My novel proceeds at a pace that would make me despair if I wasn’t musing over how to write a Wild West fairytale flashback character without channeling Clint Eastwood.
Meanwhile, I have just come off the rag, so to speak. I think that since I’ve made a habit of writing about anything that comes my way that’s related to my body, this is a fine topic for today.
I find the way that women’s periods are talked about a bit strange. There’s the usual influx of euphemisms, but I’d like to set those aside for the moment. What I find strange about mentioning that I’m on/near/capable of having my period is the look of bemused bewilderment that such a comment will usually pull out of my male friends.
I realize that it’s entirely fair for these friends of mine to feel bewildered when confronted with the mention of an experience which half the population finds alien. But then, I’m still surprised every time; menstruation is such a routine, usual part of my life.
And yet, this routine is rife with physical and mental issues. Issues I rarely talk about, or even think about, even when I’m on my period. That’s weird. I love thinking about things.
So, I think I’ll explore a little, maybe shed some insight on this bodily function that takes up one of every four weeks of my life.
Here is a breakdown of what happens to my body every month.
My period usually begins in the first week of the month, and when I was on the pill (which I was for four years) its regularity was so mind-numbingly predictable that I also knew it would come, each month, on a Wednesday afternoon. Now that I’m almost two years off the pill it is only slightly less regular. I’ve never experienced the change in cycle that can come when women who live together sync their periods up. If this happened with my mother and I, I never found out. When I lived with two of my best girlfriends, senior year, I was still on the pill. They synced to me. I was like a drumbeat.
I recently started taking more drastic steps toward getting rid of the acne that lives (lived, I hope) on my chin. I find it unfair that I have acne at the age of 24; I realize that many of us continue to have acne our entire lives, but this does not prevent me from feeling as though I’m still in middle school every time a new whitehead comes swimming up to the surface.
This acne has always behaved in predictable cycles. A week before my period it threatens, and then will usually flare up two days before I start bleeding. Since I came off birth control I’ve learned that I can predict the arrival of my period through watching my skin. Now, however, I’m two days past my period, and I have just gotten my first pimple in two weeks. This is mildly confusing to me, and I’m sure my skin is confused as well.
My period begins with a bit of dark red-brown spotting, nothing too alarming. Within four hours it increases to a steady flow, and by the middle of the next day is usually heavy enough that I’ll bleed through a heavy-duty tampon in about an hour. (That’s very quickly, by the way.) This tapers off steadily over the next three days; by the third night I will be able to sleep eight hours without having to get up to insert a new tampon. Usually my body gets a bit coy at this point and stops bleeding for about 12 hours, or just long enough for me to start thinking it might be over. Then, once I’ve let my guard down, it comes rushing back in for a day in a final hurrah.
I started using tampons when I was a freshman in high school, and they practically changed my life. I hated pads so, so much. They never worked, I would always bleed through them, and sometimes I’d end up with horrible patches of blood on the insides (or outsides) of my clothes. I avoided tampons for a while because the mechanics of them spooked me, but after borrowing one from a friend’s mother in a desperate last-ditch effort one summer day, I learned by necessity and never looked back.
My periods mean a few things to me, in both physical and mental aspects. These are the issues that continually crop up.
The first day of my period means I may be in for a very bad couple of days.
Usually my cramps are mild to moderate. They are deep belly pains, not quite like muscle pains, and they make me feel shitty. Sometimes this is literal. I described this feeling, once, as “being two steps away from having my stomach fall out of my butt.” But this cramping, although annoying, is manageable. It is uncomfortable rather than truly painful.
About once every four months, however, I have what I call a bad period. These are the periods that kick off with a little trickle of cramping pain and culminate, a day later, in sweat-soaked twisting misery. My entire lower half ties in knots, cramps that start at the middle of my spine and end in my knees. There is nausea, and a lot of blood. Since I never know just when one of my bad periods will be, when the first spotting comes I start mentally steeling myself for this possibility. Sometimes I take Advil. Usually it’s too late.
The first time this happened I was in high school. I curled up on the bed in our guest room and moaned, my arms wrapped around my waist. It was the first time I’d ever been in serious pain that wouldn’t stop or fade away. It lasted about three hours. My dad brought me saltines and told me it probably wasn’t as bad as I thought it was.
When I was on the pill these bad periods were very rare. Since I came off they’re more frequent, and much worse. The worst one was about a year ago. I called out sick that day. I remember I was curled up on my bathroom floor in an over-sized bath towel because the texture of cloth of the sheets on the bed made me feel sicker when it touched my skin. I rocked back and forth slowly and cried. In the worst of it I held my head over the toilet and vomited violently. Vomiting made the cramps fade, and I fell asleep on the floor, still wrapped in my towel.
That’s what it means to me when my period comes.
What else?
The first day of my period means I’m not pregnant.
That seems like something that I, as a woman who knows safe sex and doesn’t even have that much sex, should not have to worry about. And yet, I lived in fear of an unwanted pregnancy for a very long time. An irrational fear, but a real one. Thankfully, this has eased, because I’m better now at analyzing irrational fears.
Where I grew up, pregnancy at a young age was like a brand on your skin. It meant you had to leave school, you had smashed up your future and ruined your life. And to my family (and by extension me), “at a young age” didn’t just mean the middle school and high school years. It meant during college, after college, any time in my life before I was at least 27, and married. I got it drilled into me that anything resembling a commitment as large as a child before I had had a career and made a great deal of money would be seen as a betrayal of my genes and potential.
The very first time my first boyfriend and I slept together, the second man I’d had sex with and the seventh time I’d had sex, the condom broke. I remember his face when he pulled the little ring of latex from his penis where it had rolled itself up tight. We had been dating for six days. I was on the pill. I had missed one of my doses, the week before.
Needless to say I did not get pregnant. I simply lived in abject terror for about a week and a half, until my period came and I blessed that oozing blood flow like a fucking ceremonial cleansing rain.
I don’t think that the fear of pregnancy that I nursed for so long had much to do with the development of my kink in orgasm control, but I know that it helped me to kink on not giving out sex when I still lived with that baby stab of terror in my belly.
What else?
My period means that I’m not sexy.
Now, I don’t tend to get extremely bitchy or significantly bloated during my period, two side effects I’ve been happy to miss out on. However, my sex drive plunges. It practically free-falls. I don’t feel turned on, I usually think I look horrid, I lose interest in sex, pornography and eroticism, and I simply wait. I know that I could probably find plenty of people willing to nose-dive or cock-dive into me while bloody, but I don’t usually see the point. I find my blood interesting, especially when it’s gobby and thick, but I don’t find it sexy. That, and the nerves of my clitoris essentially shut down for a week.
But then, after my period has had its last hurrah and is permanently removed from my life for a good three weeks, my sex drive rockets upward. I become demandingly, unquenchably horny. I get in the habit of multiple orgasms, I walk around with my nipples hard, I go looking for new dirty stories to read and write. I sometimes growl during sex. It’s quite fun.
And then, after a week or so I settle back down, I get back into a groove, I don’t need sex every minute, and life goes on, until the next month comes.
And remarkably, although I’ve been doing this every month of my life for the last eleven years, I have never written any of this down before today.
