Mark 5:25–34
When I first started to bleed, I thought Ma would kill me. I was a naughty child, putting my fingers where I shouldn’t, feeling parts of my body I had no business touching. So when, at the Rand Easter Show, I saw a stain on my Tinker Bell knickers, I didn’t cry like most little girls would. No, I knew immediately that it was my punishment from God, and hid the evidence. I hid it for days. I collected wads of toilet paper and wrapped them round and round my Woolies full briefs. It was scratchy and uncomfortable, but nothing compared to the discomfort I knew would come with confessing to Ma that I had sinned and was bleeding as a result. That would surely be the end of me. So when I stood on the tips of my tallest toes and pulled the garage door closed on our way to church one Sunday morning, revealing beneath my Scottish Highland–style dress a dark secret that had, until then, remained hidden between my thighs, and Ma asked as I got back into the car what those spots on my glitter tights were, I knew for sure that this was the beginning of my end.
And in some ways it was, because as if in eager response to Ma’s question, a floodgate opened within me and blood poured out between my thighs, down my legs, and even onto my Jelly Baby shoes. It continued this way for weeks, easing up for a few days at a time, only to start again with even more intensity, charging past the clots in its way.
I later learned at Sunday School that jugs of serum periodically pouring from one’s vagina was no divine punishment at all, but a physiologically necessary and healthy part of a woman’s life that should not only be welcomed, but celebrated.
Nonetheless, I prayed relentlessly that the God who had parted the Red Sea and dried it right up for the people He loved might consider blessing me with a season of dry panties.
❖
I remember telling Ma that I wanted it taken out, cut away from me and incinerated in the large chamber at the hospital behind the hill.
She said I was mad.
“It is mad!” I screamed.
“It’s not mad, Masechaba, it is just unwell.”
“Well, I’m unwell because of it, Ma.”
Ma said I was speaking nonsense, that these were the things women were to endure, and that if it was removed from me I would one day regret being unable to bring life into the world.
Life?
What did I care for bringing life into the world when I couldn’t have a life of my own? When I lived hostage to a beast in my pelvis that could split its head at any moment of its choosing, and angrily spill its contents onto the floor at any second of its liking without provocation?
What life did I have? Did Ma not care about that?
No, she did not.
❖
I became a loner. Not because I wanted to be alone, but because it was easier for everyone that way. Tshiamo, my brother, was my only friend. The stains didn’t seem to bother him as much as they bothered others. Like when Papa bought him a car and he offered to take me for a spin. I was so excited to see Tshiamo excited, I forgot to run into the house and change my tampon and add a second layer to my pad. It was only when we got onto the highway, us foolish at 4:30 p.m. to enter the highway, that I saw the traffic and thought, crap. I tried not to think about it, even when I felt the stickiness between my thighs and knew that the tampon was engorged and the pad saturated and the only way out was through my jeans and onto Tshiamo’s new car seat. I tried hard to focus on the Tracy Chapman Tshiamo was singing along to. When we eventually got home, he pretended not to notice, but I knew he had, because I saw him through my bedroom window later with a bucket of soapy water and a sponge in his hand.
❖
At school I always sat at the back of the class, making sure there was never anybody behind me, so that if I messed up my school dress, at least I wouldn’t be the last to know.
I was clever and inquisitive at school, and I had no interest in hanging out with the troublemakers who marked out the last row of desks as their own. But I knew that if I was to maintain a seat for myself far from the suspicious eyes of the cruelest girls, I had to be as badass as the best of them.
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You learn some tricks as you go. Dark clothing, ski pants under my school tunic, a cheap, thick, no-name brand pad under the Always Infinity to absorb the inevitable overflow. I was never without a tampon in my bra, so that if I had to dash to the bathroom in a crowd, I didn’t have to bend over and scrabble through my schoolbag first. Ballet? Forget it. Synchronized swimming? Are you crazy? Gymnastics? Not even if I was paid. Netball? Risky. Running? Sometimes.
No parties. No sleepovers. Ma wanted none of the humiliation that would come with a phone call from another parent to advise that her daughter had bled through the sheets and onto the mattress. She pretended it didn’t bother her, but I knew she was just as embarrassed and perplexed by the aggression of her daughter’s young womb as everybody else was.
She would say things like, “It’s because you eat too much cheese! That’s why you bleed the way you do,” or “Those tampons you
