Period Party!

Rachel Crossman

I threw a Period Party for a bunch of middle school girls I know, and it was a roaring success. For an hour and a half they ate red jelly beans, drank raspberry leaf tea, and gave their red balloons panty-liner mustaches. I read them stories while they dunked tampons in their teacups; we all scribbled our favorite euphemisms for menstruating on the tablecloth; and they all got favor bags (filled with Teen Midol and tampons).

Talk about your ice-breaker!

I was motivated to throw the party because of my own 13-year-old daughter. I knew that she was the last of her crowd to bleed, and that she was worried. No surprise there. She’d mastered society’s lessons about menstruation: that it’s a dirty little secret that even grown women love to hate. Judging by both media messages and bathroom banter, menstruation is something that we either hide or complain about.

I’d been wondering how I could counteract this tide of negativity when I overheard my daughter’s best friend calculating how many years she’d have to wait before menopause.

That’s when I decided to take action. Having a Period Party is easy and fun. Here’s how I did it.

The guest list. It’s important that the girls invited are close friends, comfortable with each other and with any adults present. We had five girls, ages 12 to 14, who have known each other for years.

Preparation. Striving for somewhere between casual elegance and in-your-face fun, I lit candles and arranged flowers on a white tissue-paper tablecloth, which looked and felt like a tampon wrapper. Using red felt pen, I wrote down all the euphemisms for menstruation that I could think of (Aunt Flo, my friend, on the rag, the curse). The effect was marvelous, and we left the pens out for doodles and additions.

Snacks. Red snacks helped set the theme. We filled a heart-shaped candy box with red jelly beans and tiny tampons. For drinks we had both cherry juice and raspberry leaf tea, a homeopathic remedy for cramps.

Favors. Just like the ones at birthday parties, yet different. So the girls would feel both cared for and prepared, we stuffed each sack with tampons and a few mini-pads wrapped in red ribbon, some tabs of Teen Midol, two bags of Moon Cycle tea, and a red balloon.

Games. We started with a tampon pop—a variation on the party crackers popular in England. We simply removed the wrappers from a dozen or so tampons of the cardboard tube variety, as well as the tampon itself from just one. This was the secret cylinder, the special tampon that got a $5 bill wrapped around it before being carefully reinserted into its tube. We then put all the tampons strings into a small red tumbler. As the girls arrived, we instructed each to take one, and on the count of three, everybody pulled.

Read-aloud. I started with an attention-getter: the recently released chapters from Anne Frank’s diary, in which she describes her first blood. I also read a story about a girl who begins menstruating when her mom is out of town, and has to ask her dad for help.

Guest speakers. Most girls still have questions about menstruation, and it can help to ask them of an adult who isn’t anyone’s mom, and who won’t be shy about the topic. We had two midwives at our party. They’d planned to discuss childbirth as well, but never got the chance because the stories and questions about menstrual blood just kept on coming.