On My Period - Sovay Muriel Hansen

“But of all of this daily drama of the body there is no record.” – Virginia Woolf, “On Being Ill”
 
 
About six months after I turned twelve, I got my first period.
 
My family was about to leave on a camping trip with our closest family friends and I went to the bathroom before we got on the road. There was a light pink wash on the toilet paper when I wiped. I distinctly remember seeing it and thinking two things: one, that I didn’t know what it was and that I was going to ignore it and two, that I knew exactly what it was but was also going to ignore it. It is hard to explain the way you can hold both of those things as true at the same time. This sort of cognitive dissonance is especially prevalent when something happens to you that marks a stage of life that has gone. Your brain cannot think one thing about it. 
 
That night in bed my little sister (who was ten years old) and I were sleeping in the top bunk of my dad’s Westfalia camper van. It is where we have always slept – a snug and too-small spot directly above my parents’ bed. After lying, snuggled, for a long, long while, I knew I had to deal with the growing warm wetness in my underwear. Being a child, I had no other underwear with me for a one-night camping trip. Underwear was something non crucial, a cotton thing your mom teaches you to wear for no good reason you can perceive. It is as if you wear them in preparation for a time in your life that you can’t yet see, when they will start to catch the substances that come out of a hole in your body you aren’t even sure you have, but you have your suspicions.
 
Finally, I decided that it could wait no longer and I silently roused Bib from her coziness beside me because, for whatever reason, I knew I needed assistance for what I foresaw as some extensive reconnoitering of the area around the camp spot, for a place to bury my pink cotton underwear. My instinct to bury the soaked wad holds a symbolism that I see now and that I maybe knew deep down at the time: something about me was dead now. I had shed that part of me and it needed to be adequately mourned, but most of all hidden from sight. We settled on a spot near a tree and somberly buried the secret parcel and then scampered back to the van and climbed back up into bed, not forgetting to grab some toilet paper and a pair of Bib’s ten-year-old’s underwear, through which my little thighs could barely fit and into which my swollen abdomen could hardly squeeze. I bundled together some toilet paper into an uncomfortable lump and secured it in my too-tight underwear.
 
Valiantly, I lasted the night, leaking into my makeshift pad. In the morning, my mortification about this fresh hell came from several directions. First: there was something going on with my body that I could not control and it was something I associated with my mom, who was a grownup with a grownup body. I had seen her, many times, use a tampon or pad – had seen, when I showered with her as a small child, a little white string coming out of a mysterious place. I, on the other hand, had a body that I hadn’t yet learned to mistrust or even to notice – rites of passage for women. Until then my body had been a thing that let me skip, climb rocks, play piano, a thing that was just part of me, not a thing to be fixed, bound, controlled, stopped up, changed. Second: our family friends with whom we were camping had two boys who were mine and Bib’s ages, and I had blood leaking out of an area that I didn’t know, until quite recently, could leak. That morning in camp was an experience of differentiation – a moment in which you know that you are different from those boys you swim naked with, a thing you somehow know you won’t be doing anymore.
 
By the time we got home that afternoon, my mom knew what had happened and put me in a hot bath and I could see bits of blood in the water. I could tell by her knowing look that this really meant something important to her but all I felt was a quiet rage that I could not understand. She and Bib lingered in the tiny bathroom as I floated solemnly in the water. I think I forced my mom to promise not to tell my dad, a man who had always made it clear in small ways that he found “women’s issues” to be outside of his realm of comfort. I didn’t want to be a weirdness in our small house, a strange new creature.
 
Summer came and with it the question of whether to opt out of swimming, swim with a pad, or cross the threshold of inserting a tampon into a hole that, still, I wasn’t positive exists. How deep is the hole? How do you know you’ve done it right? I swam a few times with a pad on and experienced the unbearable heavy sponginess and knew I had to make the switch. After lots of trial and error of half-inserted, crooked poking, I learned how to do it. I learned that there is a lot of space “up there,” that you’ve done it right once you don’t feel anything at all.  
 
Several classmates got their periods that year in sixth grade. One day in class, a friend of mine stood up with white shorts on with a burst of crimson on the butt, and a smear on the chair.
 
In seventh grade I started at a new, enormous middle school. I was still relatively childlike looking at thirteen, though I was getting the beginnings of breasts and becoming a bit rounder and less twig-like. That year was the first time I held hands with a boy a liked so dreadfully much – we rode on the hot school bus, hands clasped tight. I felt anxious that my deodorant might not be able to handle how nervous I was – so giddy with my first big crush.
 
A few weeks later he ended things with me in the black box theater before our musical rehearsal started. He quickly started holding hands with a very thin, perfect looking girl who had lots of money who was a year older than us.
 
A year later – on the first day of eighth grade – a boy I was friends with in my science class told me that the boy with whom I had held hands had told him that I had “gotten fat” over the summer. I remember my face feeling hot and my stomach bottoming out. For the first time I became acutely aware of my body as a thing to be discussed, as a thing to be looked at and appraised, a thing that could be “too fat,” a thing that could be the wrong shape and size. I looked at my body that night at home, naked, in front of my mom’s long mirror. It was my first night as a woman, I think, because I now understood my body as a thing ranked and talked about by men, a flawed form, a thing that could be thinner, perhaps, a thing that always had room for improvement. Objectively, my body was just different than it had been: rounder, suppler, more woman-like, healthy. Unfortunately for me, my breasts had definitely grown in my fourteenth year to their full size, which are not small by any measure. In eighth grade there were still lots of girls who still had girl bodies, which exacerbated my feelings of freakishness. My body was grown, but my inner self felt small and unprepared to cope with that grown body that was now being sexualized by boys and even men.
 
I learned to habitually fear men around that time – another rite of passage for women. Men, even those my dad’s age, looked at me in ways that made me feel afraid and angry. Their look wasn’t anything that I could describe, just a lingering noticing, a refusal to let me keep my body to myself. The look, although mild, was violent and constant, one that has become banal for me as an adult. My body, I have learned over the years, is community property – its boundaries are permeable, undefined.
 
The women in my life all seem to have unsettling stories about their periods and how they are this element of chaos in their lives:
 
Bib, now an adult with a period, once left a tampon in for several days, putting in new ones over it.
 
A friend of mine felt feverish once and went to the doctor. She had a tampon that had been in her for several days. 
 
A friend and I, over cocktails, recently swapped stories about when we first started our periods. She told me that hers started when she was nine years old – she was still a child, not even a preteen, not even close.
 
All the women I know who have regular sex with men both dread and hope for their periods each month – a horrible internal conflict that plagues their lives: the simultaneous relief of not being pregnant and the anger at once again having to deal with this never-ending intrusion.
 
I often think about how, from such a young age for many girls, we become used to feeling like our bodies are out of our control – to feeling unwell multiple days out of each month. Managing menstruation becomes another thing that takes up precious space in your mind: being sure you go to the bathroom frequently to change your tampon so you don’t die of Toxic Shock Syndrome; paying attention to the feeling of it becoming saturated – a fullness I have come to notice and respond to before it leaks into my pants; waking up in the middle of the night to a warm gushing – running to the toilet before your sheets are ruined. Still, even at the age of 33, I often don’t act fast enough. Finding blood in my underwear and even sometimes on my pants isn’t unheard of.
 
Having what feels like a health problem that does indeed impair my ability to function optimally for often four days per month has been part of the rhythm of my life for longer than it hasn’t been. Still, the women in my life whose periods ended long ago talk of the symptoms that come with being on the other side of things: the heat flashes, the night sweats, the mood swings. We joke about hormones being a fresh hell each and every day, no matter what age you are.
 
When I first started my period I remember getting migraines that would come at the beginning of my cycle and would be shortly followed by painful cramps. I no longer get migraines, but cramps are a regular occurrence, though their severity has changed over time. Each month, within the week that our periods are due, Bib and I both get what we have coined “the doomies,” which is a distinct feeling that the world is ending, that everything is terrible. Each month we are shocked to remember that this is merely our hormones sabotaging our brains – that the sky is not, in fact, falling.
 
Since about the age of sixteen doctors have tried to put me on the pill to “help with PMS” and to prevent pregnancy. For some reason – I can’t tell you exactly why – I always declined to take the pill. At the time, this decision was, I think, a combination of my hippy, “all-natural” upbringing that gave me an irrational fear of medications, paired with my self-righteous rejection of the idea that if I wanted to have sex that it was I who needed to take a drug while my male partner had to do nothing. My logic was: if I have to use a condom anyway to prevent STIs (something about which I have always been hysterically afraid) then what is the point of the pill?
 
I know women for whom the pill has been a godsend – a medication that made their PMS bearable – made them able to go about their lives without debilitating symptoms such as acne, cramps, anxiety, and depression.
 
But I have also spoken to so many women who were on the pill from their teens and have recently stopped taking it in their late 20s and 30s. Several of these women have reported experiencing monumental shifts in their selfhood – even saying that they stopped being attracted to the men they were in a relationship with, that the pill had been regulating who they were attracted to, not simply their PMS and their ovulation. Regulating PMS and ovulation, it turns out, can have other profound effects. That this burden has been placed on women’s shoulders alone shouldn’t surprise me, but it infuriates me still.
 
Thinking back to my twelve-year-old self who was on the precipice of this new stage of life, I feel strange and wistful. I don’t have any real memories about how it felt to relate to my body before menstruating. That time in life feels almost mythical, fictional, far less real than the time after my period began. I think this is because before my period, I had the luxury of just being in my body – of existing in it, of feeling one with it, of just being. There was nothing to notice. My period was a Rubicon moment: from there on out my body has been something I am forced to observe, a thing that changes frequently, a thing I don’t fully trust. Recently, I saw a naturopathic doctor to discuss possible food allergy issues. When, based on my bloodwork, she diagnosed me with Hashimoto’s disease – a pretty common autoimmune disease in which the body attacks the thyroid – I cried right there in her office. She asked me why I was so upset, assured me that Hashimoto’s is common and isn’t that serious. I told her that I didn’t know, that I always get really wound up about health “things.” She asked me: “Do you trust your body?” I laughed loudly sounding a bit shrill and unhinged, told her “no,” told her that I have no idea what that feels like. I perceived a mild look of pity and slight amusement flicker across her face (though she hid it well).
 
What I wanted to say, what I didn’t say, was that I, if anything, distrust my body and have since I was twelve. My body is fraught territory for me – is a thing I obsess over: its menstrual cycles, its health, its skin, its aging, its fat, its body hair, and on and on.
 
What was it like to simply exist in my body before? What would it be like to go back there? What kind of space would I have in my mind for other ideas?
 
What would it be like to just be?