At GladRags, we recieve tons of customer feedback. Love letters are our favorite form of that feedback, I mean hey, who doesn’t like a love letter once in a while? We recently recieved this truly great story from Chrystie and loved it. Her story actually inspired us to create a new Soaking Bucket Kit on sale in July. We hope you like it as much as we did.
Thanks Chrystie!
Hi,
I know you get positive reviews all the time, but I couldn’t resist sending one along with my story. I will be 25 in October and, until I stumbled upon your website, I wasn’t aware of cloth pads. I liked the idea a lot and was won over by all the positive reviews. I wanted to try one, but I’m an inconveniently heavy bleeder and always hated my period. I wasn’t sure if I really wanted to get friendly with it by having to deal with my blood after I’d gone and bled all over something. It always seemed right to just throw away the source of my pain and misery, usually chucking it in the garbage while making a face. It wasn’t that I thought cloth pads were disgusting. I just thought I was disgusting for having a period and I was afraid to get something cute and fancy, just to bleed all over it.
I finally worked up the courage, though, to buy a night pad, feeling I would probably need the biggest one you had. Turned out it was a little too big for what I wanted and I decided that nighttime probably was the best time for it, if I ever decided to trust myself at night with a cloth pad. I put it away, feeling disappointed. What I needed was a day pad, but I questioned whether nothing but cotton could really stand up to the kind of bleeding I did. I hemmed and hawed over it for a long time before I finally tried again. This time, I was sent an adorable little camo-designed day pad that I promptly washed and waited two weeks to be able to use.
Since I only had one, I waited until the evening, one night, and took off my plastic pad, feeling a little nervous and put the cloth one on. As soon as I stood up, I felt the difference. It was soft, like a little extra wad of underwear at my crotch or possibly a small pillow, but smaller than the boat I was used to wearing. I didn‚t know what to think, so I just went and sat back down on the couch, readjusting myself the whole way, trying to get a feel for this smaller, softer pad. For four hours, I kept the pad on, feeling myself bleed and running to the bathroom to make sure it was ok. Four hours and then I had to take it off because it got saturated.
I stood in the bathroom, decked out in my new disposable, rinsing out my cloth pad and realizing how disappointed I was that I didn’t have another cloth one to wear. I was absolutely shocked at how much blood came out of that pad! It didn’t look like that much from the top. The cotton wicked my blood away from my skin better than all those fancy gels and chemicals. That was the beginning of my budding love for my GladRag. I decided that I wanted to try to get at least six hours out of my pad, so I ran upstairs to my computer and ordered a third matching insert for it – oh and another GladRag and a third insert for that, too. That way I could switch off. Then, I waited for my box to come to see what the new one would look like ∑ I hoped for the zebra print I requested. When the box came, I was overjoyed to see my zebra pad, its third insert, and the camo insert I had ordered first. It was another long wait for my period to come back. I mean, what the heck? I was waiting for my period to come? What was wrong with me? My period was bad, right? It came on a Wednesday afternoon, while I was helping my mother and sister get some boxes out of the shed. I ran inside and smiled. Yes, yes, today I would break in my zebra pad. So, stuffed fat with three inserts, it went around my underwear and I wore my zebra pad for the rest of the day. That night, suddenly remembering my night pad and pulling it out for the first time since I had put it away, months before, I wore it as I hand washed my zebra pad since we didn’t have enough laundry to make a full load and I wanted it at the ready again. What I had liked best about it was the fact that it snapped instead of taping itself to my underwear. I happen to be a “front-bleeder”, which means I seem to spurt ahead instead of down, so only the front half of my disposables ever got used and completely soaked, wasting the padding in the back. With my cloth pad, I was able to unsnap and flip it when it started to saturate in the front. That, coupled with the third insert, made my zebra pad last and last for eight hours. I rinsed so much blood out of that thing, I started to laugh at myself. That was when I decided to wear both my pads the next day, and also the night one again if I needed it, to try to go a whole day with cloth. I figured each day pad going eight hours a piece and then the night pad for bed time, I could probably manage it. Four days later, using only two day pads with three inserts each, and a night pad when I slept, I suddenly realized three things. One, I had gotten so spoiled by my camo and zebra cloth pads, that first day, that I had ended up washing them every single night because I didn’t want to wear a disposable, which meant I hadn‚t used disposables at all! Two, the angry, red, itchy, bumpy rash I had gotten every single month since I was twelve years old and started my period – the rash I just assumed was part of my “curse” – had not shown up at all! Three, my period only lasted four days with spotting in the morning of the fifth, when it usually lasted seven with spotting all the eighth, plus two or three more days of waiting for the rash to clear up! I‚d had a great period, this time! As I pulled my two, little, hardworking pads out of the dryer at the end of my period, I lovingly smoothed them out, realizing I was really attached to them in a bonding sort of way. Without knowing beforehand what was about to transpire, we had walked through the fire together and kicked the disposable habit, way ahead of when I had planned. They were good to me and kept my lady parts healthy during my period, for the first time in my life. I reassembled them so they’d look nice sitting in the bathroom, because they deserved it, and I promised them I’d add to their family real soon. They were thirsty little suckers but there‚s no need for them to get old before their time. I just ordered 8 more day pads, with extra inserts, 3 more night pads, a pair of sea sponges, and a carrying case – all in one felled swoop. That should last me five days and four nights, which is how long my new and improved periods are, now. It helped that there was a sale on camo pads and that I had a discount code, so I could order more stuff than I might have been able to afford normally. It’s not really a matter of being ready to take that step. It’s about having already done so, accidentally, and needing more resources to take the load off the two I have. I’m done with hating myself for having a period. I don‚t have to be hot, angry, itchy, and irritable once a month. Instead, I will sit on my soft, little, menstrual pillows (because that‚s what they feel like) and wonder how much blood I‚m going to find in them when I rinse them out. Hey, the big reduction of cramps isn’t anything to complain about, either. Chrystie
-owner of three awesome Gladrags and waiting for the other eleven 
I stumbled upon the GladRags website about 2 years while ‘mindlessly’ looking up cloth diapers on google. I don’t even have kids yet, but I grew up on cloth diapers, and want my kids to do the same. Even though I had always known diapers were bad for the environment, I had never even thought about how pads were just as bad! I had also started boycotting tampons around this time b/c one of my friends who is a pediatric nurse had a patient with toxic shock syndrome and it freaked me out.
I’ll be making Walnut-Cheddar Harvest Loaf, vegetarian gravy, brussel sprouts, and cabbage salad to take to Thanksgiving this year. The Harvest Loaf is from the really old cookbook, 
