The Change
And why I love it
In three beautiful words:
No. More. Periods!
I started later than my younger sister which was a great source of anguish and embarrassment to me. Mother warned me to enjoy not having periods while I could and the woman knew what she was talking about.
By my third period I was bedridden for days with excruciating cramps and nausea. Mother’s solution: a big glass of Grampa Nick’s home-brewed red wine, room temperature. Down it fast. So then I was woozy, cramping and sick to my stomach. Nice try, Mom.
I’m one of the lucky ones whose system could tolerate even the earlier, rougher versions of birth control pills. I’ve been on the pill most of my adult life and it was only because of those little pills that I’ve been able to have a life. Otherwise I’d have spent four out of every twenty eight days over the course of forty years in bed, in misery, unable to show up for work or writing or loved ones.
I used to take little vacations from the pill to see how bad the periods had gotten. One was usually all it took to send me racing back to my chemical savior.
Even so, I question the design chops of whatever evolutionary force came up with the period. Not ever having been in heat (that I know of), I can’t say that that’s a better system but this one is ridiculous. I mean, come on!
Nothing separates the sexes so definitively.
Men don’t have to put their lives on hold every twenty eight days because they’ve got blood coming from between their legs. They don’t have manage careers, children, home, creativity while doubled over with cramps. Plus they don’t have to put up with men making faces and asking if they really have to go buy tampons and Midol (and, yes yes yes, men have their own issues that I am not minimizing or glossing over. Feel free to write about those issues, gentlemen, I hear Medium is a great forum for that kind of thing).
But while generations of women have been debilitated by a monthly cycle of pain, sickness, and misery, men have been writing great literature, building great buildings, thinking great thoughts. This isn’t to say there haven’t been scores of women writing, creating, building, and thinking…
