Casey Marie Mollón
Feature Article Writing: Final Magazine Article
12.12.2016
It’s Friday morning, about 6 a.m., the sun has just risen and the air is bitterly cold – a rough morning for any person living on the streets in New York City. Now picture this: not only are you a homeless woman who has just spent the night sleeping alone in Prospect Park, freezing and damp from a perpetual shivering sweat in your only items of clothing, but, it is also that time of the month for you.
“This has to be the worst part, right here. Waking up extra early so you can change yourself – only to find out half the time that you’re too late and now you’ve got a stain,” [giggling] SJ says in an interview in Prospect Park, “I mean these are my only clothes, so…”
Sadie James, or SJ as she prefers, is a 24-year-old woman who calls the streets of Brooklyn her home. She grew up in a one-bedroom apartment in Brownsville, Brooklyn with her mother, Jade, who worked as a cashier at their local C-Town. Jade took to selling drugs on the side to help with money, SJ says, “I’m sure my mom thought I didn’t know,” she giggles again. When Jade got mixed up with some “bad dudes,” as SJ refers to them, she started owing people a lot of money. Eventually, SJ, 15-years-old at this point, and her mother were evicted from their home and were forced to live in a shelter.
“Let me tell you, those places are nastier than the streets,” SJ says, “trust me, you’d rather sleep out here.” She and her mother lived in and out of various shelters for about a year and then SJ says they parted ways. “It’s just easier to travel alone out here, you know, I worry about myself and that’s it; It’s just me.” SJ says there are so many things she has learned while living on the streets, but the one thing that will never get easier that most people don’t think about is that one week of the month every woman endures: menstruation.
39.7% of all homeless people in the United States are women, according to the US Department of Housing and Urban Development. Every month these 224,344 women will experience their period without the sufficient or healthy ways to care for themselves. SJ and I went to Duane Reade to explore the tampon options. The cheapest option was a box of 18 tampons for $4. If you do the math and average each period to be about 5 days long where you use about 4 tampons per day, that comes out to a total of 20 tampons each cycle. That one $4 box would barely cover a single period cycle. According to a poll I took, 94 out of 100 women asked, said they use about 4-6 tampons each day of their period; so the estimate of 20 tampons per cycle is actually quite skimpy.
“When I finally save up or get $4, tampons are not at all what I want to get,” SJ says, laughing, “I’m hungry man!”
New York is the first state to pass a bill that indicates all public schools, homeless shelters and jails must provide free tampons and other feminine products to women. Although this law is definitely a step in the right direction, SJ says that there are quite a few stipulations in order to make this bill work for you. SJ takes us through a day in the life of a homeless woman experiencing her period, a bodily function that she, nor any woman has control over.
“I try to sleep pretty close to a public bathroom and know exactly where it is,” SJ says, so that when she wakes up she can run straight to the bathroom and change herself. On this Friday morning SJ goes to use one of the public restrooms in Prospect Park. “I kind of just do a quick temporary change first thing before Starbucks opens,” she says, “I’ll usually put some toilet paper rolled up until I can wash myself for the day.” If there is no toilet paper, which SJ says there often is not, she will use a thick sock. She has three designated socks for this purpose that she washes and reuses.
At around 9:30 a.m., in the hopes of avoiding some of Starbucks’ rush hour, SJ orders a trenta sized tap water (that is Starbucks’ extra-large size). She uses this cup and water to wash herself each morning. She will vary among Starbucks and fast food restaurants in the mornings. “Yeah I live on the streets, but that doesn’t mean I don’t have hygiene, common,” SJ says.
After washing herself SJ says that’s when she will use a cleaner more efficient absorbent, such as a tampon or pad if she can get one. She explains some of the stipulations about getting free tampons now, “right, so we just did the math together, I can’t just go into a shelter and ask for a box of tampons every month.” The tampons in shelters are primarily for people who stay in the shelter, and even so, SJ says that you can’t ask for how many you will actually need for the whole cycle. “They won’t just like, dole out 20 tampons for all of us,” SJ adds.
On this Friday, SJ had two pads left over from a pack she stole from a 99 Cent store. She says that tampons are much more ideal because they are less messy than pads. On the street, being clean is already difficult, so during a menstrual cycle it is really important to be as efficient and clean as possible. SJ rolls the cotton from the pad into a tampon and uses part of the plastic wrapper as the string.
It is recommended, on all tampon boxes, that you don’t leave one in your body for longer than eight hours. That is, if the tampon lasts that long, which they often don’t. SJ says a big problem is infection when you leave a tampon in for too long. She says urinary tract infections are a common side-effect of leaving a tampon in for too long among the homeless female community. “At that point, you’re no longer saving for a tampon, but for cranberry juice,” SJ says, “and lots of it.”
Erin O’Mahoney, an Emergency Room Nurse at Northwell Health Hospital, agrees that leaving a tampon in for too long can cause an array of infections and problems for women. “The list is really endless, but UTI’s are very common,” O’Mahoney says, “toxic shock syndrome is up there too, blood infections which would require antibiotics and so many more.” O’Mahoney also volunteers at homeless shelters during the holidays to check out the sick homeless community. She says a lot of the problems among the women are UTI’s or other infections relating to feminine hygiene.
By about 7 p.m. SJ has gone about her day and is now out of tampons or pads. “Now it’s time for the socks,” she says, “I hate this part, I really do.” Upon depleting her grim selection of tampons, for this cycle, she will have to bring the three socks into rotation. These three socks are stored in SJ’s backpack and each time she uses one, she will wash it in a public restroom and hope it dries by the time the second and third are used. “In the summer this process is way easier just because they dry so much faster when it’s hot out,” SJ says, “in the winter…[laughs] good luck.”
The only good thing about winter, SJ says, is that you don’t have to drink as much water to keep hydrated, which is helpful because urinating multiple times with the same tampon in can also cause infection. Whether the idea of not drinking a lot during your period is accurate, O’Mahoney does actually concur with SJ in saying that urination while the same tampon is in can cause infections more easily than if you either use the bathroom less with each tampon or change your tampons pretty frequently. O’Mahoney does note that drinking less during your period is not good because you are already loosing fluids and hydration more than a normal day.
Any day is not an easy venture for a homeless person because they don’t have access to basic human needs: food, water, a bathroom with toilet paper, a shower, clean clothes, a roof to sleep beneath and many more. However, being a homeless woman entails all of these obstacles plus one week of each month of what can only be described by SJ as, “it’s pure hell.” While the state has taken some measures to ensure people have access to feminine products, as SJ was saying, there are quite a few loop holes that make those products still seem so far for some women.
“Of all the daily struggles,” SJ says, “hands down, periods are the worst and most difficult to deal with.”