Once upon a time, in a house by a big lake, a mother told a daughter about menses. How old was I? Eight, nine, ten? I don't remember. At what age do mothers explain that lifelong abomination to their daughters? Anyway, she sat me down and used her best I'm-trained-as-a-nurse-and-married-to-a-doctor language to tell me what she felt I needed to know.
An hour later, she called me to set the table for dinner. I got out plates, silverware, and glasses. Then I got the napkins to set out and something clicked in my head about napkins. My life was music, and I was always singing or playing the piano. So it was logical that I would start making up a song about sanitary napkins and singing it as I set the table. I didn't remember what sanitary napkins were, I just knew I had heard the phrase recently. And napkins that one sets on the table for dinner are sanitary aren't they?
Then my teenaged brothers came into the kitchen. And I was still singing about sanitary napkins. Mother quickly called me aside and gave me a stern talking-to about singing about taboo topics in front of my brothers. I didn't know why it was taboo. I wasn't trying to be risqué. I wasn't being deliberately cheeky. I was just singing about the napkins I was placing on the table, which happened to be sanitary and ready to use for dinner.
There's no moral to today's Oops! story. There's only compassion for the little girl whose memory of her childhood consists almost solely of music and criticism.
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