Why I Write About Periods

Every time someone learns that I’m going for my MA in children’s literature and asks about my research, I get a little bit nervous. I never quite know what someone will say to me after I tell them “I write about menstruation in kids books!” The reactions range from interest, to confusion, to (rarely) disgust or attempts to change the subject. I think, perhaps, that taking a step back and explain a bit more about The Red Dot Project, as well as why I’m so interested in destigmatizing open discussion of periods.

Like for many adults, periods have been a huge part of my life since I was a child (at age nine for me- the relative earliness may have been a precursor for future health problems). In my opinion, dealing with the damn things every month should be enough to qualify someone to write and talk extensively on them, but something else makes me experience unique. After years of extreme pain to the point that getting out of bed was not an option some days, my doctors assumed that I had endometriosis (a disorder in which the uterine lining creeps into other parts of the body) in early high school. The year I graduated from high school, I received my first surgery to remove it but the pain returned within six months and a year later I was given another surgery. To this day I get relatively awful pain each month, but I am lucky enough to have had the endometriosis caught and treated at a young age.

Unfortunately, many women do have not had the same lucky experiences as I did. In fact, despite the fact that endometriosis is estimated to affect between 10 and 20 percent of women and the illness can, especially if untreated, cause extreme pain, cysts, and even infertility, education about the disease is practically nonexistent in high schools (so rare, in fact, that my attempts to find a source regarding the subject gave me absolutely no results. In addition, even if a woman experiences the symptoms of endometriosis to the extreme, it is likely that she won’t be taken seriously. “This is just how periods are”, many of us endo sufferers are told, and we need to get over it. Even celebrity medical specialist Dr. Drew dismissed our struggles on his “Loveline” podcast when he referred to endometriosis a “garbage bag disease” that women get diagnosed with because they’re “so somatically preoccupied that [they’re] visiting doctors all the time” and even suggested that symptoms attributed to endometriosis come about when women try to deal with childhood sexual abuse.

The way that my menstruation-related illness has been dismissed both by medical practitioners and culture at large has influenced my work so greatly. When I first read Judy Blume’s Are You There, God? It’s Me, Margaret, which deals with the experience of getting a first period in great detail, I couldn’t help but wonder why there aren’t more books that even go so far as to mention the near-universal subject. Destigmatizing discussion of what happens during a normal period through even the smallest mentions of menstruation in pop culture are integral to making sure that diseases like mine are better understood. If we aren’t told in health class, or by those around, us how periods should work, how will we know when our own experiences will indicate that something’s wrong? Periods should be taken seriously, and that’s why I’m going to examine how we talk about them in literature so deeply. If I have one goal for my project, it’s to provide a diagnosis of our culture’s discussion of periods and help build a blueprint for change.