Becoming the vagina’s #1 cheerleader wasn’t a conscious decision. One second I was sitting on the toilet as my two daughters wrestled each other on the bath mat, and then, suddenly, I had two wide-eyed toddlers staring at me as I held a bloody tampon in my hand. It wasn’t my first time popping tampons in and out in front of them. (Sad truth: When you become a parent, you spend a lot of time peeing in front of your children.) But they’d never noticed before, so I’d never said much about it.

“Is that...blood?” my 3-year-old asked. I could see her struggling to figure out just how horrified she should be. In her world, blood is the number-one sign something terrible is going down — a mess of scraped knees, stinging ointments, and screaming fits over plasters.

I looked my daughter straight in the eye. “Yes, it’s blood,” I said. “I have my period, which is how my body tells me each month that there is no baby growing in my uterus. Isn’t that cool?”

A sea of period-filled moments clogged my brain as I spoke, like some sort of teen-movie montage. Waking up in the middle of a school sleepover to brown bloodstains in my underwear. Wearing shorts at a pool party to hide my pad — and the awful feeling of it ballooning in the water. The reactions of past boyfriends to sex while I was menstruating, ranging from disgusted to gung-ho. Last month’s failed attempt at getting the Mooncup to work, only to have the thing leak on me in the middle of a yoga class.

A thread of shame runs through all of these memories. So many moments spent hiding, covering up, being “discreet,” pounding painkillers to make sitting through classes and meetings somewhat bearable. So I decided, in that moment, that of all the crappy things my daughters would inherit from me, vagina shame would not be one of them.

I kept going, suddenly confident on my porcelain perch. “Vaginas are so awesome. They can bleed, and babies even come out of them! I love my vagina!” I exclaimed, on a roll. “Don’t you?”

My daughter nodded at me and went back to playing Frozen with two travel shampoo bottles. But I was emboldened. Vaginas were awesome. And it wasn’t just my daughters who needed to hear this. I needed it most of all.

I’ve spent the past 25 years going out of my way to completely hide my menstruation. I double up on tampons and pads when I’m going out, just in case. I wear black when my flow is heaviest; I obsessively check for tampon strings flapping in the wind every time I’m at the beach. Menstruation is something most women will experience for decades, and yet we’re instructed to keep it under wraps, as if it doesn’t happen at all. The tampon aisle being named "Feminine Care" tells you everything you need to know about your period. It’s the Voldemort of the human body: the thing that must not be named.