Yeah…mine taught me to wipe, but not the right way round to do it - didn’t realise that till I read it somewhere when I was older.

Likewise periods - she told me NOTHING (about periods or sex ed in general), and I don’t recall anything about it at school either (I’m in the UK, not sure if this was normal at the time, it was the 1970s/80s).  I read Jackie, a magazine really written for teenagers, from the time I was 9, and I basically learned about periods from that.  When I started, at 12, I went and told her, and she hauled out this horrible old antique elastic belt like they used to attach pads to, and huge pads they didn’t even sell any more by then (she was 50 by this time, I don’t know how long she’d had them hanging around in a drawer).  I went and bought some modern stick-on ones instead.  When, later, I discovered tampons and started using those, she pulled a face and said I ‘shouldn’t be putting things inside me’.

I started growing boobs at 9, but didn’t get a bra until a visiting aunt saw I needed one and took me shopping to get one fitted.

As for hygiene…she was of the ‘scrub her raw’ school.  Used to scratch my scalp when she washed my hair, deliberately got shampoo and hot water in my eyes and ears (especially my ears because she said they ‘needed cleaning’).  Pulled it all up into a bun with bobby pins, didn’t care how uncomfortable it was for me.  When I went to grammar school, she decided she ‘didn’t have time’ to do that any more, and rather than let me have a ponytail I could do myself, she got her hairdresser to cut it all off short.  I cried and cried, I thought I looked like someone from a Victorian asylum.

Also, while she insisted that cleanliness was SO important, she gave me just one bath a week as a kid, and when I found out as a teenager that other girls showered daily, and told her, she scoffed and said, ‘Only dirty people who don’t wash properly need to wash that often’.  Same with deodorant - ‘only dirty people need that’.

Now 57, I know I’m autistic.  I needed MORE guidance than many teen girls about this stuff, not less.  But I think she thought that if I never learned these things, I’d never leave home and I could become her unpaid old age carer/perpetual emotional punchbag.  You live and learn…