I was a late bloomer. No, I don’t mean one day i went from ugly duckling to beautiful swan. . . I mean I didn’t get my period until I was 13. Late 13. Like, only two months until my 14th birthday. Other girls I knew I had gotten theirs in some cases years before me. I thought I was a freak. I still played Barbies with my little sister sometimes.
Other girls started getting theirs in middle school, mostly in 6th or 7th grade, as I recall, although I do also recall one unfortunate girl who started hers in 5th grade wearing light-colored pants. I didn’t know until later what had even happened to her; I just thought she was, like, really sick. She also started growing boobs – the Holy Grail of puberty. I kept on waiting and waiting on those. Nothing, not even in college. I never got those until i graduated college, got a job, and started driving everywhere instead of walking or riding a bike. I gained weight, and now I have fat boobs, which are not the same thing as real, honest-to-goodness puberty boobs.
Not long after the girl-in-5th-grade-red bottom/white pants mystery illness occurred, my mom handed me a book that she said was from the doctor. It was brown, paperback, not very thick, and for the life of me, I cannot remember the name of it. I wish I could, because it actually explained just about everything to me about intercourse. It was something along the lines of “Everything a 12-Year-Old Should Know About Puberty” or something like that. To this day, I have not discussed sex much with my mom. As a straight female, I do not remember that book having anything about homosexuality in it. I doubt it did. Today, I assume there are books that explain all of that, and if there aren’t my kids have been raised in such a way that they would probably ask why not? At the time, that didn’t bother me – I was more concerned with the fact that it had no photographs, only drawings. So, i still had no idea what a penis looked like. NO IDEA. Boy, was I in for a rude awakening when I finally saw one. I mean, the drawings were pretty detailed, but still.
I digress. This is about my period. The one I didn’t get until I was almost fourteen. Oh. Did I mention it finally came on Thanksgiving day, 1985? Oh, did I miss that little detail?
Thanksgivings growing up were pretty much all the same time. A few days before, my mom and sister and I would drive up to get Grandma Smith from Chattanooga, or she might hitch a ride down with someone in the family coming our way. Sometimes, she took the Greyhound bus. I still remember going to pick her up at the greyhound station in downtown Atlanta. This was when parents still seemed nervous about going downtown. “You know, it isn’t safe.” I’m not sure what Grandma did on those bus trips, but I remember you could smoke on the buses, i think, so she definitely smoked, and knowing her, she probably had a bottle of Early Times or Old Crow in her pocketbook. If I recall correctly – because I didn’t drink then, so didn’t take much notice – Grandma did not need mixers. She and Aunt Dot both had a predilection for making friends with fencepost, no matter how sketchy said fencepost might be, and so I can only imagine that she probably ended up smoking and drinking on that Greyhound bus, and was probably three sheets to the wind by the time she got off the bus at the Atlanta station at 11:00 am.
So, Grandma Smith was already usually with us, and Grandma and Pop would usually drive up the day before or day of Thanksgiving. (I think at that point, they usually came the day before.) That little truck would pull in the driveway, and out would jump chaos. My Grandma Palmer’s hugs were not for the faint of heart. She would hop out, and run right over to you, give a “hooo-WEEE!” (I will have to recreate this sound for you in person for you to get the full effect.) And then she’d hug you so hard you thought your eyes were gonna pop out, and god help you if you’d just eaten. While hugging you, she’d lay a big, long, loud kiss on your cheek and then you’d have to remember to wipe the lipstick (grandma always meticulously applied and reapplied her bright red or pink lipstick) off later, because Mama and Daddy said it wasn’t polite to wipe it in front of her. I remember being excited to see them all, but perhaps a little too cool for school by the time I was 13 or so. I was probably plotting how I could eat and then get out to play with Karen next door as soon as possible. At that age, we were pretty much inseparable.