HelloFlo: The Guide, Period.: The Everything Puberty Book for the Modern Girl - Softcover

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Naama Bloom is the founder of HelloFlo.com, a modern-day health site for girls and women. Her mission for HelloFlo was to create a place where women and girls could learn about their bodies in an open and honest environment without any shame and with a healthy dose of humor. HelloFlo’s first two videos, “The Camp Gyno” and “First Moon Party,” have been viewed over 50 million times and show girls that while puberty can be awkward at times, it can also be fun and empowering. She lives in Brooklyn, NY, with her husband and two children. HelloFlo:The Guide, Period. is her first book.

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INTRODUCTION

There is no such thing as clean underwear. At least for a girl. You may start your day with a nice, fresh pair of underwear, but by your first trip to the bathroom? Yup, there’s always something crusty waiting for you. 

Sometimes less crusty than cottage-cheesy. 

Sometimes less cottage-cheesy than yogurty. 

It can often feel a bit like your body has taken it upon itself to produce its own personal dairy section. If you know what it’s for, it can be magical (some might even say vagical). If you don’t, it’s shameful, confounding, embarrassing. But it’s there. Always.

Being a girl is messy business. A fact widely known, though rarely discussed, by half the world’s population. At nearly every stage of a girl’s development something is spurting or sprouting or budding or blossoming. Garden metaphors abound! Based solely on evidence provided by decades of “feminine hygiene” advertisements, you’d be forgiven for concluding that getting your period is basically a monthly frolic through a field of sweet-smelling flowers. 

But have you ever actually spent any time in a garden? It is dirty business. Literally. Plus, there are thorns and worms and, if you know anything about gardening, likely some sort of manure. So while it’s not a perfect field of sweet-smelling flowers, a real garden may actually be the perfect metaphor. Puberty is messy business. 

Oh, and there will be blood. A lot of it. Think: horror movie. Sometimes it may look and feel like a waterfall of blood when in actual fact you merely overslept and your maxi pad, the one that all the commercials tell you is so good at absorption, was simply not up to the task of your heavy flow day. Some people call those ruined panties “period underwear” and only pull them out of the drawer each month as needed. We like to think of them as our Red Badges of Courage.

And while we’re on the topic of maxi pads, can we discuss the blue dye that we see in commercials as proof that the pads work? Since you probably haven’t gotten your period yet, I want to let you in on a little secret: the blood you’ll see when you get your period—it’s not blue. In fact, sometimes it’s not red. It can be all sorts of shades from red to brown. Just being honest here. You’ll find that’s the tone of this whole book.

So why does puberty get such a clean rap in all the commercials? Why do we usually talk about what happens to our bodies as though actualinformation is a tampon we need to quietly slip up our sleeves when we walk across the room? I’m not really sure. But what I do know is that it needs to change.

Girls, bear with me for a moment—we need to loop in your grown-ups.

Adults: 

The girl sitting next to you is smart. She needs to know what’s about to happen. Good thing you bought this book because I can guarantee the information she needs isn’t at the bottom of a Yahoo Answers rabbit hole. It’s a bit like reading Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret had it been written on the bathroom wall of Penn Station. With a Sharpie. Think that’s an exaggeration? Please pause here for a moment and go Google pubic hair. 

See?

Thanks to the prevalence of unrestricted pornography on the Internet it’s nearly impossible to Google anything about female anatomy without being immediately confronted by pornographic images. In fact, some studies suggest that children are encountering online porn as young as eight. Not your children, of course, never your children. But the children they know and talk to and play with. That’s because online porn is the contemporary equivalent of your friend’s older brother’s contraband issue ofPlayboy that somehow made its way to your sixth-grade sleepover.

But even without those images there is simply so much information out there. How can a curious young girl, in search of answers about the changes she is experiencing, going to be able to differentiate between what is true and what she finds on the fourth page of a grammar-free message board?

I believe it’s critical for your girl to understand what’s happening to her own body. She needs to know that the world may start treating her differently just because she now looks like a woman. She also needs to know the basic essential fact that puberty is connected to reproduction. If she’s not armed with this information she will have a much harder time processing the world around her and making good decisions. So take a deep breath and kindly hand the book back to her.

Okay, Girls, back to you.

As founder of HelloFlo.com I’ve been in the unique position to hear from thousands of girls and women about how they relate to their own bodies, and I’ve come to realize that the way we talk about physical changes is, well, lacking. I’m writing this book because you deserve honesty and real information. And you deserve to understand what’s going on—both in your body and in the world around you.

That’s why I’ve written this book. To supply you with all the facts, even the messy ones and the ones you may find most embarrassing to talk about. And I’m doing this in a way that acknowledges how intelligent and sophisticated you are.

Underlying everything HelloFlo does had been a determination to talk honestly with young women about what is happening with their bodies. No euphemisms, no avoidance, no blue dye.

We also celebrate it. Puberty is not a curse. It’s confusing, uncomfortable, sometimes painful, but also interesting and ultimately powerful and empowering. It’s like if a Girl Punk Band made a musical and your body was the orchestra. All Girl. All Punk. All power. That’s what this book is—Punk Rock Puberty.

There will be questions you were afraid to ask and ones you didn’t know even existed. There will be answers. There will be jokes. There will be stories. Many true, sometimes mortifying, stories. There will be pictures. There will be drawings. There will be Instagrams. There will be Beyoncé. And most definitely there will be blood.

As corny as this sounds, it’s my dream that every girl enters puberty with enough knowledge of what’s going on in her body and mind to keep her confident throughout. I’ve spoken to countless doctors, parents, and girls while writing this book, and I’ve tried to put everything that’s useful in these pages. I’m not a doctor, I’m not even an expert. What I am is a woman who was once a confused girl who made it her mission to remove some of that confusion for the girls that came after me. 

Chapter 1

Girl, You’ll Be a Woman Soon

How soon is soon? 

One year? Five years? Thirty minutes? 

Let’s start with the first question.

It’s pretty much guaranteed that at some point your breasts will develop. Your period will arrive, and your body will start to bleed on a regular basis. (More on the bleeding later. I’ll get to that.) It’s also a sure thing to say you’ll grow hair under your arms, between your legs, and on your legs. And these are just the changes you’ll be able to see.

You may be thinking to yourself, that’s a lot of changes. And you may be hoping that I can somehow tell you when to expect that change. I wish I could, but unfortunately I don’t have that magical power. What Ican tell you is what’s behind all those changes and, hopefully, get you a bit more prepared to deal with them, perhaps even...