Let’s address the elephant in the room! PERIOD!

Stayfree they said, but we all asked in whispers, “am I stained?”

“Don’t tell your guy friends about this special class you had, you don’t want to create unnecessary gossip around it”

The chemist gave me a wicked smile when I asked him for my “wings”. He puts them in a brown bag and then in a black polythene like I was carrying a bomb rather than my pack of monthly essentials.

If this was not enough, women were asked to lock themselves in the room and not come out for one whole week.

Don’t cook they said, don’t visit the temple they said!!

Menstruation or periods or your cycles or that time of the month, doesn’t make you impure, it doesn’t make the temple collapse and for sure won’t poison the food you would cook.

What are you ashamed off? Your Body? How can you be ashamed of something that comes naturally to you?

Let’s move forward and talk about the men in our lives. What do they know about periods, apart from the fact that women get moody at that time?

Why we don’t address the elephant in the room? Why we don’t tell them about the “what” and “why’s” of periods? Why we don’t ask them to bring pads for their mother, sister or friends?

We BLEED, We CREATE!

So, what’s the taboo all about?

Where do our freedom of speech go, when we talk about a topic like mensuration? Why are we not coming together to kill the illness called superstition? Why women still have to use old clothes or rags? Why do people think it’s okay to spend money on cigarettes than buying sanitary pads for their wife? Why still girls are not provided with proper toilet facilities? Why we are not teaching our daughters, that periods are not the end of the world? You can dance, you can jump, you can play whatever sport you feel like, periods don’t stop you from touching the sky!

Today, take a pledge that you will teach your boys to behave like men, and tell your girls “Congratulations! You are now officially on the road to becoming a woman”