When she sees it
For the first time

When she hopes she won’t
And she does

When she hopes she will
And she does

When she hopes she will
And she doesn’t

When she hopes she won’t
And she doesn’t

When she sees it
For the last time
Does she know?
(do we
ever
know
anything
is the last?)

Most women likely understand and can apply myriad memories to these fragments, housed in about four decades of living. By the last time, something close to three quarters of our lives.

There is magic and powerlessness in these fragments. Hope and prayers embedded in them. Desires and fears. Fate, destiny. Womanhood that starts in childhood. Childhood rudely interrupted, often unready. Science gives us a chance to play with some factors, but it cannot guarantee outcomes. Much like life itself, we can emphasize our wishes, yet wishes do not make reality.

Over the years it has fascinated me to watch taboos fall, one by one.

The first time, for me, was in 1981. I was not prepared. I didn’t understand. Now there is a Little Red Book of stories. There is an ease about cups, pads and tampons. I remember my inner shock hearing about each one—even more so, trying them.

Despite my birth year of 1969, my mother was far from a hippie. Better called Victorian. Piano legs were not covered, but almost. Nothing was discussed. Everything was so confusing to me. Nothing, she decreed, should be inserted.

Catholic school helped make Mary’s story quite convincing, omitting the same things my mother did, and together they created an environment of mortification.

By the time I got to boarding school, I had dealt with the “curse” for over two years. At summer camp. At school. At the pool. Even as I remember these moments, my body tenses; I have stories. Of trying to find the out-house at camp during the middle of the night. Of leaking onto someone’s mattress when spending the night. Of rolling up wads of toilet paper to engineer my protection, to get myself to safety. Of “accidents.” Of the fear. Of what I was admitting when I couldn’t swim, or the walk to the classroom closet before going to the bathroom.

It was all about navigating survival, discomfort and shame for many years, even in all-female environments.

Eight long years, from eleven to nineteen, in which this was just life. Every 28 days, five when I wanted to disappear. Or at least stay home, which was never an option. I remember begging my dad to let me stay home from music camp, a week cruelly aligned with my calendar. (Now I see what an interruption that would have been to their life, their plans.)

On a high school trip for Model UN, a friend teased me for using pads and encouraged me to try a tampon. I tried. And then I tried to walk. I guess I didn’t do it right. It hurt so much that I raced back to our hotel, never trying again until my life, perspective and geography had changed.

I suppose there are invisible chapters. Before. Mitigate. Middle. Mitigate. After.

*

Before: before we are ready. Born of the ancient history from which our bodies are built and our brains designed, our evolutionary calling to fertility that we must mitigate against until we are ready. Knowing that our earthly coil has not evolved anywhere near the pace of our world, it unsettles me to think of how young physical readiness is. My mother (b. 1929), G and I were all the same. Eleven.

In the Before chapter, it’s a nuisance, a source of anxiety and stress, if not something worse.

About a quarter of every month gets spent addressing it, regardless of where we fit in this paradigm of chapters. But thinking now about how it was in the beginning, my heart hurts. Little me. Little G. Little M (my mom). All of us with our stories. The latter described having to wash her cotton rags until they were white again and hang them out to dry in the sun—where others could see them. She taught me how to treat my own stains, and sometimes our knuckles would get raw with the agitation.

*

For many including me, the first experience with a lover preceded a desire for any outcome aside from pleasure. This was when I realized two things: one, that tampons could work; and two, I was not ready for any outcomes. Full stop.

And so began the Mitigation chapter.

Mitigation: the birth control pill when in relationship and two separate precautionary rounds of the morning-after pill when things were more spontaneous, shall we say. This preventative nature of mine became a source of dark humor a few years later when I tried everything within my power to conceive, and only saw blood every twenty-eight to thirty days. My timing always was impeccable.

*

Ah, yes, the Middle. When the whole point of enduring this monthly ritual is supposed to make sense. (This is what I tried to explain to G when she was little and learning about what I called my “change”—the changing of the lining of the uterus, or to suit her age-appropriate comprehension, the changing of a fresh blanket within me that would allow for a baby, if there were one.) Bleeding and healing. It’s okay.

The Middle involved ten years of trying with breaks off and on. Starting when I was twenty-three. Eight years before I stopped seeing what I didn’t want to see each month. The Middle included many months of Clomid and IUIs. One month of IUI with injectables. Many months of acupuncture and herbs. Cervical surgery. Bedrest.

Never a false positive. Never any accidents of this kind. For many who suffer from infertility, this is one of areas where it gets complicated among other women. The club of compassion didn’t happen until much later.

Even success in the Middle chapter was so hard wrought as to hardly be called success. Rather, arrival. Joy. Prayers she would stay; fears she would not.

Followed by two years of grace thanks to milk production.

*

Then eventually a new, more final Mitigation round. Mitigation choice: tubal ligation. I imagined that this chapter simply would fade away and that would be that. The end, right?

Plot twist.

Hormones, fibroids, who knows what else. Two years ago this led to a serious yet asymptomatic—aside from traditionally heavy months—bout with anemia, remedied by a blood transfusion and birth control to manage both the fibroids and the hormones.

Then, not long ago, after two years of management thanks to birth control, it was as if my body stopped listening.

For no obvious reason, she behaved as if there were no birth control in my system. Bleeding erratically and heavily for a month, I seriously wondered if the birth control pills were placebos. Stress, fear, doubts entered my consciousness again. What now?

Arriving strong over forty years ago, clearly she wasn’t planning on leaving without a whimper.

It has been a strange relationship. At times, one of ease and release. I remember the wave of energy I used to get, just before she arrived, that would get me to clean the house or complete a project, often a physical one. And the wave of kindness I learned to give myself when she did arrive, early lessons in self-care.

I remember once when my mother and I were in Spain for the summer and my stomach hurt like crazy as it typically did, but I didn’t have any painkillers with me. In the middle of a midday tour walking the streets of Segovia, I told her what was going on. She had a quick remedy, “go get a beer. My mother would say there is nothing like hops.” Sometimes she really could make me laugh. (I think I was sixteen at the time.)

My mother always said that her mother used alcohol only for medicinal purposes. I loved these moments of inhaling matrilineal wisdom. Few and treasured, they were hard wrought and typically worked without fail. In this case, the hops sure did.

Re-cycling more, I remember the horror and humiliation of those early years.

I wonder how generation upon generation of us has managed.

I am fifty two, just past the average stopping point.

*

I make a decision.

Stopping birth control would let me see if I am still bleeding naturally, and if not, the fibroids might reduce of their own free will.

This is how I may have entered the After chapter. Maybe. Hopefully. Promising-ly.

What makes me giggle is my own delight in seeing nothing as the days go by. I haven’t felt this way for twenty years, since the pregnancies.

Yay! Nothing.

Sometimes I forget to be grateful. Then I get a giant wave again.

Yay! NOTHING!!!

YAY!!!!!!!!

NOTHING!!!!!!!!

*

At the same time, it feels like this, once again, is the great un-spoken topic. If it is somehow a nation’s right to decree how a woman mitigates her fertility, how is it not an open discussion how her body changes, and respect for such?

In the past year, despite the birth control, I have had symptoms that made me do research on menopause in general —spikes of anxiety with no stimuli, dysregulated body temperature (hot and cold), rounds of unreasonable tears, brain fogginess, irregular heartbeat. News flash – it’s not all about hot flashes (obviously). With more than 28 common symptoms, many women don’t recognize them as menopausal in nature. A great online source out of the UK, Latte Lounge, centralizes a lot of the current material. I watched videos, listened to lectures, participated in an online workshop. Meanwhile when I went to the gynecologist either in Massachusetts or Ohio the answers were hollow, their insights meager, their compassion non-existent and their feedback sometimes frightening.

The basic message seems to be: (1) if we’re dealing with children, everyone is interested. If we are not, women are on our own. (2) Each woman’s body is different (again, obviously). (3) Get a hysterectomy (easy for doctors; totally excessive for many).

Ageism, sex-ism, and that’s-my-baby-you’re-carrying/feeding/raising-ism. All rolled into one.

I am reminded of the disturbing news released a few years ago that almost all pharmaceuticals are tested on male rodents because females are too messy.

Several months ago, I joked about how I was feeling to my accountant. She shared a homeopathic remedy that an older colleague of hers recommended when she got uncharacteristically teary at work. I learn that women routinely leave the workforce because of menopausal symptoms. While women may have an easier time with pregnancy than they do with menopause, the laws in our country do not protect them at all with the latter. It’s not considered a disability or even a serious health condition.

Meanwhile in the UK there is ongoing legislation to help working women going through menopause—already protected for the past decade under the auspices of age, sex and disability discrimination.

*

In the early days of what I still hope is the After chapter, I note an immediate boost in mood following the end of birth control. I am reminded of the way I felt when I was on the pill in college, when life was otherwise grand, and begin to see that there has been a depressive layer on me for the past two years that is impossible to parse completely from my environment and the pandemic. But still. I feel a lot better. My fibroids seem to be dramatically in retreat. And my mind feels sharper, too. More things are getting done. Could this all be related?

I find myself wondering about the state of womanhood as I often have since G came into my life. As a daddy’s girl, when I was having a son, I was so excited; a boy was exactly what I wanted. After he died, there was truly nothing more in the world I wanted than to get pregnant again, but I will admit here that when I learned I was having a daughter, my heart sank. Among all the women I knew—the two women I knew best, my mother and I, and then all of the women who helped educate me and with whom I went to school—there wasn’t a single role model I could turn to and say, I hope G turns out like her. That’s the sad truth. I didn’t trust women. I rarely admired them.

But after G was born, I had a fundamental internal shift on behalf of both of us. On behalf of the earth and our first mothers. On behalf of the great matrilineal line of all time that passes from generation to generation both genetically and spiritually.

Sparked by this recollection, I pull out my notes from The Great Cosmic Mother by Monica Sjoo and Barbara Mor describing what was possibly our first stop of spiritual thought. Goddesses, tombs as makeshift wombs, the Milky Way named after divine food: a spray of breast milk. Ignorant of the concept of gestation, prehistoric women gave birth without a sense of the antecedent; during Paleolithic times, “pregnancy itself was seen as resulting from a magical intercourse between the mother and the spirit world” (47). Similarly, women could bleed and heal without treatment.

Noting that “the only ‘god image’ ever painted on rock, carved in stone, or sculpted in clay from the Upper Paleolithic to the Middle Neolithic (30,000 years ago) was the image of a human female,” (8) the authors concluded, “God was female for at least the first 200,000 years of human life on earth.” (49)

Beyond the sacred, the practical. Being the gatherers in the hunter-gatherer model, Sjoo and Mor made a case that “75-80% of the group’s subsistence came from women’s food gathering activities… the first tools were women’s digging sticks… worldwide legends cited women as the first domesticators of fire… women were the first potters, weavers, textile-dyers and hide-tanners, the first to gather and study medicinal plants – i.e.:  the first doctors” (7), and they further credited “the female contribution to the origin and elaboration of language… the first formal calendars [were] women’s lunar markings” (48).

Despite best efforts, many links to female divinity were not completely erased like the sacred use of the color red, the dresses and cloaks of priests, the consecration of blood in the Christian tradition, and other blood rituals.  In Women’s Mysteries Ancient and Modern Esther Harding suggested that one of the prime causes of neurosis, illness, depression and pain suffered by many women… is that we now have no menstrual ceremony of any kind.  This combination of meaningless isolation and lack of ritual solitude is the final patriarchal taboo against women… a major barrier against self-realization.  Thus was women’s ancient collective power broken” (Harding qtd in Sjoo/Mor 186). Strong words.

Re-reading these lines I hand-transcribed from book to scrapbook in calligraphy when G was still toddling around, I remember the passion, frustration and yearning I felt between the lines. Born of becoming a mother. Born of raising a daughter. Born of seeing freshly. Born of removing a blindfold and wondering if what I was reading was real [I went on to read ample derision of this book, but it couldn’t take away how I felt reading it]. Born of wondering how to raise my girl well. Born of wanting to honor the power of her being.

*

As this blog is about the cord between mother and daughter, it seems fitting to record this life passage and the process associated with it. By the time G reaches her fifties, will this, too, be something people reference with greater ease? Will film stars mention their “changes,” and will there be greater respect for the cyclical nature of our lives? For the totality and complexity of womanhood in general?

What remains to be seen, and what excites me most, is how we emerge in the After chapter. I have loved growing into my club of compassionate womanhood that really started with the shared experience of motherhood but included women who chose not to parent. The germinating of trust among us and within me.

Recently I spoke with a friend about our shared desire to incarnate more fully, to be more true to ourselves, to allow our children to find their own way, and to see what is in store for us next. Both of us yearn for partners, but there is a new air of surrender and honor in this process. We also look back at the patterns in our adult lives with thirty years of data. We see how we have survived the hits and managed the curve-balls, how people we have trusted have let us down, and how—despite our best intentions—we have become habituated in our responses. I wonder if this is midlife, I say to her, thousands of miles away. This insight we are describing. The chance to see. And the election of whether we want to keep doing it this way or not. She, too, is just starting her After. I think she sees my patterns and I see hers in even greater color than we do in ourselves. This is a gift in its own right, to be seen. To have our characters revealed to us. To be encouraged to break our well-honed patterns. To have a wing-woman or two.

It is as if somehow midlife—the After chapter, the menopausal journey—graduates us into the greatest sacredness we will allow. It grants us voice and opportunity to be more true to ourselves than ever before. It allows our desire to flow unmitigated, literally and figuratively. The only limit is our own bravery and our confidence that all will be well when we do. That we will be loved when we speak, when we act from our truest selves.

You know what I think? We may well be loved more.

*

As I write this, I cannot help but think of the current laws in Texas and my abiding fury that women’s ability to manage their lives is being threatened or taken away.

Every woman can tell stories similar to mine. Different circumstances. Greater ease or lesser ease. Greater luck or lesser luck, as the case may be.

Only she can decide for herself whether she can take on the monumental role of parent, and if she decides that now is not the time, I can think of no act more courageous than to mitigate against it. Until if, when, or if ever, she is ready.

Unless the government would like to help with all of the other aspects of the four decades in which we have to navigate our bodies, it ought to step away from this one.

In the end, it is only she. It is only we. I am only I.

*

Hopefully, I am starting the After chapter now. As I do, I am excited to see how we all unfold in our mutual After chapters. Will we be brave and incarnate anew? Or will we retreat and accept what we know?

I really want to be brave. In a way, I have no choice.

After bleeding and healing for almost five hundred months, I believe we have earned the right to step into the light, into our voices and into our extraordinary bodies. We have earned the right to shine as brightly as we can, for all the world to see.

We have earned the right to be free.

REFERENCE:

http://www.project-aware.org/Experience/symptoms.shtml

lattelounge.co.uk

https://committees.parliament.uk/work/1416/menopause-and-the-workplace/

ANGEL WING ART:

https://www.etsy.com/listing/857482386/angel-wings-wall-art-garden-decor?ref=shop_home_feat_1