there are really only a couple other adolescent physical traumas that immediately come to mind. (though i'm sure there are countless others repressed into the dark regions of my noggin.)
one is The First Bra. at age 10 you definitely get made fun of if you have a bra, but the catch-22 is that you also get made fun of if you don't. the girls who have developed early (me) get their straps snapped (and the boys rightly get punched in the gut), but the slower girls get made fun of for not being faster.
i remember walking home from elementary school one day with a group of 'popular girls' (i o-so-badly wanted to be popular, but i was a little too big and bumbly to really fit in) when one of our male classmates rode his bike up behind us. he somehow knew i was the only one in the group with a bra, and pulled the straps. hard. i was so embarrassed i about cried. i think the popular girls laughed. looking back, i'll just assume they were laughing out of jealousy... i'm sure they wanted bras, too.
whatever.
so less than a year after getting my first bra i got my first period, at age 11. luckily that first one came when my mom was around and could explain the whole thing to me, but the second one i wasn't prepared for. (they don't really teach you to keep 28-day calendars in middle school.)
i remember i was on the school bus, on the way home at the end of the day. there were only a few kids left on the bus and we were all being goofy, stretching out on empty seats. i was in the back row, lying down on one seat and streching my body across the aisle and resting my legs on the opposite seat.
i also remember being in that semi-reclined state and looking down the length of my body at my white pants... specifically the crotch area that was now spanning the aisle of the bus (neat!)... and noticing a big, obvious red splotch.
my face quickly turned an equal shade of red and i recoiled my body and sat properly in the seat for the rest of the ride home.
Posted by xta at June 23, 2004 02:25 PM | TrackBack