Do You Remember Your First Day of School?

[Editor’s note: Over the course of two years, B.C. authors Nicole Breit and Claire Sicherman exchanged letters to explore their experiences of growing up in Vancouver-area suburbs of the 1980s.

Candid, evocative and often funny, their writing offers an inside look at the shame, silences and power dynamics that inform how girls and young women come to understand themselves and the world around them. Breit and Sicherman’s letters are collected in ‘Bloom: Letters on Girlhood,’ a new memoir out this month through Caitlin Press.

The authors will celebrate the Vancouver launch of ‘Bloom’ at Upstart & Crow on the evening of Oct. 18, 2025; tickets are available online. Other launch events are scheduled across B.C. later this fall at the Doris Crowston Gallery on the Sunshine Coast on Nov. 8, and the Salt Spring Island Public Library on Nov. 15.

In this excerpt from the letter that opens the book by Claire Sicherman, we revisit the heady, nervy and hopeful mix of emotions that some associate with the first day of school.

What do you remember about the first day of school, readers? Let us know in the comments.]

Dear Nicole,

The first day of school is tomorrow and I’m sitting at my kitchen table fretting. The days are getting shorter, the mornings and evenings are cooler and the crispness of fall is in the air. The few yellow plums still left hanging on the tree are plump with juice, the blackberries are mostly picked over and the wasps are fighting over the remaining fruit.

I’m not good with endings, and I find the transition from summer to fall difficult. You’d think I’d be used to the weather, since I’ve lived on the West Coast all my life, but as I get older, the dark and the wet get increasingly onerous and a heaviness slinks into my body, as if the damp has seeped into my bones and made a home.

What a perfect time then, to start writing a letter to you, dear friend, not only as a way of communicating on an intimate level the inner workings of our very beings, but also to explore the blooming of our respective girlhoods, and how they each relate to our existence as mature women. (I was going to write middle-aged but mature sounds so much more sophisticated mostly because I still have a hard time believing that I’m actually in mid-life.)

We also discussed how letter writing can be therapeutic. There’s something about employing the second person that helps bring us closer to the truth, a proximity that is sometimes difficult to emulate with other points of view.

Authenticity has become such a rare occurrence in this world filled with fabrication that it’s as though this very fabrication has become the truth. It’s therefore very meaningful to be writing to you, as we seek out a deeper, honest and vulnerable connection, to truly witness each other, in a genuine and supportive way.

As I sit at my kitchen table, fingers drumming, mind endlessly wandering and creating all sorts of stories, I wonder if you have as much difficulty with transitions as I do. Did I already mention I’m not good at endings?

Well I’m not so great at beginnings, either. I think I might have an overall problem with change in general, which makes living slightly more difficult, since, as we all know, life involves constant change.

Tomorrow is Ben’s first day of Grade 11. Let me be clear — Ben is not anxious about going back to school. Sure, he’d prefer not to. He loves the freedom that summer brings: waking up late, hanging out with friends, playing on his computer, days that melt together like a Dali painting, unremitted, unscripted and uninterrupted.

I was always nervous to start school again. By the end of August I’d feel the beginning flutters of butterfly wings in my belly. The flutters soon morphed into strong quakes and by early September I’d become a jumpy bundle of nerves with a short fuse. You would assume since it’s not me starting school tomorrow I wouldn’t be anxious. But my body remembers every panic-filled first day and it begins revving on its own.

As a responsible parent who has done her time in many forms of therapy, I am doing my best not to transfer the anxiety I’m feeling onto my teen. By writing to you, I’m hoping the fear will flow out through my pen, and I’ll find a little freedom on the page.

Grade 8. Oh, great

Did I ever tell you I got my period on the first day of Grade 8? I woke up feeling queasy, which was not unusual considering I had anxiety-barfed the entire week leading up to it. New junior high school, new teachers, new kids. Most of my friends were looking forward to getting older, to meeting new people, to kissing said new people. I wasn’t looking forward to any of it. I wanted to stay in my room, hermit under my covers, travel back at warp speed in a time machine to when I was younger, perhaps even crawl back into the safe soft warmth of my mom’s uterus.

I longed to remain the pickling age, as my dad called the perfect number, around three or four years old, when most children are still cute and innocent, before adolescence smothers and chokes everything.

That morning I felt a wave of pain in my belly followed by a dull ache, a firm pressure on the lower portion of my abdomen. I trudged slowly to the bathroom, pausing to check out my new underwear in the mirror. They were nice and white, one of the new pairs I received from my mom as part of her back-to-school sale shopping. I touched the soft ribbon on the front, the white trim around the edges, the smooth seams on the sides.

When I sat down on the toilet I was surprised to see a tiny circle of blood on my underwear, a rusty red spot the size of a nickel, with an extra dark dot of cherry in the middle. It looked like a dartboard. “Bull’s eye!” I snorted, because of course this was all happening to me now, on the first day of school, just a few weeks after my 13th birthday.

I had longed for my period to arrive so I could be like everyone else, just like Margaret in my favourite Judy Blume book. I thought there was something wrong with me, that it might never come at all. Although I didn’t want to grow up, the thought of being left behind was worse. I wished for my period to come the way I yearned for glasses, braces and a broken leg.

But after a morning full of cramps, I realized that my period wasn’t cool and I no longer wanted it, just like those other things I had desired. Something had shifted, much like the rest of my body. The sprouting of breasts. First bra. Mound of dark pubic hair. Freshly shaven legs.

My mom didn’t make any fanfare about the arrival of my period — she was very matter of fact. She had a job to get to and nothing was going to make her late.

I locked myself in the bathroom with the pad my mom had tossed to me, a soft square wrapped in pale pink plastic, and stuck it onto a fresh pair of underwear. Extra thick and long, the pad stretched from my belly button to my bum and it made me walk funny, all bowlegged like a cowgirl who had just spent the day riding a horse.

Maybe this was what wearing diapers felt like? Tampons freaked me out — I shuddered to think what would happen if one should get lost up in the vortex of my vagina — so I wasn’t going near those.

My mom dropped me off in her tiny white hatchback that still reeked of rotten chicken from the time when packages of meat had leaked inside the trunk. I managed a crooked smile but really I was biting my tongue so I wouldn’t cry.

‘Did I look as different as I felt?’

Walking into the school felt a bit like landing on a different planet. There were hundreds of bodies zipping everywhere, kids grunting and slapping each other on hands or backs, others squealing with their voluminous hair, fluorescent lights buzzing overhead. I made a beeline for the bathroom to check if my pad needed changing even though it hadn’t even been an hour since I’d put it on. (It didn’t.)

I wondered if anyone could tell I had just gotten my period. Did I look as different as I felt? I searched frantically for my homeroom, like a captain of a ship looking for dry land, craning my neck past the tidal wave of students, when I felt something sharp jab into my ribs. I looked up to see Randy-the-Terrible rubbing his elbow, as if drilling his elbow into my ribs had hurt him and not me.

Randy was a horrible boy from my elementary school who was popular only because he was horrible. Flagged by his two henchmen, Randy scanned my body up and down, his eyes lingering on my chest.

“My, haven’t you grown up this summer,” he sneered. I immediately pulled my backpack over my chest, cheeks as red as the blood on my underwear, while Randy and his friends walked away laughing.

Over the years I’ve bled on or right through my underwear too many times to count. I’ve mostly seen my period as something to endure.

When Ben used to ask questions about my period, his eyes would stretch into full moons, and he’d tell me he was glad he wasn’t a woman, happy he didn’t have to bleed every month, or go through the physical and emotional pain of PMS.

I felt like a bad feminist when I didn’t defend my menstrual cycle. The truth is, I mostly don’t want any of it either. What I do hope is that my talking about it with him and his watching me struggle every month will make him a more compassionate human.

As I grieve the end of summer, a new beginning is already upon us.

Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year, is traditionally a time to celebrate, but also a time to reflect on the previous year and look to the one ahead. Honey-filled foods are eaten to welcome sweetness into the year.

I may not be sure what will happen in this new beginning, but I do know that in a couple of weeks I will be thinking of you as I slice up apples from our tree and dip them in honey, freshly made by our island bees.

With all my bloody love,

xo Claire

Excerpted from ‘Bloom’ by Claire Sicherman and Nicole Breit. Copyright © 2025 Claire Sicherman and Nicole Breit. Published by Caitlin Press. Reproduced by arrangement with the publisher. All rights reserved.

What do you remember about the first day of school? Share your stories in the comments.