Despite living in Texas all my life, I know only two Spanish words. On my one trip to Mexico, the words — Cerveza & Bano (beer and bathroom) — were sufficient. That changed, however, when my daughter came across tampon instructions in Spanish.
While I was attending a tradeshow in Las Vegas, my daughter’s elementary school principal called. Oh, yay, I thought. The principal said my daughter came to her office after watching the fifth-grade girls’ movie about menstruation.
The tradeshow was noisy, so I kept asking the principal to speak louder. She ended up yelling that my daughter had asked for a free tampon sample with instructions in English. The instructions for my daughter’s free sample were in Spanish. The principal yelled at me to “take her shopping in the ‘girls’ aisle’!”
Once I got home, I took her to the “girls’ aisle” — the feminine hygiene section of the store. My daughter is a big reader, and if she wanted to read tampon instructions, I was all for it. She picked out a few tampon boxes with bright packaging, and more importantly, instructions in English.
She felt more in control and prepared with that one trip to the store. For all women, being “prepared” means having reliable and consistent access to feminine hygiene products. When I was a teenager, my mom would ask me what kind of period products I wanted and they would magically appear in my bathroom cabinet. “Mom magic” I called it. I now realize how blessed, spoiled and ungrateful I was then. Period products are expensive and they don’t appear under your cabinet magically. Until now, I never thought about not having what I needed during my period.
For the women, especially mothers, who She Supply serves, it can be a challenge to provide their teen daughters with feminine hygiene products when it’s also a challenge to provide food and shelter.
Did you know that one box of tampons costs approximately the same as two gallons of milk?
I remember my mom taught me about faith and that community service isn’t something you make time for with what’s leftover, but integrate into your everyday life. Parenting is hard enough as it is. Let’s help those mothers fill up their daughters’ bathroom cabinets so they can do their “mom magic.” Let’s help them provide their daughters with something we often take for granted.
Email us at [email protected] for a guide that tells how you can start a provision drive to raise money or collect hygiene products.