“All one's actual apprehension of what it is like to be a woman, the irreconcilable difference of it—that sense of living one's deepest life underwater, that dark involvement with blood and birth and death—could now be declared in valid, unnecessary, one never felt it at all.” – Joan Didion, The White Album
Yesterday I stood in the warm shower and watched little red pomegranate globs drop painlessly from my body and into the bright water running down the drain below. It occurred to me suddenly that I have spent more of my life bleeding for almost a quarter of every month than not. I got my “period” (absolutely despise that word) at age 13 and am now almost 28 so it’s been more or less fifteen years since I’ve been capable of human reproduction/ menstruation. I remember reading Anne Sexton’s “In Celebration of My Uterus” in high school. The poem gets a little gay and can make me embarrassed to be a woman but there are some sweet parts to it:
Everyone in me is a bird.
I am beating all my wings.
They wanted to cut you out
but they will not.
See, that’s nice. Doctors will almost always do their due diligence to chemically castrate and / or cut up or out the human uterus; it’s up to people who menstruate (the group of folx formerly known as women) to learn about how these gorgeous, alienlike little red flesh pears, controlled by the tides of time and chemicals, cycle like divine clockwork. On a biological level, menstruation (I also hate that term, they literally put the word men in it) is the most important reason we (or most of us) are here right now.
I’m not downplaying sperm, which is sacred, important, and also environmentally sensitive, but I am saying that the female reproductive system is one of the most elegant works of God ever to operate in an animal. In many ways, it’s still a great mystery. It’s been established through thousands of years of common sense and now science that lunar cycles exert themselves upon / influence the egg moving (menstrual) cycle. Our bodies are subject to outside celestial forces.
At almost 28 I have been bleeding for almost two decades and upon beginning midwifery studies and reading Joyce’s “Oxen of the Sun” episode of Ulysses again (one of the greatest pieces of writing ever conceived to describe birth), I am a little sad that there’s almost no nice writing whatsoever about menstruation (or am I overlooking all of it). I have more than a few female friends who experience serious menstrual dysfunction and pain, trapped in a uterine world resembling Roman Polanski’s Macbeth. That is so sad. They hate their wombs and ovaries. Friends come to me for advice regarding proper holistic treatments for all sorts of reproductive despair: pain, irregular cycles, digestive upset at specific times of the month, etc. I recommend to them plants and adjustments. Transcendence is absorption in, and not detachment from the body.
Bleeding every month is a big deal in the body. It is all at once miraculous, deliberate, and banal. The uterus expands by almost FIFTEEN PERCENT in preparation to hold an embryo or expel the egg and it’s a mild inflammatory event that a body in optimal health can handle. If your body is inflamed, if you are sick or stressed or depressed or smoking or sad or eating poorly, exercising too much or not enough, if you are nutrient deficient, etc. you will most likely experience that inflammation in your period/ monthly bleed/ whatever you want to call it. It’s a hard situation because we live in a shame-filled society of unhealed infant-adults who are taught that all pain is bad and to avoid or cover it up at all costs. A little sensation/ “cramping” is normal before/during menstrual bleeding, plus the deeply bizarre hallucinations that can occur on cycle day 22 for example before the bleeding starts. One time right before bleeding I was about to open the fridge door and pull out some beautiful red elk steaks, suddenly overwhelmed by a wave of white-hot sporadic anger so strong I almost kicked the door in. The animal rage subsided in seconds and I didn’t hurt myself. It was a quick flash of biological lightning, but still kind of powerful. A little deep “pain”/ darkness is always normal.
JMW Turner, ”The Full Moon over a Sailing Boat at Sea,” watercolor ca. 1823–6
On the other hand, there are many “menstruators” (may the Lord God forgive us for coming up with words like this) who experience crippling pain, heavy bleeding (or almost no bleeding at all) and spend literal months of the year mostly immobile while taking grams of ibuprofen, which is really not good for you. Staggering amounts of human females experience endometriosis, adenomyosis, and polycystic ovaries. These conditions are severely aggravated by environmental factors, the most powerful one in my opinion being poor nutrition. Instead of getting the proper resources to adress a litany of factors contributing to their metabolic despair, wemmen are almost always told by medical professionals to simply take birth control pills in order to “regulate the cycle” and get “a normal period.” What they don’t tell you however is that by taking these drugs you are shutting down a bodily cycle akin to shutting down digestion and getting rid of menstrual function all-together.
My mother worked in women’s reproductive healthcare during my prepubescent years and although she was stupid enough to let me go on hormonal contraceptives for speculated “ovarian cysts” at barely post-pubescent age of 14, I lasted only two or three month-long bouts with the daily pill before finding myself listening to Fleetwood Mac (Rumours of course) alone in my bedroom, screaming for no reason, banging the floor with my fists in an uncontrollable and almost autistic fervor. That’s when I knew it was time to stop!
I think I took HCs on and off for like a two-year period once I turned like 18 or 19? I can’t remember. They hand them out at doctors’ offices like candy condoms. That can’t be good. I also had a so-called nuvaring lodged in my birth canal for a few months until a blood clot the size of a small orange dropped out of my body during entomology class like a miscarriage that never actually happened and I had to go to Planned Parenthood (a nice title, isn’t it) and get my HCG levels checked to make sure it wasn’t a lost pregnancy. It made my breasts (also don’t like that word, it reminds me of chicken meat) even bigger than they already were and by the time I had finished humiliating myself at PP I had already had enough and spurned hormonal contraceptives (HCs) forever. You might find my examples ghastly but they’re really nothing compared to what others often experience on these drugs, including the 300-400 women who die of birth-control related blood clots in America every year. Many of the HC pills on the market and the Essure implant (that one’s really bad, look it up) come with black box warnings, the strictest labeling requirements that the FDA can mandate for prescription drugs that pose the most serious health risks. Bad bad bad.
When you got your birth control did the Planned Parenthood physician’s assistant or nurse or your doctor explain this to you or that many of these drugs are inextricably linked with severe bone density loss! The rapid depletion and malabsorption of basic micro and macronutrients. Or the landmark Danish study that established HCs as The Cause of long-term clinical depression in sizeable numbers of the women who take them. Or the massively increased risk of cervical cancers that come with these drugs or the women who are taking IUD companies to court after not being properly warned of new risks of their intra-uterine devices splitting apart inside their bodies, causing massive bodily injury and infertility. The studies demonstrating over and over again that it’s bad for the body NOT to ovulate. Probably not. If you are on HCs you are not getting a real period, it’s a placebo period thanks to sugar pills they’ve included in the pill pack since the 60s, when women thought the absence of blood meant pregnancy, and not lack thereof. If you don’t ovulate you don’t menstruate. It’s not good to turn your hormones into scrambled eggs. And don’t get me started on the covid shots and disrupted menstruation. Horrible. Anyone who frames disrupted menstruation as not a big deal really does know nothing about human reproduction, or is lying.
The worst part is that anyone critical of these pharmaceutical products is automatically identified as an Amy Coney Barrett hater of women, anti-choice, anti-feminist. It’s understandable. Regardless of what anyone says women are socially conditioned to not hurt peoples’ feelings and sometimes pointing out these facts can make others feel ashamed or upset. Well, there’s no shame in taking drugs. Most of the people disdaining HC critics don’t know about the 1970 senate safety hearings on the pill, famously stormed by feminists who demanded proper informed consent regarding the safety (or lack thereof) of birth control pills, which were at that time so high in estrogen that women were dropping like flies with heart attacks, blood clots. Or all the brown, black, and poor women who were used as medical testing guinea pigs during the development of almost every form of HC currently available to us. Once again I’m not saying that nobody should take these drugs. As one very brilliant midwife told me recently, “there is always a time for every medical intervention, every single one.” Nor am I saying that these drugs shouldn’t be available for those who want to take them. They’re just drugs. I’m just saying that the informed consent is way off and that there are risks to shutting down one of the most basic bodily functions. I know women who have taken birth control pills since high school and are now in their thirties. They haven’t ovulated almost ever and to be honest there’s always something a little… defanged about them. Once you get to know the intricacies of your female body’s uterine and ovarian function you (if you are a “menstruator”) will be surprised by how much it will tell you about your health and state of mind. There is immense mammalian power to know one’s bodily patterns as a female; it is one of the oldest and most basic way of controlling human reproduction. And I’m sorry to sound anodyne and banal but these processes are sacred. To experience life and death at the same time is a great gift. The universal is contained in the particular. And don’t forget the Mystery.
Do you know how good it feels to bleed without unnecessary pain (psychic or otherwise)? It’s like diving into a beautiful blood-red death every month. It’s like being on drugs.
Since quitting HCs almost eight years ago I have been trying to get my endocrine system back into homeostasis and I’ve really done my best. My skin sometimes breaks out and that is the extent of my menstruation woes, aside from my desire to ovulate during the full moon, which sometimes but rarely happens. After I got covid I experienced a menstrual cramp or two. I track my ovulation with great focus and determination and monitor the color of my blood and bleeding patterns, which all divulge information about uterine health. Even with all this knowledge I will still die. It feels good to release the egg-white-like potential for life and then later bleed it out and be left alone like a wild animal in the woods.
Nancy Spero, “Sheela-Na-Gig,” Handmade collage on paper, 1991
MORE INFO:
· You can tell when you are ovulating, i.e. fertile. Getting pregnant (with the exception of less than the miraculous .99% of people using contraceptions of any kind) is not like getting struck by lightning. There are less than seven days monthly that provide optimal PH levels, fluid, and cervical crips for sperm to survive and/ or fertilize the egg that’s been released. We are raised in complete ignorance of our bodily realities (blood, birth, death) and societally women bear THE brunt of birth control. Not fair. Socially enforced fertility ignorance combined with, more often than not, male demand for “unprotected” sex, plus a multi-billion-dollar pharmaceutical industry that places great pressure on medical professionals to pathologize literally everything in the female body, is a recipe for reproductive disaster. We want sex without consequence, which is childish and a fantasy. You cannot separate sex between a sexually dimorphous male and fertile female from the possibility of human reproduction, unless you are already pregnant—then the deed has been done. Males need to acknowledge this and learn to pull out like adults, etc. A great book to read about how we got here is The Chalice And The Blade by Riane Eisler. Also you can watch the totally anodyne, inoffensive documentary The Business of Birth Control, a painfully balanced examination of HCs.
· Apps other than Natural Cycles that calculate and predict ovulation based on the days of your menstrual cycle are usually inaccurate and misleading. Depending on a litany of conditions you will not ovulate on day 14 of the cycle. That’s ridiculous. These companies also fork off your data into a giant algorithmic river of Biblical proportions.
· “Know Your Body” is the best fertility awareness tracking app run by a start-up of UK women mathematicians I think who value privacy more than any other app. It’s not immediately user-friendly if you don’t know how to track your cycles. Read Toni Wechsler’s Taking Charge of Your Fertility or Lisa Hendrickson-Jack’s Fifth Vital Sign to learn about fertility awareness. Learning these methods do not just let you know your fertile window, they can also alert you to underlying metabolic imbalances such as endometriosis, PCOS, etc, as there are body temperature patterns strongly correlated with these conditions.
· Stop eating processed sugar, white flour, and industrial seed oils if you get PMS. If you don’t believe me that this matters, look it up. Even expensive “healthy” foods are usually bad for you if they come in a package. Sorry to sound alarmist but seed oils are toxic industrial byproducts that make us (and animals) sick and they’re found in almost all processed foods on the market. It doesn’t matter if it’s organic.
· Regular caffeine intake is probably not your friend if you experience “premenstrual syndrome”, severe breast tenderness, or headaches during the luteal phase (the days after ovulation leading to The Bleed).
· Drink nettles tea.
· Take methylfolate and not folic acid, as many of us carry the MTHFR (motherfucker) gene and cannot absorb it as such. Eat lots of dark, leafy greens.
· Eat good eggs and high-quality, grass-fed liver if possible. If you eat an exclusively “plant-based” (which is a misnomer, since everything, even meat, is plant-based) diet there’s almost zero chance you are getting the levels of fat-absorbable macro and micronutrients you need to ensure healthy ovulation and bleeding. Sardines are very good too as long as they are packaged in olive oil or water.
· Sleep a lot and go outside. Drink 2-3 liters of water a day.
Finally, don’t hate yourself. Really work on that.