Wellbeing Thread - who's in?

what colours should i paint then, lrd? at the moment everything is tones of greige, which is making me feel veeeeery low. (and i don't care how trendy it is, it's depressing).

i'm thinking of a lineny colour mostly to brighten it all up, but i do think i need some colour somewhere. dh has vetoed green. and we have blue tiles throughout the kitchen/ dining room... and all the way down the stairs to the front door, and to the basement. and we def can't afford to replace the tiling. oh, and paleish goldeny hardwood in the living area, but it's all open plan.

someone said we should paint the external wall a darker colour so that the outdoors comes 'in' but i don't read enough decorating mags and this makes feck all sense to me... at the mo we have one wall painted really dark brown, but as all our furniture is dark brown wood it just disappears. oh and the chimney breast is the same very dark brown. it makes me want to scream.

all ideas welcomed. i'm about as interior designy as your average hoarder.

Cross-post.

Yes, me too jacks. It makes me want to say 'fuck off' quite a lot.

If men had periods, there would be a solemn and serious recognition of the pain, perhaps entitlement to paid leave for the first few days, and mandatory hot water bottles built into sofas so you could reach them without moving.

I must have been reading too many Homes magazines. One of the things the Resisting Femininity threads did was make me stop buying glossy mags (more or less), because they just get me down with all the 'ooh, so-and-so is so thin/fat/unloved/loved up' crap. But the downside is I've replaced them with Homes and Gardens and so on, and that's why the paint colours come in.

Back in the days when I drank alcohol I am sure I would have reassured you there's no such thing as too much pear cider - it is very tasty stuff.

have a happy period

duh

Oh I hate "happy a happy period"!!!!!! FFFFFNNNAAAAAAAAAAAARRRRRRRR!!!!

Sounds like a great colour - especially for the fireplace

< wonders if have perhaps drunk slightly too much pear cider whilst watching "Rick Stein tastes the blues" - great stuff >

oh yep, that sounds like it, helvetica. we bought it initially for the braces stuff, having no experience at all with said devices! but i'm glad we did as it covers all bases!

i'm going to paint my downstairs loo in 'menstrual joy' i think. and the chimney breast above the fireplace. he might be slightly baffled whn he gets to the paint store to order it though.

'Menstrual joy' sounds like a Farrow and Ball paint shade for Christmas, doesn't it?

I'm not sure I'm especially joyful about periods, having been a teenager in the 90s I find it fairly twee. It's more I actively dislike the 'joyful periods' thing being a cover for 'actually, be joyful because you can hide the disgusting debilitating effects of periods'.

I don't know if this is such a thing any more, but I wasn't mad keen on the insistence when I was a teenager that it was somehow letting the side down to be in pain from periods (or maybe that was just the PE teachers at my school, who were constantly pouring scorn on the idea you might be in some pain.)

juggling - I think healing is completely the right word.

It does matter, this stuff, doesn't it?. My mum was great in that respect but I do feel quite angry that I was in other ways made to feel as if periods were something to be hidden, or as if I should expect to faff around hiding tampax so men didn't feel revolted (grrr!).

I think we're actually conditioned to feel this stuff is too unimportant to talk about - look at me apologizing for long posts about tampons - when actually it's going to happen to every girl, and every woman is going to spend a huge number of days having a period.

I didn't think it was a hijack at all.

It does make me think more about wanting to reclaim things though. I think this is why I get so fed up with the 'happy period' adverts (and all period adverts). They make you think you're being told about happy-clappy, we-love-being-women kind of stuff, but actually the message is 'periods are massively debilitating to women and what you need is a magic, magic product to make them disappear so you don't have to be incapacitated and no one has to notice'. As if the aim were really to pretend such things as periods never happen. Not a great message really!

helvetica - i'm not sure which one it is... it's been on the stairs for three days and has now vanished and i can't see it in her bedroom. from memory it has a great double-page spread on tampons and how to use them with decent diagrams... i'll ask her where it is when she gets in from school. it covers all the bases so is probably the general one: braces, spots, breasts, pubic hair, friendships and relationships, periods... and i like it because it reinforces individuality, but recognises conformity. so i think it talks about being your own person, and the difficulties with peer group pressure etc.

it's a great series though. just sensible and not shrouded in crop tops and hot pants, but without being staid or old-fashioned. i don't think i've seen the boys one, i'll have to have a look. i suspect we're about to enter that issue as well!

• So hopefully this won't be considered too much of a thread hijack ?

< ponders changing name to something about hi-jack as do tend to make a habit of going off on tangents ... >

Good to think that we can do something to increase well-being for our DDs by talking over these things, as well as perhaps some healing ( if that's not too strong a word) and increased well-being for ourselves because I for one feel things around periods could have been better handled/ explained when I was growing up/ in our generation.
Hopefully when my daughter is discussing this in years to come she will be more confident and less euphemistic !

Btw (sorry to double-post, who knew there was so much to write about tampons eh?), no, she didn't show me on herself - she told me on me. She was standing there so could see I was trying to stick it straight upwards!

(Idiot that I was).

from - yes, she did. I was quite embarrassed at the time! But she was very matter-of-fact which helped massively. She probably could have done it from the other side of the bathroom door though. I remember her just saying 'now, you want to put one foot up and rest it on the edge of the bath, and remember your body is slanted diagonally upwards so you're aiming it at your lower back - not straight upwards' and that was pretty much it!

I remember the tampax leaflets (which may have got better) were rubbish, and as I was only 12 I had no idea that my vagina wasn't pointed straight upwards (becase we'd not really done anything in biology). She also got me the applicator ones which I think are much easier when you are young. I genuinely knew a lot of girls who had bought tampax, tried to use them, and found it too hard to work out so stopped. And looking back that is quite awful really, isn't it? If you're active and like to swim or whatever.

I expect my mum was quite embarrassed too, looking back, but she hid it well and it is one of the things that I was so grateful to her about, because most of my mates suffered on with pads for years - either because their mums didn't show/tell them how to use tampax or because they had peculiar ideas about tampax being 'inappropriate' (which I never understood, though I can see some teenagers will prefer pads and that's fine).

I have no idea about acutes either btw!

Can I ask a (probably very obvious) question? When you talk about "your mum calmly showing you how to use a tampon" (sorry, can't remember who said that) do you mean she took you into the loo and actually showed you on herself?

Don't think I ever even saw her naked. My dd sees me naked all the time though, and we share a bath from time to time. Hopefully I might still be blas'e enough to show her when the time comes.

Glad I mentioned it madwoman - It's good to share thoughts ...

dd1 is nearly 12 and has hairy armpits andher breasts are just starting to grow - no sign of periods yet but tbh can't be far away. she has a very sensible 'american girl' book which gives sanpro info, and just the other week i bought a few different types for her to get familiar with and ponder (before she needs to use them, and also so that i'm not caught out by having nothing pre-teen sized!)

tbh she dances several times a week (garage tap amongst other things) so i suspect she will move swiftly to tampons out of practicality.

her pathfinders group is also in the middle of a 'hot topics for youth' series, so she is being bombarded with lots of 'growing up as a young woman' stuff at the mo.

am loving the pretty jar idea. that would really help her too, i think, in terms of understanding it isn't a dirty little secret that needs hiding away...

Hi Helvetica - Thanks for all the links - I think something like "reclaim the night" would be the sort of thing I might go to. I like the way they've really gone to town (!) on welcoming all women on the website. Very encouraging !
They say "bring your daughters"- From what age would you bring yours (those that have DDs) ?

Thanks too for the tips around periods Hel and LRD - some of those little things you mentioned are a great idea. Sometimes little things can make a big difference. Think I need to do some more thinking around this for DDs benefit

Ooh! Fantastic! Sorry, I can't read.

Yes, I will go then. Thanks so much for linking to this - it is exactly what I need right now, I've been struggling to be articulate about porn for a while and it's something I would really appreciate learning more about. The programme looks wonderful too.

I'd love to go to Leeds RTN, it's just that I keep having to commute up that way at the moment, and it's over 50 quid each time, and we're not very well off especially before Christmas, so I would feel nervous about committing to it. London is much more affordable from where I am.

Thank you!