It just happens. One morning while you are warming up your cold coffee for the second time, your budding preschooler, as yet unable to successfully start the peel on his clementine, begins relentlessly interrogating you about the nature of the afterlife. What to say? Death is a big one, and it's so early. You're caught off guard. How do you take the enormous scary true thing he is asking you about and somehow give it back to him in a narrative that both honors the mystery and illuminates some truth and allows him to fall asleep that night?
It bonds you to women everywhere. It separates you from children. It provides a slew of stories that will, I promise, be funny someday. That little box of Advil I gave you is a badge of honor. You can take care of yourself; you can endure.
Writing this while living through the worst time of the month for me is an interesting test. I’m gushing like a gunshot victim, my lower back is killing me, my emotional balance is slightly more delicate than usual. I’m seriously annoyed by the timing of this extra-heavy period, arriving on the heels of the flu. I mean, come on. Give a girl a break.
But it occurs to me - you don't have to like a thing to recognize its power and place in your life. You don't have to enjoy it to be marked by it.
In a culture that tells us that our bodies - especially female bodies - are objects to which we should do things like sculpt and tone and pluck and smooth and otherwise manage and subjugate to our will, having a period is like hosting a messy counter-cultural rebellion in your pants every month. My body is, in fact, a most essential part of me. And I am a subject, and I would rather not be treated otherwise - by myself or anyone else. Just when I start to slide into considering my body as an object, I start inconveniently bleeding. It's a built-in system to remind me to honor and respect my body, rather than turn it into a perpetually disappointing object covered in splotchy skin and thinning, graying hair.
I think that's why I loved pregnancy and childbirth and breastfeeding. It just wasn't up to me. Things happened - outrageous, dramatic, very messy things - and all I could do was marvel, gag, endure, behold, exclaim, and try, usually futilely, to wrap my mind around the power of it all.
I didn't say all this to Frances that day. I said some of it. I wouldn't have thought of any of it, without her there to ask. Tell me why this is good. I'm saying it to her now. Frances, it's very, very good. I am grateful to you, the miracle who arrived after hundreds of bloody undergarments were rinsed in the sink, for helping me to consider the mysteries of the universe in a new light over and over again. I love you, dear valentine.
Kids have a nose for the not-nice. They're wise to our efforts to soften the blow; they dislike euphemism and evasion. They want to know about death, birth, God, and every big metaphysical question you can dream up having to do with time, space, loss, and love. They encounter human-scale conundrums and demand help making sense of them, things like homelessness, divorce, where babies come from, the practice of raising and slaughtering animals for food, war, bad things happening to good people, and good things happening to bad people. I try to always be honest, and to avoid freaking them out too much. But the vaguer you are in the face of their questions, the worse everything gets.
I remember making dinner and listening to NPR in our new home in Annapolis on the anniversary of 9/11 in 2008. Frances was just three years old, and Gabriel was a little baby whacking a wooden spoon against a white kitchen cabinet door at my feet. I was rushing to chop vegetables and start cooking while he and his sister were happily engaged in what they were doing; who knew how long it would last. Frances was playing kitchen a few feet away. The radio was on quietly. A reporter used the phrase "when the twin towers fell" and Frances suddenly looked up at me, alarmed.
What towers?
Some towers that used to be in New York City.
They fell down?
Yes.
Why did they fall down?
A plane flew into them.
Why did a plane fly into them? Was it an accident??
Um. Um. No, it wasn't an accident. It happened a few years ago.
Will a plane fly into our house? Do planes fly into buildings in Annapolis?
Her face was filled with terror. Now no building was safe. No plane was safe, either. This line of questioning continued, and my brief and uncertain responses probably only fueled the terror. Maybe if I had said something like "a man who wanted to hurt our country decided to fly a plane into those buildings, and no one had ever done that before, and no one has done it to a tall building in our country since then, and people in America remember the anniversary when it happened and feel sad" - you know, given her some context and a little help up front with this new "twin towers fell" reality she was confronting - maybe then she wouldn't have looked skywards, cringing, and ran for her life across the cobblestone streets when we visited Philadelphia a year later, convinced the big buildings would fall and crush us.
It never occured to me before now that her fear of the tall buildings on that trip and my inability to give her a frame for what she heard on the radio that day might have been related.
At least I learned that she listened to the news when I listened to the news. So I didn't listen to the news around her very much after that.
As if I could stem the tide of those conversations!
Now Frances is a beautiful budding teenager, and she knows everything. She reads everything, she notices everything. Our joke is that I live under a rock and depend upon her to tell me about what's happening out in the big world. But even so she still looks to me and Mike for orientation; for help with the value and meaning of things. How to frame them.
Soon after she first got her period, about a year ago, she asked me - the person in our family most likely to know - a very real question: what could possibly be good about this? My kids all knew about menstruation. How could they not? They followed me into the bathroom as soon as they could walk. Beatrice still does. (She recently told me she doesn't want to have a period. Ever. Sorry, kiddo.)
But knowing about it and experiencing it yourself are two very different things. Frances wasn't interested in having babies for a very long time, so the whole fertility angle wasn't very compelling to her. She'd now have to worry about stained sheets and underwear, and she'd already lived through awful cramps and unruly emotions. It was clearly burdensome, this so-called passage into womanhood. Why are you happy about this, Mama? What kind of a lunatic would celebrate the onset of grappling with a real drag every month for endless years to come?
But knowing about it and experiencing it yourself are two very different things. Frances wasn't interested in having babies for a very long time, so the whole fertility angle wasn't very compelling to her. She'd now have to worry about stained sheets and underwear, and she'd already lived through awful cramps and unruly emotions. It was clearly burdensome, this so-called passage into womanhood. Why are you happy about this, Mama? What kind of a lunatic would celebrate the onset of grappling with a real drag every month for endless years to come?
I think because Frances is so damn smart, and has been training me for many years now, I surprised myself with a pretty good answer to her question.
Having our period - having our body refuse to get with the program and support our illusion of invincibility for a few days every month - helps us to know from a young age that the world is not ours to control. Boys are not given the same opportunity. Our periods teach us adaptability, resilience, humility, stamina, acceptance. We learn that being a healthy growing person includes a time of vulnerability and limitation and discomfort every single month, and in the end, that is our strength. Whether or not we ever have a baby, we realize our capability, our endurance.
We don't need to rail against our weakness, or the world's refusal to bend to our will, or feel shame at our embodied limitations, as men so often do. We take a breath, take an Advil, have a snuggle with the hot water bottle, and move on.
We are powerful because we know our vulnerability in a way that men can't.
And maybe there is even more there for us that is good. I told her how once I was practicing yoga with a friend who was a serious student of Aryuvedic philosophy and practice, and when I went into a deep twist, she showed me a gentler variation, explaining she preferred it as she was "on a ladies' vacation." Huh? A what? I finally got it: she was on her period, and thus giving herself a vacation. Going gentle, taking it slow.
Frances, what if our periods are not irritations that get in the way of our fast pace, but rather invitations to slow down, to give ourselves a mini vacation, knowing it is merited and good?
What if last night, instead of making dinner for my family and cutting valentines for Bea and making sure Gabriel practiced the piano and overseeing Frances cooking tofu between 5 and 6 pm, all while muscling through some awful cramps and changing my super plus tampon not once but twice, I just stretched out on the couch, explaining to the children that Mama was on a ladies' vacation, and they could make themselves peanut butter and jelly sandwiches for dinner? And make one for me while they're at it? And let's get really crazy and have a picnic on the floor in the living room so I can lie down??
I know, I know, it might not work so well. But maybe if I did it with some regularity it would. What if we owned this magical thing that happens in our bodies, rather than conceal and deny and quietly grumble over it? Frances, maybe becoming a woman really is something extraordinary - even if it is a real pain in the ass sometimes.
It bonds you to women everywhere. It separates you from children. It provides a slew of stories that will, I promise, be funny someday. That little box of Advil I gave you is a badge of honor. You can take care of yourself; you can endure.
Writing this while living through the worst time of the month for me is an interesting test. I’m gushing like a gunshot victim, my lower back is killing me, my emotional balance is slightly more delicate than usual. I’m seriously annoyed by the timing of this extra-heavy period, arriving on the heels of the flu. I mean, come on. Give a girl a break.
But it occurs to me - you don't have to like a thing to recognize its power and place in your life. You don't have to enjoy it to be marked by it.
In a culture that tells us that our bodies - especially female bodies - are objects to which we should do things like sculpt and tone and pluck and smooth and otherwise manage and subjugate to our will, having a period is like hosting a messy counter-cultural rebellion in your pants every month. My body is, in fact, a most essential part of me. And I am a subject, and I would rather not be treated otherwise - by myself or anyone else. Just when I start to slide into considering my body as an object, I start inconveniently bleeding. It's a built-in system to remind me to honor and respect my body, rather than turn it into a perpetually disappointing object covered in splotchy skin and thinning, graying hair.
I think that's why I loved pregnancy and childbirth and breastfeeding. It just wasn't up to me. Things happened - outrageous, dramatic, very messy things - and all I could do was marvel, gag, endure, behold, exclaim, and try, usually futilely, to wrap my mind around the power of it all.
I didn't say all this to Frances that day. I said some of it. I wouldn't have thought of any of it, without her there to ask. Tell me why this is good. I'm saying it to her now. Frances, it's very, very good. I am grateful to you, the miracle who arrived after hundreds of bloody undergarments were rinsed in the sink, for helping me to consider the mysteries of the universe in a new light over and over again. I love you, dear valentine.
