I’m really grateful to be living in a time when there are people like my beloved Drew Barrymore who talk about things like perimenopause.

Lord knows no one else ever spoke of it. It’s because every goddamn thing that happens to women has to be seen as embarrassing or — Oh no! Let’s not mention this is front of men…. it might make them uncomfortable!

Do you think for one single, solitary moment that if men menstruated from their penises every month, we ALL wouldn’t hear about it constantly? Just yesterday at work, PJ texted me because he smashed his pinky finger on a door frame!

It’s society’s fault. It’s the men who don’t want to hear about it and the women who are people pleasers so they don’t talk about it.

Women need to be in-the-box, garden-variety, just-the-right-amount-of-quiet… or the way people think they should act (I can’t use specifics here because the ideas of how women are “supposed” to act are ever-changing and constantly debated), lest they be dubbed crazy, or even more derogatory terms that I’d rather not mention.

I’m not saying PJ is like this (I’m feeling a little guilty about the pinky smash I wrote about above if you can’t tell) he’s great. But unfortunately, he’s someone I had to break down for years by constantly telling him allll about my periods and all the torture that I had to endure along with it. And yes, it was torture. I wish men could experience PMS and periods for just one month. Just one, and they’d change their tune. It would never again be “yuck I don’t want to hear about it”, it would be, “you strong, powerful goddess. How do you do this every month without throwing yourself off a cliff?”

I’m trying to break this pattern with my own boys, so I have always talked openly with them about every womanly issue I’ve ever had.

I was also the one who explained sex to them. I’ll never forget the look on my eldest’s face when he got confused and thought an actual chicken egg was going to come out of his penis 😳

I want them to treat their female friends and partners like human beings who are experiencing natural things, and not lepers that they’re disgusted by.

For instance, if a girl got her period on her boyfriend’s grandmother’s white dining room chair the first time they ate dinner there, I’d want her to be able to tell her boyfriend without any embarrassment so it could be cleaned up right away instead of being too embarrassed to say anything and therefore leaving it and permanently staining the white chair and reasoning that the grandmother probably thinks it was a drip of gravy when noticing it a few days later and tries to get the stain out herself but it’s an act of futility because it’s there now forever.

Or something like that that happened to someone else and definitely not me.

My boys aren’t going to be too embarrassed to buy tampons at the store for their women. That’s so dumb anyway. Why would a man ever be embarrassed to buy tampons? They’re obviously not buying them for themselves. If anything, they have a woman at home who is probably having actual sex with them. They should be proud purchasers of the tampons!

I challenge you, men and women – talk about this stuff! Drop the stigma. Mothers, aunts, grandmothers, for God’s sake, tell the younger generation what to expect when they go through perimenopause! Why does it have to be a mystery? Women, teach your girls that they shouldn’t be embarrassed about their periods! Teach your sons that it’s normal and not disgusting! They’ll be better people for it.