My Nana became my best friend when I was 13 and she is 54 years old. When I was growing up, my mom was on her own, so she lived with my brother and I with my grandparents for all the obvious reasons. Finances, childcare, use of my grandpa’s car (when he said he could). When I was a kid, I never thought much about our lives because, let’s be honest, what kid thinks about theirs? I just eat breakfast with everyone, watch TV with everyone in the evenings, and when we get ready to go somewhere, I share a bathroom with my mom, my grandma, and my aunt. This is our life. Then puberty hit me. Then, my grandma hit menopause. Then we became soul mates.
Of course, we didn’t put it all together at the time. My grandmother was young, fashionable, with red ankle boots and a nice short perm, and she was always busy at the time. She worked part-time at the office; she had friends over for bridge parties, baby showers, funeral sandwiches, and movie nights. She was a busy person back then, always making plans or on the phone with one of her daughters, the phone cord taut as she bent over to remove a casserole from the oven or a cigarette from her purse in the hallway.
She was always busy, and then all of a sudden, she wasn’t busy anymore. Suddenly, she seemed to wither. She says “no” to her friends more often than she says “yes” to them. No one talks about it, but I can see it. Around the same time, my new breasts started growing so fast that the pain would wake me from my slumber. I kept waking up in the middle of the night with my heart racing. I could never seem to fall asleep, and neither could she, which we discovered one night when we met in the kitchen. She was in pajamas and I was in a long T-shirt. Longing for something, but none of us knew what. Chocolate cake? Leftover macaroni and cheese? “It’s like we were pregnant together,” she said after making us cinnamon toast and tea. Thus began our time as twin forces to be reckoned with.
Every day after school and get off work, we would look for each other. We had little interest in the other people in the house – my brothers, my grandfather, men in general – because they didn’t understand what we understood without saying a word. Our bodies are foreign to us. We are hurt. We were crying and hungry. We were angry at everyone but each other.
Then the two of us started our ceremony. Sometimes on long Saturdays, when everyone else was busy, we would nap together in her room, read our romance novels together, and eat the delicious chocolate she hid under the bed. She left the caramel for me. She bought us cooling masks to help soothe our burning skin, we both were always so hot and irritable. We watched soap operas and ate butterscotch ripple ice cream while removing the masks from our faces, feeling fresh, hydrated and content.
I told her about my school-age drama and she hung on every word. She was into it all, getting mad at Natasha for telling Cameron I liked him, and then forgiving her and me when it turned out he liked me too. She told me about her adult drama and I was flattered, honored to hear this woman’s love story and that woman’s shopping addiction. A soap opera on our boring little street.
We lose ourselves in the most dramatic part of any TV miniseries, Thornbirds and Danielle Steele’s Zoya. We chatted about going to Paris together one day, just the two of us. Because who else would we want to go to?
I understand now. We are at both ends of the menstrual journey. Mine was beginning and hers seemed to be ending. The supply of tampons was relocated to the shelf in my bathroom. Years later, when I was pregnant for the first time, we talked about that time in our lives. I spent the afternoon baking her annual holiday raisin bread while the two of us drank tea, danced to holiday hits, and banned my grandfather from our domain. We climbed the stairs to her room together and got ready for bed. “Oh, of course I remember that,” she reminded me. She told me it was one of the hardest times in her life: a year where we both felt like our bodies were betraying us and were a little uncomfortable all the time.
Make confused. Hungry, annoyed, blushing, crying. But at least you’re not alone.
“You made things better,” she told me. “You’re a great little buddy.”
Jane McGuire is a contributing writer for Romper and Scary Mommy. She lives in Canada with her four boys and teaches life writing workshops where someone cries in every class. When she’s not traveling as much, she tries to organize pie parties and outdoor karaoke with her neighbors. She will sing Cher’s “If I Could Turn Back Time” at least once, but she’s open to requests.
