For your viewing pleasure, a painting created exclusively for Friend for the Ride:
My mom painted this young lady falling off the roof, inspired by a recent conversation with her friends.
During their high school and college days, in the forties and fifties, Mom said they felt oh so sophisticated confiding in one another: ”I fell off the roof.”
Meaning: ”It’s that time of the month.”
We wondered where this expression came from.
I had no luck googling, so I checked with Harry Finley at MUM, the Museum of Menstruation.
Harry doesn’t know either, but he remembers a visitor to the museum in 1994 who was writing a book on expressions. The writer thought “falling off the roof” came from the Pennsylvania Dutch.
Perhaps, but when I reported this back to Mom, she commented that the girls in Baltimore and the girls she met at Duke certainly knew it too.
Harry’s MUM site boasts an incredible online archive of materials related to menstruation.
A pamphlet titled “As One Girl to Another,“ is dated 1943.
Produced by Kotex, the page below refers to the “crazy nicknames” girls have for their periods.
Yep, one of those crazy nicknames is “falling off the roof.”
But I still have no idea where the expression came from.
Any ideas?
My mom, Nancy Kiehne, paints in acrylics and watercolor. To see more of her work, check out her Tumblr site.
My grandmother was born in 1915 and died in 1991. I was the recipient of all the volumes of her diaries (about 20 books). She wrote religiously in them since she was about 9 years old until she was about 70. My mom was an only child, and she could not bring herself to have (let alone read) them, and my grandfather had long since passed. I was about to throw them out when I decided that to honor her memory, I would read them once before I let them go. Much to my surprise, they proved very interesting in parts.
One term that kept coming up was “I fell off the roof today.” Confused about that I asked my mom (born in 1942), and she didn’t know what that meant. There was very little on the internet in those days and nothing I could find about that term. My grandmother was very clumsy, and we chalked it up to that, but felt like she should have stopped going up there if she kept falling off. She was clumsy, but not stupid.
She wrote semi-regular entries and dated each one but she didn’t write regularly enough for me to see a pattern. It happened often enough that I went back and decided to do some math on the dates. I found that there were always 28-31ish days between entries of “falling off the roof.” Me being a young guy (and yes stupid) in my early 20’s that didn’t mean anything to me. Sometime later my mom asked me if I’d ever figured out why Grandma kept falling off the roof. I said no, and then as almost an afterthought I said, but she sure was regular. Confused my mom asked what that meant, and I said something must have made her go up there and fall every 28-31 days! My mom laughed (at me I am sure) and had the answer immediately. My grandma (and her sisters had a secret code they used to share that monthly experience). Just to think, all this time I thought my grandma wasn’t “hip” and “with it”…
on August 1, 2023 at 5:05 pm Ed Lorenzini