I'm Too Young for This!: The Natural Hormone Solution to Enjoy Perimenopause Read Online Free Page A

my mother, who did not know how to tell a lie or be dishonest, told the mother of the most popular girl in the class that she didn’t know why I was such a late bloomer.
    The word was out and they all made fun of me. “How could you?” I wailed to my perplexed mother.
    The year before this, the Catholic school I attended started running those scratchy black-and-white films showing sterile pictures of fallopian tubes and talking about “bleeding.”
Eeewww!
I didn’t want to know anything about it, at the time, which is pretty funny considering my work now. But I digress. So there I was, the only one in my class without her period and wishing/praying for it!
    It all seems silly now, but so overwhelming when you are a fifteen-year-old.
    Why did I even want the process to begin? I had the freedom of living without hormonal cycles, and the relatively steady physical and emotional balance of that freedom. Yet I did not know to appreciate it. No one told me about the long, drawn-out process I was about to enter; I did not know of the cycles of woman.
    Then it finally came … a spot of blood. I was thrilled! “Guess what?” I blurted out to my mother. “I’m bleeding!” She seemedembarrassed, but later that evening without a mention she put a box of Kotex (trade name for humongous sanitary pads) in my room along with this awful-looking strap-thing-y to hold it on to my skinny little body. It felt like I was riding a horse, but I wore it proudly and complained about the discomfort to my girlfriends (for attention) while I prayed for cramps.
    My mother was very Victorian, modest and shy, so she never really talked to me about it. In fact, the entire “sex talk” we had happened one day when I was standing on the kitchen stool putting away some dishes for her on a high shelf. She remarked that I had some hair under my arms (about four strands), and then she whispered, “Oh, do you have it
down there
also?”
    Down there
. That was it; the closest we ever got to talking about my changing body, my transition, my new life. A product of her time, my mother’s shame of her own body became my shame, so I kept all things girly and personal to myself.
    I entered womanhood having no idea of what it meant.
    A PEEK UNDER THE HOOD
     
    The female body is miraculous and complex, capable of bringing new life into the world by way of our reproductive organs. But what exactly goes on “down there” and in there? It’s important to understand how our bodies work: our exquisite female reproductive system consists of internal and external parts.
    The external parts include the labia majora and the labia minora, also called lips, that surround the vagina and urethra and protect the internal organs from infectious organisms. The internal parts include the vagina, which claims both the functions of enabling sperm to enter the woman’s body and being a birth canal. The uterus is the organ that carries a growing fetus, and the cervix is the lower part of the uterusthat joins the uterus and the vagina. The ovaries, which rest to either side, produce eggs, and the fallopian tubes allow eggs to travel into the uterus.
    Our bodies are magnificent. Each month we experience apoptosis, a fancy name for the necessary death of cells. We can understand this better by an explanation of our monthly period and what happens in the uterus. Each month we shed the lining of the endometrium (cell death) and it is cleared from our bodies through the process called menstruation. This monthly bleed is a necessary form of cell death to make way for new cells and to remove cells whose DNA has been damaged to the point at which cancerous change is liable to occur. It’s a brilliant process, always clearing our bodies monthly to keep us healthy; it is only interrupted if we become pregnant, and in that case the endometrium lining holds the nourishment for the developing fetus.
    If an egg released from the ovaries is fertilized by sperm, and pregnancy occurs, it