This paper should have been about my first trip to Disneyland. It took four days to talk my dad into signing the permission slip for me to go and three and a half hours of driving to get to. The trip was supposed to be the day vacation of a lifetime. However, I never even made it on a ride.
The drive was spent with me lodged between two girls in the backseat of my Girl Scout troop leader's car feeling like I was about to throw up. As the five other girls in my car sang along to the Spice girls, I was trying to figure out what I ate to feel so sick. It could have been the pancakes my dad had made for my sister and I that morning, he was just starting to experiment with cooking since my mother had left a few months earlier, or maybe it was the licorice and chocolate we'd been snacking on in the car. Either way I prayed I'd get over it before we arrived because I wanted to ride every ride at Disneyland.
Finally, pulling out of the parking lot of the freeway, we had made it. We parked and met up with the other two carloads of kids and chaperons. While one mother bought the tickets I was dragged along with a few other girls to the bathrooms. They all passed around lip-gloss while I walked shyly a few steps behind them. Being in girl scouts had felt wrong to me after my mother left. Maybe it was puberty and I was becoming a different person than my old friends or maybe it was the awkwardness of not having a mother to take turns chaperoning or to come to the tea parties, but things weren't the same. I didn't want to share lip-gloss with three other girls or talk about how cute the boys were. I had grown quiet in our meetings and no one had really suspected anything of my awkwardness that day. The parents still whispered about my mother, and the other girls all knew. I was Katherine Stratford, motherless, doomed to grow into social awkwardness.
While Madelyn and Sarah squealed in delight over strawberry smackers I nearly had a heart attack in the bathroom. I knew what was happening to my body, I had just never really expected for it to happen. I had just turned eleven, I was completely flat chested, and had no interest in boys. I wasn't expecting to start my period for years, if ever.
"God, Kat, you're taking forever." Sarah had whined a few minutes later. Her statement snapped me out of my shocked stupor. I cursed my mother for not preparing me for this. I stuffed as much toilet paper as I could into my underwear and left the stall.
"Sorry," I mumbled as I scrubbed violently at my hands. I felt dirty and sick to my stomach. I wanted to scream so loudly that my mother, wherever she was, could hear my anger, and I wanted to just curl up and cry. I had no idea what to do.
As we rejoined the group I stared up at a few of our chaperons. Somebody had to be notified. I knew the adults all could have helped me, but I couldn't work up the nerve to say anything. I was too embarrassed. I couldn't understand how something that happened to every female could feel so embarrassing and shameful. In that moment I was no feminist, I prayed I could just turn into a boy, or, better, disappear completely.
We walked through the gate and headed straight to our first ride. It was the log ride. I watched as people dropped in their log shaped carts down the track screaming and soaking. I couldn't go on this ride. I immediately burst into tears cursing at my hormones. I attracted the attention of the troop leader and at least half the troop. I was escorted away to a nearby bench as the rest of the girls went on the ride.
The troop leader kept asking me what was wrong, but I wouldn't tell her. I couldn't tell her. After about thirty minutes of crying she called my father to pick me up. Since the traffic had cleared, he arrived in only two hours. Still, those may have been the two most humiliating hours of my life. I wouldn't get off the bench, and I couldn't stop crying. Security had come by to make sure someone hadn't hurt me. I was comforted about heights, clowns, crowds, anything and everything that someone thought could make me feel better.
Eventually I was escorted to the exit to see my worried father and nine-year-old sister. I silently cursed his male anatomy and her childhood innocence as I followed him wordlessly to the car. Bianca rambled on about how lucky I was to be at Disneyland and what a baby I was for leaving. Eventually my dad made her shut up, but I still couldn't tell him what was wrong.
Somewhere along the ride home my dad had realized what was wrong. I think the crying, my first time ever insisting that the male race was better, and the sweater tied around my waist gave it away. He dropped my sister off at her friend's house and drove right past our house to a drug store. I refused to go in with him, still playing completely dumb as he gave me knowing looks.
He came back a few minutes later with seven bags. He had bought out half the feminine hygiene isle. He was a gynecologist he knew pretty much everything about my predicament. He told me about what was going on as I stared at my shoes with my arms crossed over my chest. When we got home, he hugged me right before I ran upstairs to my room with all seven bags. I dumped them out on my bed. I had been humiliated, betrayed by my mother and my own body in the same day. I had changed that day. It was my first shove into womanhood.