Photo: Maksim Toome/Shutterstock
Her mom was furious.
By Amanda Hartmann — Written on Feb 09, 2022
A worried teenage girl came to Reddit after getting in trouble with her mother for using tampons despite her mother telling her not to.
Reddit’s “Am I the A**hole,” or “AITA,” is a subreddit that allows users to share stories for the opportunity of gaining an outside perspective to a conflict they are facing.
The commentors and users of Reddit then are able to vote and discuss who in the situation was in the right – and who was the a**hole.
The young girl opened up about the conflict with her mother over using tampons, writing, “My mom has had a rule that I’m not allowed to use tampons until I am 18.”
Continuing, she says that she “basically gaslit” her mother to convince her to let her use them — under the condition that she only use them for swimming.
She then lied to her mother, saying she took the box to her dad’s house, but she actually left them at home, buying other boxes to leave at her dad’s house.
She found that she vastly preferred them to pads because she found them more comfortable, and so she used the tampons instead, trying to hide them as well as she could.
Her mother is starting to realize the truth.
In her post, the 15-year-old daughter writes that her mother “is slowly starting to find out the truth of what I’ve been doing with the tampons.”
She explains that her mother confronted and yelled at her about “smuggling them” between her parents’ houses.
Now, the daughter feels trapped and worried about the lies she has been giving her mother, even saying “I know that what I’m doing isn’t right,” before wondering if she was the a**hole in this conflict.
However, the verdict was decidedly that the daughter was “Not the A-hole.”
The comments came to the teen's support immediately, assuring her that the “sneaking” tampons seemed justified due to the controlling nature of her mother’s rule in the first place.
The top comment perhaps said it the most directly.
Another comment asserted that something like pads versus tampons should be the daughter’s personal decision, and that the mother was being unnecessarily controlling by putting arbitrary age rules around it.
It seemed the closest anyone was to agreeing with the mother’s perspective was innocent confusion at what she had been trying to do by making such a rule.
Beyond this daughter’s story, the opportunity also opened a discussion of the unnecessary stigma on tampons and female puberty in general.
One comment questioned into her mother’s reasoning behind the rule, suspicious that her mother held a somewhat common stigma over tampons, believing that they took a girl’s virginity.
Unfortunately, upon the question, the daughter herself went into the comments to confirm that this is exactly what her mother believed.
She also added that her mother was very worried about Toxic Shock Syndrome.
Unfortunately, stigmas like this are all too common when dictating how women, especially girls going through puberty, can handle their own bodily functions.
One commentor compared this teenager’s experience to her own when she had gone through puberty, except instead of period shaming, she was body hair shamed — but also deemed “too young to shave” it!
The silver lining is that, while several people in the comments had comparable experiences, they all seemed to at least know better now.
Hopefully, the next generations of girls can have more autonomy over their own choices with their period and puberty, if the people in the comments are any indication.
For example, one parent explains how important they knew it’d be for their own daughter to be allowed to make her own choices with her period.
We can only hope to see more parents like this one so we can finally get rid of these unnecessary stigmas that are making young girls feel ashamed for how they went to deal with the changes of their own body.
Amanda Hartmann is a writer and editorial intern at YourTango who writes on news and entertainment.