Anxiety-humming in the background of all this year’s
adventure has been my own personal mini-horror-movie—the yuckiest, most
erratic, most alarming periods. Maybe post (2021) Covid weirdness, maybe perimenopause,
definitely at least one fibroid.
All my period-having life before this, I had periods
as regular as the moon. I tracked them with little red hearts on the calendar.
If I was feeling sad or overwhelmed or crabby, I could mentally check when it
might ease up. My period was a not-favorite friend. A routine so predictable as
to be almost comforting.
Plus, most of that time, I was either not having regular
sex or having sex with a lady who understood. Most men I’ve played with either
didn’t overlap with periods or didn’t mind putting a towel down. I still had
this weird, instrumentalizing fear that I couldn’t do “what I was there to do” with
guys—sometimes being on my period made me feel naked and exposed, and not in
the good way.
The Shy One, true to his name, didn’t prefer period
sex. I was such a jerk about it once when we were in the middle of a fight
about other things, and I regret that, but it still felt like kind of a patriarchal
disdain was behind his non-preference. “Other women,” he’d defended, “Don’t
like to have sex on their periods.” Maybe meaning..normal women? Clean women?
Still, I transformed those fears into kindness and patience with him and DEEP
resentment of my own misbehaving cycles.
I can’t tell how much of my shame in that relationship
came from mirror-neurons, from me absorbing emotions he didn’t know he was
giving off, and how much was projection, fear of religious people, fear of men.
I have to admit, and this is pretty fucked up, that if his conservative background
had been Christian instead of Muslim, I might not have made it to a fourth
date. His conservatism felt less scary because it wasn’t my family’s brand, but
I guess, patriarchy is patriarchy, and my own overcorrected bigotry is still
bigotry.
Things to ponder as I keep realizing that life isn’t a
romcom, that *love despite our profound differences* is maybe not the
healthiest thing to believe in.
Anyway, periods. When he came home from his long trip
home to Sierra Leone and we hadn’t seen each other in three weeks, he decided
to brave period sex on a light day, inspired by missing-each-other horniness.
There was a LOT in that day that maybe I’ll write about sometime, but the sex
was profound, adventurous, and loving. “Oh thank you, thank you, THANK you.” I
cried out as he entered me, always a little too grateful.
But he often did this thing where he pulled away after
a date, whether to focus back on home and Mrs. Shy One or just focus back inside
himself, where he preferred to be. Near the end, in that making-myself-small-so-I-don’t-have-to-lose-him
phase, I felt crazy and needy for wanting him to be kind and loving after
dates, instead of tuning me out for a few days.
In that void, I started to wonder if I’d traumatized
the innocent boy with my never-not-bleeding vagina. There was this idea in my
head that he was somehow cleaner than me, that she was cleaner too because she shared
his aversion to period sex. In so many ways, I felt like they were normal and I
was deviant. That she was pure and good and I was a guilty pleasure. And
instead of realizing that was the awful nonsense that it was, I got madder and
madder at my body, at myself.
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