Another brilliant piece from a GUNNAS WRITING MASTERCLASS writer
Our relationship with periods is a funny one. We are told to hate them, to fear them, to distrust them. That they are dirty, disgusting or, at the very least, inconvenient.
They are, in the words of pubescent kids; gross.
‘What happens if I get my period in class?’
‘I can’t tell my teacher. I can’t tell my dad. I can’t tell my mum.’
‘How do I get the pad out of my bag to the toilet without anyone seeing?’
‘What if I don’t have a pad?’
‘What if I get blood on my skirt?’
‘I would never come back to school if that happened.’
Periods drain us. They mark us. They consign us to child bearing, to child raising.
Not that many pubescent girls are worrying about that, yet. They worry more about the mark on their underwear, the mark on their skirt, the necessity of wearing what some boys call ‘adult diapers’.
Menarche – the onset of menstruation – is a milestone. It’s a coming of age, the body’s way of telling us that our eggs are ripe for fertilisation. It’s not really a cause for celebration for seven, ten, twelve year old girls who don’t have baby plans in their near future. Less of a cause of celebration for transgender boys who can feel that the words ‘body-betrayal’ are blood-stamped on their underwear.
As adults we might put together a kit of pads, pain killers and chocolate, all in a pink zippered bag for our children to carry to school. We might mark the date with a celebration dinner; a welcome to womanhood feast. More often, girls say that they experienced one period, maybe two, before telling an adult. When they tell, most often they beckon to a trusted adult and whisper the shameful news out of hearing of others.
For those whose periods wait until thirteen or later the questions change.
‘Why aren’t I …?’
‘When will I …?’
‘What’s wrong with me?’
And once we reach that place in puberty, it marks us to others. That final growth spurt in puberty pushes young people out of their shoes into clown-sized feet. Then their arms and legs sprout like weeds from their still-short torsos. It gives girls that long, coltish look: the Lolita look. The look that has men slowing their cars for a closer, slow-whistle leer and has parents policing the clothes that children wear to try to slow the tide of sexual interest.
Our relationship to periods is fraught in this era of hand sanitiser and time keeping organised and synchronised by Apple. We want life to be packaged, predictable and clean. We want periods on schedule and measurable. But most of all we want to be clean.
Tissues.
Wipes.
Purse packs of Dettol brand anti-bacterial gel guaranteed to keep us 99.99% germ free all without water.
Liquid no-touch soaps by the kitchen sink, the bathroom sink, the garden hose.
From birth, they hear:
‘Don’t touch that.’
‘Don’t drink that.’
‘Don’t put that in your mouth.
‘Have you washed your hands?’
‘Get your hands out of your pants, you dirty girl.’
‘Don’t.’
The refrain of a generation.
And yet when we bleed it is messy, inconsistent, clotty blood that seeps, stutters or gushes from our vaginas. We recoil; repelled and repulsed. We reach for a tampon to shove it all back in. Out of sight, dealt with briefly in four hourly increments.
Out of sight.
‘Don’t forget to wash your hands.’
And when we are older, old enough, and our periods become ‘heavy’ or ‘irregular’ or ‘painful’, we will have a shot, a pill, a rod or an IUD.
But nobody tells us that periods are irregular in our teen years.
Nobody tells us that there are things we can do to ease the cramps. Nobody tells us that it’s OK to ask to be nurtured at ‘that time of the month’. Or that periods can help us keep track of our energy flow; our creative time, our busy time, our time of loving.
Because our society is set up to demand the same performance from us day in day out, six and a half hours a day if you are a student or eight hours a day at work. There is no space for glorious energetic accomplishment in the week after a period, followed two weeks later by a clumsy ebb. Because our world is measured in a steady pulse of testosterone and has no space for fickle oestrogen and progesterone.
Of course, some wombs do cramp and bleed furiously and every person should have the right to choose their own course to manage that pain. People in their 20s who demand a hysterectomy, sure that their futures do not include childbearing, should be permitted that autonomy. But for the most part young people are not choosing. We adults are medicalising the teen menstrual ‘condition’. Mothers are proudly declaring that they have ‘put their daughter on the pill’. And now, apps tells the girls the hour and day they will experience their not-really-a-period.
Periods are gross.
So we take hormonal birth control, the five year option, please, and we smile smugly and say, ‘Oh, no. I don’t bleed anymore, well, hardly ever, but nothing really’.
Like we have conquered the war we wage against our own bodies.
We have become the ultimate masters of cleanliness.
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