Cup, chaos & Croatia
A Period Talk Gone Rogue. The menstrual hygiene session I deserve!
There I was — throat sore, eyes half-widened in “teacher mode,” standing in front of a class of forty 13- to 14-year-olds in a government school, ready to deliver a well-planned, structured session on menstrual hygiene. I have two other volunteers with me who are first timers and hence I am the main speaker who clearly isn’t doing great yet.
I had diagrams. I had slides. I had enthusiasm.
What I didn’t have was… silence. Or chairs that stopped screeching. Or teenagers who realized I was not, in fact, made of glass.
Instead, I spent the first 10 minutes playing ringmaster in a circus of fidgeting, giggling, loud-whispering hormonal chaos.
And here’s the thing — I’ve seen this movie before. Every class, like some secret factory setting, splits into three classic groups:
1. The earnest ones, sitting straight, nodding like human highlighters.
2. The curious ones, interrupting with questions like “Can we die from periods?” (Yes, that happened).
3. And the gloriously unaware ones, mentally surfing another planet.
It was group 3 that was giving me a run for my money today.
So, I went rogue.
I called out a girl from the chaos — Priya — one of the gigglers from the back row who clearly thought I was part of the background noise. She looked shocked, like someone had just told her boiled vegetables were delicious.
I smiled sweetly. “Let’s take a break from pads and periods,” I said. “Tell me, Priya — if you could go anywhere in the world, where would you go?” I had a plan, and I believed in myself to execute it well.
She tapped her chin theatrically (as kids do when they’re pretending to think deeply) and said, after two full minutes of suspense:
“Croatia.”
Excuse me?
Even my ovaries blinked.
“Croatia?” I repeated, thinking maybe I misheard, and I looked at her while she stared blank at me, like it was my turn to say my dialogues.
But no. Croatia it was.
I had no idea what to say. In my head, I was frantically Googling “Croatia hygiene issues,” while on the outside, I nodded wisely like it had been her obvious first choice all along.
“Why Croatia?” I asked.
She pointed at her friend in the third bench. “She told me about it. While we were playing ATLAS. I didn’t know it was real but then I Googled it. And I liked how it sounded. So now it’s my favorite.”
Reader, I had nothing. I was upstaged by the sound of a word.
Still, I ran with it.
“Okay, Croatia it is! Let’s talk hygiene there!”
I read out some facts — lack of sanitation access in rural areas, social taboos around menstruation — suddenly, I had everyone’s attention.
Croatia had become cool.
Menstrual hygiene was now an international issue.
And then — plot twist — I mentioned how we can play few tourist attraction pictures on screen and then we have the session and we indeed end with food items in Croatia. This small win had all attention in the room for me. I found in my panic-search:
The Museum of Broken Relationships.
“Oooh,” the class chorused.
“What’s that, Miss?” Priya asked, now fully engaged, chin no longer tapped.
“It’s a museum,” I explained, “where people send things from old relationships. Letters, gifts, random objects that remind them of a breakup. It helps them let go.”
She nodded thoughtfully. Then hit me with this:
“So… people just give away stuff when they’re sad so they’re not sad anymore?”
I said, “Well… not exactly. It’s not about sadness disappearing. It’s about choosing to stop carrying something heavy.”
And then — because Priya is clearly here to mess with me and possibly host ‘Koffee with Kids’ someday — she asked:
“But how do we know when to fix something and when to just give it away, like that?”
Now that… is the kind of question philosophers get paid to avoid.
I started forming a wise response, something about emotional maturity, life stages, metaphors…
But Priya cut me off.
“I mean like, I have this broken teddy bear I love. Should I keep fixing its head or just send it to that museum? Do they pay people for the things?”
And just like that — boom — existential crisis turned into stuffed toy economics.
But that’s the beauty of it, isn’t it?
To Priya, the broken thing was a bear.
To us, it becomes people. Memories. Bonds.
At her age, the pain is in stuffing and stitches.
At mine, it’s in text threads, awkward silences, and endings we don’t always choose.
And still, the question stays the same:
“Do I fix this… or let it go?”
So yes — today’s session was about menstrual hygiene.
And yes — I did finally talk about pads, hygiene routines, disposal, and the difference between spotting and bleeding like a Game of Thrones finale.
But also?
Today was about Croatia. And broken teddy bears. And the quiet truth that sometimes, the kindest repair can be either letting go or fixing it — but at what cost, that makes all the difference.
While I passed a sanitary pad for my part of sharing wisdom, they passed nonchalant questions at me, making me question life in general for a moment, and meanwhile snapping me out of all of it with rather loud screeching noise of bench being dragged. I am yelling yet again.
Whether it’s a pad, a place, or a person – you get to choose what stays, what heals, and what becomes a memory in your museum. It is indeed another decision shaping your life.
