Trying to keep my sanity in a house full of manly ball-scratching, burping, farting, and raised toilet seats.
Trying to keep my sanity in a house full of manly ball-scratching, burping, farting, and raised toilet seats. 
“Mom, would you get mad at me if I got a detention for putting a tampon in a friends backpack?”
I was in the process of making my coffee when my 12 year old came up to me and propositioned me with this very interesting question. I looked up from stirring my coffee and met his eyes. He had a smirk on his face and it took everything in me not to bust out laughing.
“Did you get a detention?” I asked, with as much seriousness as I could muster without showing my eagerness to hear this story.
My son chuckled, “Nooooo! It wasn’t me!” And so he began to tell me the story of how one of his friends (I’ll call him “M” from now on) was looking through his friends bag and found her tampons. He took two, and even though she knew, she didn’t stop him. During PE “M” decided to put a tampon in two different boys’ backpacks. My son was aware of what his friend had done, soooo to aid in the revelation of the prank my son asked boy #1, “Hey do you have a pencil I can borrow?”
“No, I don’t.”
“Oh, well why don’t you check your bag?” So boy #1 unzips his bag, sticks his hand in and suddenly feels a strange long wrapped object. Slowly he pulls it out and looks at it, then looks at my son and “M” with this look of contorted disgust. The boys chuckle to themselves as boy #1 discreetly walks over to the garbage can and throws away the tampon. Now it’s time to hit up boy #2.
“Hey man, you got some gum,” my son asked but to my son’s disappointment boy #2 checks his pockets instead of his bag and hands him a piece of gum. Time goes by when boy #2 overhears my son telling another friend, “I can’t believe “S” hasn’t found the tampon that “M” put in his bag.”
At that moment boy #2 opens his bag, takes out the tampon, unwraps it and proceeds to pull the tampon apart and play with it in all kinds of ways, which of course has everyone around him thoroughly entertained. “I thought he was gonna stick it in his nose or something!” My son tells me laughing. Of course, all was fun and games until the coach realized that something was amiss, saw where the distraction was coming from, and asked boy #2 to go to the front to see him. They had a conversation in which it was revealed who had put the tampon in his bag to and THEN…coach did it.
He gave the tampon prank kid …… DETENTION!!
ARE YOU SERIOUS?? DETENTION?? For what?? Who got hurt? Where was the injury? Who was bleeding?? (other than the girl who was menstruating) The first kid didn’t fuss about it and boy #2 thought it was hilarious and obviously basked in the entertainment quality that the tampon provided his peers around him. Maaaaannnn, and here I thought it couldn’t get worse than the kid who was arrested and suspended from school for the rest of the year for shooting plastic spitballs at two of his friends in the hallway.
Honestly, though, I’d like to know how the coach kept his composure and didn’t laugh his ass off at the whole situation himself.
Of course I laughed with my son as he told the story and when he was finished he asked, “So? Would you be mad if I got a detention for doing that?”
“Definitely not!” (Which is the reason why it’s probably a good thing I’m not a middle school teacher!)
Good news was, the next day when my son got in the car after school and I asked him how his day was he informed me that his friends mom wasn’t mad at him for the tampon prank either or for getting a detention for it. 
Peace Out!
-Natasha Olivera
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My journey into motherhood began when I was 17 years old. Today, I am the mother of two teen boys, 15 and 13, and I am one of the only moms "blogging" about raising teen boys. On this blog, which I like to call a "blogory", I share my candid, poignant, sometimes humorous, but always real, short stories about my stumbles through parenthood as a young mother raising two teen boys while coping with living in a house full of testosterone. My parenting philosophy revolves around honest, no holds barred communication, where no topic is off limits, mixed with an enormous sense of humor. Peace Out! -Natasha Olivera
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Stuff like this makes me think back to K-12 and eye-roll. What is the harm of playing with a tampon? Were they disrupting class? Was somebody publicly embarrassed? No. Getting a detention for something like this just makes boys (and girls) ashamed about what goes inside their bodies and about exploring something that should be explored at their age. In this case, I do not think they should have been reprimanded for checking out a tampon.