Girls don’t always have fun
When you stop to think about it.
If you stop to think about it.
And if you’re male, I guess you,
We,
Don’t:
Don’t always;
Don’t often;
Don’t ever….
For some, early-onset puberty arriving inconveniently at school.
My wife tells me of a poor friend
Who got the shock of her life in the Primary playground –
Thought she was bleeding to death:
At 9, far too early, really, to understand
Or to have to live with too grown up a concern,
Beating her Mum’s half-dreaded and wholly unprepared
‘Birds and the Bees’ talk to the punch by a good few years.
Then a repeat performance pretty much every four weeks
From fourteen to forty or fifty-something:
Four or five hundred months
Of three or four days ache and discomfort.
That’s 2000 days or more:
A full five years of the tiredness and tension
Associated with Mother Nature’s egg-relocation,
Plus further symptoms one might mention.
And that’s when the tell-tale cramps do arrive on time –
But what when they don’t…?
What of being ‘late’ and of the ‘waiting game’
When she’d give anything to feel that familiar pain
Rather than have to entertain
The possibility working on a probability
Then the facing up to the ‘clear-blue’ certainty
Of an unplanned or sadly unwelcome pregnancy?
And what of those for whom ‘late’
Would be cause for cautious celebration,
Who’ve tried it all:
From time-determined copulation
To programmes of in-vitro fertilisation
So desperate are they for conception?
Girls don’t always have fun …
There seem to be so many risks to run.
