinking.

Didn’t we all start out with pads, when we first started having periods? And not the little, skinny, discreet things that are in the market today. Things that have anti smelly stuff in them, or that have wings, or that have EXTRA ABSORBENT MIDDLES for those really heavy days. Things that are tiny and wrapped in pink or blue plastic, or that might have butterflies printed on the outer cotton. Things that come in a tiny, discreet box.

Right.

We started out with HUGE pads that today resemble those Depends pads you use later in life. HUGE pads that made NOISE that sounded like you were a waddling duck…or worse like you were stuck wearing a pair of corduroy pants some well meaning relative had gotten you as a gift, the kind where the wale was really wide and when you walked it sounded like a burning Cessna? Yeah, that kind. So you’d have this….thing taped to your underwear, and every time you would move at ALL it would make this kind of slithery, crunching noise and you would turn bright red knowing that everyone could hear your pad, and everyone knew you were having your period!!!

You could just die, couldn’t you?

Now that I think about it…don’t we all know one girl from school who had an accident, and it always involved white pants? Maybe that’s a post for another day.

It made gym particularly challenging. Do you or do you not disrobe in front of others while wearing a pad? I must have missed that chapter of pad etiquette….until I discovered the joys of tampons (praise Jesus), I used to change clothes in the toilet, with the door shut and firmly latched. I was already being mocked for my mis matching underwear or purple bra (not that I needed a bra at twelve, and what was my mother thinking, letting me wear a purple bra to school? That is a sincere invitation to locker room mockery), and certainly wearing a large, lopsided and probably not properly secured diaper would have just given those teenage Lucy Borgia’s even more ammunition to use against me.

And if you hear some other girl make a crunchy noise as she duck waddles down the hall in an insane attempt to have her thighs NOT TOUCH, you cannot under any circumstances acknowledge that you heard a single solitary sound.

God forbid something should fall out of your bag during class. Something large and pink and plainly only meant for girls. Imagine the mockery!

Worse still was the monthly trip you made to the store for such products. What if you ran into someone you knew while at the store, with your box of large pads perched on top of the cart full of groceries? You know whomever you meet is going to automatically know that they are for you.

And what did you do if you were at someone’s house and had to change one? Stuff it in the bottom of the wastebasket? Put it in your bag and bury it in someone’s kitchen trash or take it home and bury it in your own?

Oh, I’ve made myself laugh. That’s enough insanity for now. I see a grindstone, and my nose is gravitating towards it.