Why must I bleed alone?

I take this new birth control pill where one of the side effects is having four menstrual periods a year. It’s menopause in a pinch! I feel like an Olympic gymnast or some other kind of professional athlete, too muscular and stressed out for feminine luxuries such as menses and the prom. When it comes time for one of my quarterly shed, it takes me by surprise and I welcome it like a long lost friend.

We have lots of euphemisms for menstruation, and we don’t refer to it unless in the company of women, and rarely even then. I had a friend who was absolutely intolerant of anyone complaining about her period. She’d never had cramps or heavy bleeding or stopping then mysteriously restarting or accidents or missed one in her life, and she staunchly believed that no one else should. If it were mentioned in her presence, she would through clenched teeth remind all of us of her freedom from pain and a manageable monthly flow and change the subject.

Then there are the judgmental ones. I have been around the alternative healing community for decades, and when confiding in a friend/amateur healer/shaman about my woman’s issues, they would almost always launch into a tirade against wheat or dairy or white sugar or caffeine. When doubled over and obsessing about banana chocolate chip muffins, the last thing on my mind is yoga. Lectures about my bad health and spiteful shaming usually greet any attempt on my part to have learned discourse about menstruation, and so the best way to get a grip on it was to get rid of it the best that I could.

It is strange how little talk there is about our periods, as if the subject, if not in a health and wellness context were morally reprehensible. It is a dirty business that women keep to ourselves. But why are we secretive? Over half the world menstruates at one time or another, and you’d never know it. Isn’t that strange?

When I first got my period, I was thirteen. My mother was not overjoyed. She gave me big, foamy white kotex pads that she had still left over from before her hysterectomy. They were old, so they had long tabs on either end for the sanitary belt that was supposed to keep it on. When I put the entire contraption on, I looked like a sumo wrestler. Usually I couldn’t be bothered to put the weird belt together, so the pad, devoid of the newfangled modern adhesive that would secure the wad inside your pants, would slip and slide all around my area, creating something akin to a potato print card.

My mother showed me how to dispose of the pads. She folded them up, wrapped them in toilet paper, shoved them inside a paper bag, crumpled up the bag into a ball, then buried them deep inside the bathroom trash. She repeated the process twice, miming the steps the second time as not to waste those gigantic pads. There was incredible shame in the whole business of bleeding, and she wanted me to be painfully aware of it. The shame could work to my benefit, because if ever I wanted to get out of doing something, I could just cry “Period!” and it was an instant no-contest. Everyone would leave me alone. It was like having a magic word.

Of course I was incredibly lax about throwing those huge pads away, and my negligence was punished with more lessons on how to properly dispose of them, as if they were radioactive nuclear waste. My father even started to shout about my lackadaisical and unsanitary sanitary pad refuse, but he never really completed his thought because I think he realized mid-scream that he was out of his jurisdiction. My father didn’t talk much. If anything, he hollered. But even then, he was brief. Korean parents are like that. It is traditional and appropriate for parents to have no discernable affection or emotion for their children. My father was positively textbook when it came to this. My mother was too watery, too in love with the French, too mommy, to comply with this rule.

My father said about five things in my entire childhood and adolescence that I remember. One was odd and unprompted. I came home from school one day and was walking up to my room when he shouted, “You will never use tampons.” That was it. Wow. Thanks Dad. Words to live by. This was during the big Rely Toxic Shock Syndrome scare, which vied with the Hillside Strangler as women’s number one fear. Toxic Shock was ominous because they never really said how you got it, or why, or what happened when you did. It just struck you dead in the cunt. It had the qualities of both nuclear fallout warnings and a stalker rapist on the loose. What an awful joke of a name Rely was! As if women sought to rely on anything they would be duly punished.

My monthly flow staged its own rebellion. I constantly bloodied my sheets with robust flamboyance. My bed often took the appearance of the scene of a crime. My mother would wash the sheets without a word, and the secrecy around the curse kept me from having to do laundry ever.

When I became a comic, it was drilled into me by several women comics that we should never talk about our periods. Male comics often stereotyped female comics and dismissed them because “all they do is talk about
their periods.” Talking about menstruation became tantamount to a black person eating watermelon. We just couldn’t do it. Even now, I am a bit ashamed that I must disclose that I menstruate at all. It is probably because I actually don’t truly menstruate anymore gives me the distance from it to actually give voice to my once hidden thoughts about it. What is the deal? Why must I feel like I bleed alone? Or that I once bled alone?

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