The standup continues…
Horrid: that they're called "down there wipes"
Embarrassing: that I call my vagina a "hoo-ha" in this post
Hoo-ha remains because I believe in calling myself out
I grew up hearing a quote from my cousin, who, at the onset of her period, said, I can't wait until menopause. It was an attitude I adopted and ran with, because, seriously, blood snot coming out of my hoo-ha and ruining all my clothes and making me double over in pain was stupid and annoying. No wonder they called it the curse. It makes me think that if there is a god, she must be a dude, because, seriously, is this some sort of revenge porn? There had to be a tidier less painful way to prove you're not pregnant.
There were a few times I worried about being pregnant, but my period was more likely to be early than late so I didn't have the scares that so many of my friends did. I don't even know if I can (could) get pregnant. My mother — in one of her many ploys to get a grandchild — told me that after she had a baby she stopped having cramps. I may have considered popping one out for about 30 seconds, but I was more willing to have cramps for two days a month for thirty-five years instead of having my life derailed by having a child. Wait. Let me do the math. Doubled over in pain from four to eight hours per menses. (I said menses cuz I'm doing math and it makes me sound more STEMMY.) Average that to six hours per period. Twelve months a year. For 35 years. That's over 2500 hours, or over 100 days, or 15 weeks, which is about three and a half months. So, I gave up three and a half months of my life so I didn't have to have a kid in the off chance that it would get rid of my cramps. What if I had a kid and still had cramps? If I do that math, its….. just pure evil.
It's okay. The pain lessened after about twenty years.
Photo Credit: THOR, CC BY 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0, via Wikimedia Commons
Tags: aging, female, gender, menopausal, menopause, Vocabulary, women
I stand by my 1970 statement.
I got my first period on the day Nixon resigned. I was 11 years old, and we were on vacation, staying with some friends of my mother in Vancouver BC, who had two teenage sons. My mother stopped having periods when she had killer chemo several years before then, and my older sister didn't have her period yet. I didn't know anyone who had a period, and no one had bothered to tell me about this plague of the female gender. There were no "feminine products" in my house, so I had no idea about any of what was going on. I was deeply concerned that something was TERRIBLY WRONG and I might be bleeding to death and everyone was watching Nixon's resignation speech on the television. When I could finally get my mother's attention, there was a great deal of commotion and I was left bleeding in the bathroom while my mother and her friend drove off the to drugstore to find something for me to use. Periods were hell, and no they just got worse after childbearing, and worse again after tubal ligation. I finally cauterized the walls of my uterus and the bleeding was done. The hormones have raged on, and after more than ten years, menopause still does not seem to be complete. I would love to give this curse to any number of men….Childbearing and childbirth was powerful and magnificent! On balance, the power of being able to create a life was worth the rest of it. Without the kids, I would have thought the whole thing was an outrage!
I got mine at sleep-over camp. Ugh.