Before Time

By. Connie Pertuz-Meza

Mami always bragged about how she got her period at fifteen. Like everything with Mami, her first menses story is part tragedy, part biblical, and part cuento, bound by layers of things never spoken and tied neatly by a miracle, evidence of how tight she was with Papa Dios. I got my period at eleven, hid it from Mami and everyone else for over a year for all those reasons never spoken and more. Later, almost a decade later, my older sister hid her pregnancy at twenty-two, while living at home and unmarried. Mami had not been a safe place for either one of us.

Mami never told us stories from fairy tale books or ones that her mother recited to her on account that Mami never went to school and taught herself to read with the Bible. The only stories Mami recounted were the ones she pulled from her life, sprinkled with images from the Bibles, and a plethora of Colombian sayings.  

*

I was draped over the plastic covered recliner in my childhood living room. My sister, Joann, had the sofa to herself and was stretched out like taffy, controlling the remote. The theme song of Just The Ten Of Us filled our two-bedroom apartment. It had long become my habit to measure time by TV shows for that day. Over thirty minutes, the dull ache in my lower abdomen began right before the start of Mr. Belvedere, which was just on.  I tried not to move, as to not disturb the waves of pain. Unaware that pain vibrates, shifts, and subsides, and it can’t be tricked, no matter how perfectly still you are. But, this too had become my habit to drift away and ignore the sensations that rose and fell in my body. Once the end credits rolled, the ache found itself wrapped around my lower back. I pressed myself up on the recliner and looked over at Joann. It was an unwritten rule that we never spoke about things which mattered, instead we spoke about Menudo, the latest episode of whatever sitcom we were watching, and rolled our eyes when we were a safe distance from Mami about her latest prophetic dream. We didn’t talk about Papi’s drinking, never revisited Mami’s fits of rage or erratic behavior, and we certainly didn’t talk about how Mami insisted on cleaning our privates. Ashamed, I was certain my third and fourth grade classmates did not sit on the toilet every morning while their mother washed between their legs with a bar of Ivory soap and an old sand bucket with the handle snapped off. Old enough to feel the discomfort bolt through my body and hang my head in shame at family parties when Mami insisted on going to the bathroom with me to make sure I wiped privately. When I protested. I was told I was too young, I couldn’t possibly know how to take care of myself. All of these thoughts ran through my head as I unfolded myself from the recliner and walked towards the bathroom. 

Once in the bathroom, I sat on the toilet and pulled my panties to my knee to be confronted by a muddy brown stain. Breathing a sigh of relief, I lined folded toilet paper on the crotch of my panty. Whatever, this sticky brownness was, it wasn’t my period. La regla, was how Mami called her period, I marveled that it was synonymous with the Spanish word for ruler. At eleven I did not want to be measured as a woman. In her eyes, Mami saw being a woman a death sentence, leading only to tragedy, starting way before your period, but the actual act of bleeding once a month made everything more gruesome and unappealing. 

Mami took to saying how she did not want Joann and I to grow up. She gave us baby bottles till we were well past eight and having us take baths in a baby pink tub until our growing bodies could no longer fold and contort themselves to fit the tiny tub. When Joann was in fifth grade and I was in second, Mami came home upset, it was always the same, a classmate from Joann’s class got her period or a family friend’s or neighbor’s daughter. When Griselda's mom, one of Joann’s classmate’s mothers, shared with her that her daughter had started her period the summer before. 

Mami shook her head in disbelief. “ Ya se hizo señorita antes de tiempo Griselda.” 

It sounded like a terrible diagnosis with an even more terrible prognosis, period, becoming a young lady before it was time. A fear slithered over my body as I worried about when it would betray me. 

Fifteen, Mami touted this age over her head, like the grand slam period trophy. But when she told this story, which she did every time she came home to announce another victim to the period war, Mami also spoke about her terrible life and how the only person who had her back was her main boo, Papa Dios.

“I was worried, you know.” Mami said.

I sat with my elbows propped on the kitchen table, a copy of The Heart Is A Lonely Hunter in my hands, my legs and feet bouncing up and down nonstop. I stole a glance towards Mami who stood in front of the stove, arepas grilling in the large pan she used with that sole purpose. I had heard this story so many times, and if this was a scene on the television I could provide the subtitles for the closed captioning. 

Mami’s period story always started this way. “I found out about la regla because I heard my Tia and primas talking about it, but no one ever spoke to me about it, I had no idea this happened to women. My period came and went without a problem for the first few months. Then it stopped.” At this point in the story Mami held her hands up mid air in halted position, palms outward. “I had no idea what was happening to me. You know, ignorant.”

Confused, I wanted to ask Mami why did her period disappear, but instead I reread the same page over and over again unable to concentrate in the world of two mutes who could not hear the world around them. I looked towards the living room. Joann's neck was twisted in the direction of the television.

Mami let her lips always curl around the word ignorant as if it were her fault that she was born in a remote and rural part of Colombia, where it was Sally Struther commercial poor, where eggs were a luxury. At eleven she was sent to live with a Tia to the coastal part of Colombia. In exchange for household work, Mami’s Tia would send her to school, at last she would learn to read and write. Mami soon realized how the only thing awaiting her was back bending work and endless teasing from her primas. She bounced from one Tia to another in Barranquilla.

“I was patient. Every month I waited. One. Two. Three. Four. Nada.” Mami let the word nada remain suspended in a long pause. “I was always skinny,” Mami said looking in my direction, measuring my thick thighs and wide hips. Shame filled, by the constant policing of my body by my mother, early on I sought refuge in grilled cheeses, cheddar popcorn, and chocolate cupcakes. Now aware, the extra weight I padded myself with was a map of my trauma, everything never felt and said, stuck to my body. 

“I heard people whispering that if you didn’t get your period you just died. I convinced myself that I was dying. That my belly was round with trapped blood.”

Later, horrified and filled with sadness, which soaked my bones. I’d comb over all the details of Mami’s story searching for other clues, as I tried to understand her in order to understand myself, desperate to understand what had happened to Mami as a young servant girl in la casa de Las Tias. Where every man in the house tried to attack her, a grab, a forceful embrace, and slipping into her bed late at night as she slept. Mami insisted that she fought all three offenders as a young girl, on account of her being tough, not afraid to fight. I wondered how much Mami had forgotten, and how many details were carefully constructed in order to change the ending, making herself a fighter and not a victim. 

“I was worried sick and went to my favorite Church in Barranquilla. La Iglesia de Chiquinquira. I climbed up those steps certain I was dying and only God could save me. I prayed with all my soul. Everything I had inside me.” Mami always closed her eyes at this point and tilted her head upward. A dreamy smile plastered on her face as she imagined what she called her real home. El Reino Eterno. “I wept. Do you know that if you pray hard enough you cry?” Mami opened her eyes and stared at an imaginary audience. “Y que paso? I’m up and going down the stairs when before I walk down the last step a gush of blood comes down. My period. I ran all the way home thanking el numero uno, Papa Dios. My period was a miracle.” 

I rolled my eyes, Mami celebrated her period, but no one else was allowed to bleed, especially me.  

All of this swirled through my mind, as I marched out of the bathroom, wishing I could stomp Mami’s voice narrating through my head. There was a graveyard of girls who became young ladies way before their time, Mami’s period story, and the sexual attacks from her Aunts’ husbands, and that brown sticky stain on my panty. Mami always left me in the shadows, I sat back down on the recliner, careful to sit on my tailbone, afraid if I sat on my seat, something would burst inside of me like it did for Mami on those church steps. Joann was channeling surfing, after Just The Ten Of Us, 2020 was on, every week exposing one truth or another.   

“Want to watch some old 21 Jumpstreet?” Not waiting for my reply, Joann walked over to the entertainment center and popped videotape into the VCR. We taped a lot of the shows we watched, re-watching them so often I memorized scenes and loved to narrate them aloud to Joann right before we went to bed. 

I nodded, as I stared at the back of Joann’s head bent over the VCR, rewinding and hitting play. I thought about how she had just begun her period less than half a year ago. Mami had called her friends and moaned over the phone: Se hizo señorita. She did not include the antes de tiempo, because at thirteen Joann was expected to start a period, but I wasn’t. I would become a young lady before my time. It made me wrong. 

“I think there is another 21 Jumpstreet episode after this.” Joann flung herself on the sofa.

Only the glow of the television was alive in our apartment that night. Mami was asleep in her room after a long day of cleaning houses, then selling clothes around the neighborhood till late in the evening. Papi was not home and would not arrive till the sky turned from ink black to navy. When I finally went to bed I lay flat staring at the ceiling, my hands folded over my stomach, and ankles crossed. Fear wrapped itself around my throat, I was afraid to swallow, worried that I’d dislodge something stuck, and that the brown stickiness would turn bright red and flow, like the tears now brimming my eyes. I did not want to be a senorita. I wanted to be Mami’s little girl. 

*

The next month a bright red streak in the middle of my panties, I was in social studies class. Menstrual pain seized me, overcome with nausea I raised my hand and went straight to the bathroom.  There was no denying me hice señorita antes de tiempo. I never planned not telling Mami, I just didn’t tell her that month, instead I used folded pieces of bounty as a pad, taking only one or two from Joann’s stash, afraid she’d realize they were missing and run her mouth to Mami. Who would then confront me and once I fessed up, Mami would tell all her comadres and la vecinas I had become señorita antes de tiempo. When I did wear a pad I’d walk out of the bathroom with it balled tightly in my fist burying it deep in the garbage past the platano peels and the day old rice. I loved the tickle I got in my stomach for doing something I knew I shouldn’t and getting away from it. The next month after, I was not scared to not tell Mami, scared to give up the control I felt. For the first time my body felt like my own. It was better than being Mami’s girl. 

This went on for a year and a half. When I finally told Mami and Joann I had my period, I made sure I told them when I would not be accused of becoming a senorita before time.

Connie Pertuz Meza writes stories about her life, family, and ancestors. Connie is also a mother of a teenage daughter and middle school aged son. Connie’s writing appeared in The Rumpus, Kweli Literary Journal, Raising Mothers, Dreamers Creative Writing, Voices In The Middle, the Acentos Review, MUTHA, Latina Outsiders: Remaking Latina Identity Anthology, La Pluma y La Tinta Peinate Anthology, and La Pluma y La Tinta Emerging Voices Anthology. She is a 2017 Brooklyn Film and Arts Festival Non-Fiction Prize Finalist and Honorable Mention. Connie is also a two-time VONA/Voices Fiction Fellow, an alum of Las Dos Brujas writing workshop, a Cullman Teaching Institute Fellow, a Tin House Craft Intensive participant, and a Kweli Fellow. A member of M. Colleen Cruz’s writing group for teachers who write, based in Brooklyn since 2004, Connie is working on a semi-autobiographical YA novel.