The other day, at a child’s birthday party I was attending, surrounded by bubblegum pink balloons, cotton candy, and spewing aqua water fountains – some of us parents had gotten on the topic of blood. We had begun discussing how a health practitioner someone knew was unable to stand the sight of it. I shook my head and laughed, and when they asked if I was unable to look at blood, too, my reply was that I am a woman.
I’ve thought of it a lot since. How for 21 years now, blood has consumed 25% of my life, yet I’ve lost the sense of revulsion for what a grisly thing that is. Blood is just another fluid to wash off my hands, off my ankles, off my floor. The bright-red so like splatters from a horror film, now just as mundane to me as raspberries.
And, I never thought I would say this…but something I have come to honor. Even as I scour it from my clothes.
Of course, I was raised, as so many of us have been, to despise my cycle. But only now do I know it for what it is, what it means, and how brilliantly powerful an event it can be.
When my first cycle began, it was a timid arrival accompanied by a twinge of hot gut-pain I had never felt before. I remember patiently waiting for my sixth grade teacher to stop chatting with the other teachers at recess so I could kindly ask her for a pad. I still remember the secrecy of unwrapping the pad in the bathroom stall, the crinkling of the paper so loud and clumsy in my little fingers. Trembling.
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