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Always Be Prepared: A Lesson Learned The Hard Way by LaVonis Miracle

My favorite teacher-slash-contributor is back to share another humorous essay about her life with Humor Is Relative readers! I feel LaVonis' own descriptive summary for this submission sums it up best: Life can give dish out some terribly embarrassing ordeals. Fortunately with age we tend to learn from them and laugh at them. This story is about one such time for me. I hope anyone who reads this will laugh along with me and remember not to take those moments so seriously. [Notice: due to topic, some people may regard this story being PG-13]

The other day I went to the grocery store. It was cold weather and I had on my coat and gloves. I didn't want to carry my purse in so I had stuck my checkbook in my coat pocket. When my groceries were totaled and bagged at the counter I reached into my pocket to pull out my checkbook. Still having a gloved hand that had confused my sense of touch, I placed on the counter in front of the bag boy, the checkout girl and the customer behind me a feminine maxi pad. We all just stared at it at first. The moment was quite awkward to say the least.

"Well, uh," I muttered as I placed it back in the pocket and fumbled for my checkbook. "Ah there.." I grunted as I pulled out the correct item.

I managed to pay, gather my things, and politely refuse the bag boy for assistance to my car while I scurried out the door.

I told that story to tell this one.

For the past twenty plus years I have not gone anywhere without a feminine maxi pad. I have them in all my coat pockets, my glove compartment, my purse of course, and my desk at work. When lessons are learned the hard way one tends to overcompensate.

I was a freshman in high school when this lesson came to me. I, like many fourteen year old girls was a bit shy, awkward, and very modest. Heaven forbid the words, "having my period", be said out loud. It could only be whispered and then to my mother so she could get some feminine pads when she went to the store. I was never much on carrying a purse in high school because I always had so many books and notebooks. (Those were the days before backpacks.) Not having a purse ensured the fact that I didn't have the necessary supplies like lifesavers, make-up or feminine items but the need had never arisen until this particular day

A trip to the restroom revealed that I had to find a feminine pad as soon as possible. Somehow this had never happened at school. I just stayed there awhile in quiet desperation. There was no school nurse and our administration was all very male.

The home economics teacher finally came to my mind. Surely she would have something. They taught lessons on taking care of babies and such. Clearly this was the place to go. I went to one of the teachers only to find out that she could not help me. In fact, none of the three had any such supplies. It wasn't until much later that I realized that all of these women hadn't seen their fiftieth birthday in years and were in fact very close to retirement. What on earth would they need them for?

Their advice to me was to go to my girlfriends to see if they had anything. I proceeded to start on what I refer to as my pilgrimage to find a feminine maxi pad. My unsuccessful travels from room to room made me feel more and more helpless. No one had anything.

At last I thought I had found one. My friend quietly excused herself out into the hallway with her purse after we convinced the teacher that this was truly an emergency. Thank goodness he didn't ask for any details. I panicked when she slowly pulled out a tampon. I had never used one of those before.

"It's easy." She said.

"I don't know how." I said trying to stay in a whisper.

"Just, you know, put it there." She said getting irritated.

The conversation went back and forth with her trying to tell me how with a sort of demonstration with her hands in the air kind of thing. I can't imagine what it must have looked like from a distance. With frustration our discussion came to an end and I walked off empty handed.

For awhile I wandered aimlessly down the hallway wondering what to do. At some point I ended up at the home economics room once more.

"Haven't you gotten anything yet?" the teacher asked surprised.

"No one has anything." I answered in aggravation.

"Well, I guess I could get some material and sew some cotton inside." She said in a helpful tone.

This was getting more complicated by the second. "I would rather not."

"Why don't you go down to the guidance counselor's office? They have a lot of various supplies down there."

"Ok. Thanks." I muttered as I slowly went out the door.

When I got to the guidance counselor's office our female counselor was not there. Mr. Lynn sat at his desk and didn't even look up when I walked in. I stammered and stuttered forever and I finally just said it. "I need a feminine maxi pad."

"Oh, uh, well." Was about all he had to say at first.

"Let's see there may be something in here." He went to the metal cabinet as nervously as I felt. As he opened the door he plundered through several objects turning something over. "Ah here we go." He said as he pulled out a box. Just as he was about to open the flimsy little carton, he managed to squeeze it too tight on the bottom and about fifty tampons shot up in the air like little rockets. They went everywhere. He tried to catch them and dropped the rest of the box on the floor. Little white tubes rolled all over the place.

I just stood there, frozen as though my feet had melted into the floor. He got down on his hands and knees and began crawling around gathering up the things while trying his best to reload the box that kept coming apart. I tried to help him.

"I can't use those." I said in an expressionless tone.

He looked up at me still squatting in the sea of tampons and said. "Why don't you try the girl's basketball coach?"

Again I was on my pilgrimage thinking I was the only girl in the world who used maxi pads instead of tampons. I was beginning to think something was wrong with me. I made my way down more curvy halls, past the gym and into the girl's basketball coach's office.

"Excuse me," I said already fearing that she would pull out the tampons, "I need a maxi pad. Do you have any?"

"Let's see," she said as she plundered down into a deep dark drawer. I have these." She held up the tampon box.

"I can't use them." My earlier thoughts were being confirmed.

"I do happen to have these but I don't know if you'll want to use them." She held up the old fashioned kind. The kind my mother used to use. They were about four inches thick and had no sticky pad for the underwear. It required some kind of elastic belt contraption which was not included.

"Thank you." I said as I took the diaper thing and slipped into the restroom. Just as I was breathing the final sigh of relief, it happened. The huge maxi pad slid off my underwear and straight into the toilet bowl. I'm sure they could have heard my gasp clear into the parking lot. Once again I stood there in that quiet desperation mode. I was getting well practiced at the feeling. There was nothing to do but go back out there and ask for another one.

I came out of the coach's restroom. "Um, would you happen to have another one?"

She looked up from her desk with a comically puzzled look. "I---dropped the other one, uh, sort of, in the toilet."

Her expression was that of an aggravated-getting ready to crack up laughing at me one. She slowly fumbled for the box and gave me another pad. "Try to hang on to this one."

"Thank you." I took it and quickly went back into her restroom. This time I held on to it for dear life. The ordeal was finally over.

It took me many years to be able to share that story. Being a school teacher now, I have a great understanding for my girl students and those little inconvenient rites of passage that we all have to endure. Obviously by my grocery store experience we never get too old for those awkward moments. However, with time one just learns to move on through the situation as quickly as possible and laugh about it later. My advice to anyone who has suffered life's little painful moments: learn from it: get over it, and always be prepared for the next time.

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Humor Is Relative thanks Cay Dickson, from the Houston Chronicle, for the compliment!

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They do certainly give very strange and new-fangled names to diseases.
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