One of the worst things about having your period is the sensation of blood leaving your body. It slips out, warm, thick, and slippery. It is vital fluid, running out of you. You feel as though your internal organs might fall out. You feel vaguely like you might be dying. For the past few months, my flow has been really heavy, especially right at the beginning, and I bleed through tampons, through pads, through pantyliners. I drop viscous pools of blood into the toilet: there are red skid marks even after I flush. I am an awful hippie, I use cloth pantyliners, there is a disgusting tupperware in the corner of the bathroom filled with bloody rags soaking in bloody soapy water. I am literally on the rag. That's my blood.
I can't remember if it has always been like this, or only since my cycle finally started up again several months ago, when my second baby was about 15 months old. In any case, I have been a constant oxytoxic, progesteronic, prolactic, estrogeneous storm - pregnant and/or nursing - since the spring of 2007. Before that, I was on hormonal birth control for 11 years (in fact, I was on the pill when I got pregnant, LMAO!); between my two pregnancies, I had a Mirena shoved into my uterus, emitting a progestin hum. So I don't even have a clear idea of what "normal" means. The only constant is that I always, always, always get backache when I have my period. It's been like that since I was a teenager, but I was dumb when I was a teenager: it took me years to realize that those occasional days of excruciating back pain weren't random, but linked to my cycle. I squirmed in the awful plastic chairs of my high school classrooms, the ones with the cracks that would invariably snag your pantyhose, because back then, we wore pantyhose more often than we wore tights. Weird, right? It was the 90s, and I was struggling with depression, and no one noticed. Why didn't anyone notice? I was in bed all day on Saturdays and Sundays, and whenever I was alone, I cried like my heart was breaking. I'm an only child; I'm so glad that my sons have each other.
There is no normal in the female body, anyway, no baseline. Everything is always back and forth, up and down. One chemical rises, the other chemical falls. Symptoms parade across the weeks: your back aches, your organs cramp, you are fine, you crave sugar, you have diarrhea, you feel strong, you are dying for sex, you get a pimple or five, you cry, you are scary, you are surprisingly sanguine. Just recently, I noticed having mittelschmerz for the first time, and I noticed it three months in a row. It's awful: a strange, dull ache, and I limp on that side, because moving that leg too much exacerbates the irritation. I curl around a heated buckwheat pillow and moan. My husband tries to keep the children away from me so I can moan in peace, but I'm their mother and they want me. The worst thing about mittelschmerz, the worst thing about so many of these things, is that they - the people who are supposed to know - have no idea what is actually happening to you. They can only make feeble stabs, offer quackish words like "fluids" and "irritation," then rush to clarify that it's not really a problem anyway. The female body is a mystery to medical science, opaque and dense with changeable cells that may not be her own. She is - I am - a chimera. My sons' DNA is in my brain, which sort of means that my husband's DNA is in my brain, but I am nowhere in him, not physically at least. I am permanently changed, I am not who I once was. I kept my last name when I married, but it was a futile gesture. Spitting in the wind.
My ex-boyfriend S, the person I was with immediately before I got together with my husband, used to say this about my period: "It's good, because it reminds me that I need to take care of you." I assure you that this was not just a line. The boy was crazily sweet. His tenderness towards me was endless, and he always gave way when we argued. He thought I could do no wrong, even when I did very wrong indeed. My husband holds me to a slightly higher standard. Needless to say, I am the one who ended the relationship with S; he would never have left me - he would have followed me to the ends of the earth - he offered to take me back more than once. I had never left anyone before, and overall, I'd say that I prefer to be the one who gets left, because that way, when I weep over the loss, frightened and lonely, I have someone other than myself to blame.
"It's good, because it reminds me that I need to take care of you." That would make my husband snort. He has no truck with such babyish sentimentality. Trying to explain how I was feeling, why I needed extra consideration, I once told him, "I'm hemorrhaging from an internal organ." He jumped a little and looked up, horrified. "You're WHAT?!" I clarified: "I'm having my period." He sat back, relieved, dismissive. "But that's what having my period IS. I'm bleeding. From my uterus." He looked at me. He's a lawyer. "So what you're telling me is that all those people were right. All the people who said that women can't do the same work as men because they're weak and unreliable when they have their periods. Is that what you're saying?" He raised his eyebrows, Gotcha. He thought he just made a slam dunk, closed the case with a bang, but he didn't. I know he didn't, but I can't explain why at that moment. I want to elbow him in the jaw. I storm into the bathroom, fuming. I can't remember what happened after that, but I assume I cried - I always do when I have my period.
Many women have it harder than I do. They puke when they get their periods, or get migraines, or crippling cramps, or whatever. Other women barely notice their periods at all: "It's nothing!" And both of these types of women - the serious sufferers and the deniers - often take the following attitude towards casual period talk: "What are you complaining about?" And that's kind of what my husband meant, too: It's normal, so be normal and don't complain.
Here's the thing: I'M NOT COMPLAINING. I'm never complaining when I discuss these things. I'm just telling the literal truth. Everything I have said here is strictly true. It's true that when you have your period, you have to take special care to bring cotton/polyester/polyurethane/plastic/silicone devices with you wherever you go, to stop uterine material from running down your legs, to prevent yourself from leaving damp red kisses on every surface on which you rest your ass. (Are those "It's nothing" chicks on crack? How can it be nothing to be walking around the city leaking blood for several days a month? It may or may not be actively unpleasant, but it's not NOTHING. NOTHING IS NOTHING. What the fuck are they thinking? That's just crazy, completely crazy.) It's true, too, that ovulation and menstruation alter your chemical makeup - your perceptions, your responses, your appetites - and that you have no control over it. These things are just true. They are facts, like the fact that nearly five and a half years of continuous milk production have ground my body down into nothing. My Karl Lagerfeld T-shirt, which used to fit me so well back in the winter of 2006, now hangs around my waist in folds. The tiny, narrow vintage pencil skirts that I bought because they were too beautiful not to buy, but were so cripplingly tight that I had to be really careful about sitting down in them - those pull on easily and zip up smoothly now. The skin on my stomach is oddly soft, and makes crinkly folds when I move. Also, the sides of my breasts are dotted with enormous freckles. They were always freckled, but were the freckles always this big? This many? This bumpy? Is it just because my breasts have shrunk so much that the freckles have taken over? Even my husband can't quite remember.
And you, a woman, you experience all of these things, and it's normal, and you don't die, and you stay the course, and you continue to do the same work you always did, the same work as a man, inasmuch as anyone ever does the same work they always did or the same work as any other person, which, you know: maybe, maybe not.
Actually, since becoming a mother, I have changed course and taken some care to ensure that I no longer EVER do the same work as a man. I am a mother; I am a birth doula and childbirth educator and lactation counselor. Even if you're contrary as fuck, you have to agree that these things are fundamentally women's work, at least for the time being. Why have I made these choices? Is it to ensure that my work can never be compared to a man's? Is it because I enjoy holding power over other women? Is it because I'm CRAZY?
Sometimes it does seem like insanity, or at least some flavor of masochism, to define myself so exclusively in terms of my womanhood, because what is a woman anyway? She is mutable and permeable: her chemical makeup shifts and flickers; she changes proactively, aggressively, beyond what the simple passage of time demands; her body encompasses and releases other bodies; she picks up pieces of other bodies, and those pieces live in her until she dies. If I think too hard about it, I think that I may be no one at all. I am not quite here, and then I'm gone. It seems like the only way to make a dent is to scream, to scream really really loud. I was too frightened to do that with my first son; I thought that screaming was the wrong thing to do, so as soon as I felt like I was really gonna scream, I got an epidural. But I birthed my second by screaming: I stood my ground and screamed and screamed, and then I had him right there on my living room floor, holding my husband's hands. While I do make plenty of noise, I don't often actually scream during sex, but I'm considering starting. Seems prudent.
I am at the cafe. I go to the bathroom, I pee, I wipe, I see blood. My period. I thought it might come today, but after having that thought, I forgot to bring anything to deal with it. I just got here, I just started working, I don't want to pack up and leave to go get Tampax from the Yemeni deli man. Fuck it, I think, I'll just bleed onto the chair. The thought amuses me. I put it on Twitter.
All photos by Mike Nogami, except photo 2, by Good for Travelling.
