Knotty Thursday: Human Macrame! Healthy Hoo-ha!

 

I started out with this nice simple design: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KX_Tfn186sQ but putting a ring at the center of the harness felt so freeing and gave me so much extra length that I just got a little carried away. I like it.

Also a star of last night's self-date: the Big Pink Rabbit! I hadn't been penetrated by anything since January, given the blood and sadness and post-surgery "no visitors in there" orders, and whoa was I in an extra good mood all day today!

Also contributing to the good mood: I went to my follow-up appointment for surgery and all is well! The IUD is in the right place, all the biopsies came back clear, and I only have the slightest spotting! Please pray to all the slutty gods and goddesses and nonbinary deities that the evil rogue periods are done! 

The Heated Blankets (Love, Shame, and Bleeding All the Time, Part Two)

 

On Wednesday morning, I went in for surgery for my misbehaving hoo-ha. They were going to take pictures inside my uterus, clear out some tissue and send it for biopsy, and put in an IUD to hopefully regulate (Or even stop!) the rogue periods.

Pre-op was deep vulnerability practice. First, they have you take off all your clothes and get in your hospital gown, the classic butt-revealer. Mine was an off-sky-blue with an emotionally neutral geometric pattern that definitely did not stay in my brain. And then, I was chilly, and a nurse who called everyone “love” asked if I would like a heated blanket. Of course I would!

She put one heated blanket underneath my head and another over me. The tenderness, the warmth, and the kindness got me all undone, a pure Miranda July movie moment if there ever was one. The nurse dimmed the light above my head and I stared up at the bright rectangle of the light in front of the dimmed one. Relaxed by the warmth and care I guess, my spirit shifted to my first walk along the river with The Shy One, that moment of innocence and uncertainty, before we’d had the chance to break each other’s hearts twice. “We’re on your time,” he’d said, and I took his hand and turned us toward home.

I guess the heated blankets (I accidentally typed “hearted.”) got through all my layers of grief and hurt and loss-of-face and loss-of-hope and let me inhabit that moment more fully than I’ve inhabited any of our so-beautiful-I-don’t-know-what to-do-with-them memories. Fat drippy tears overflowed and I sniffed discreetly so no one in the pre-op room would worry.

These tears were different from all the other ones I’ve cried this past month-they weren’t the bottomless, howling, laying-on-the-floor grief of the first days post breakup or the let’s-listen-to-the-song-and-get-some-sorrow-out of the calmer next few weeks. These good, tender tears were a glimpse of what was real and good and blessedly, healthfully over.

The wait was long and the blankets cooled. My teary release turned to anxious boredom. I woke up from anesthesia to navigate a once-again bloody crotch, this time maybe productively so. My hands were covered in blood for the millionth time in these messy months, and I was glad I’d caught the nurse’s name so I could call out for a fresh pad. Someday, no more pads. Maybe soon.

As I recovered from surgery, more waves of emotion came in, darker and angrier and harder to write about. Trauma, drugs wearing off, new hormones, ongoing loneliness and hurt made me prickly and harsh for a few days, until the next wave of grace came, but that’s another story.

Love, Shame, and Bleeding ALL THE TIME: Part One

 

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.

Knotty Thursday: Pretty Half-Hitch Pattern!

 

TMI alert: I'm deep in the hot-flash woods of perimenopause, and what that has meant this month is that I've had my period for THREE WEEKS. I had to get special medicine to make it stop. Along with end-of-the-world heat and a broken car air conditioner (now blessedly fixed) plus last week's breakup thing, I felt achey and crabby last night all the way to my bones.

I found this nice futomomo pattern that I liked:

(Did you know that futomomo literally translates to "fat leg"? Love it.)

But I wasn't feeling bendy enough and I kept worrying that I was going to bleed onto my pretty new post-breakup sheets. It took me a loooong while to accomplish anything, but finally, I put on my trusty lo-fi mix and settled into just practicing the pattern--I think it turned out lovely!

An Absolutely Beautiful Mess: Part Four

 

The most important part of the story: Lying still first thing with him sleeping on my shoulder, breath hitting my collarbone in sweet, soothing rhythm.

But also, two things that turned the next few days into a hurricane of anxiety:

1.     My period, which had only been gone for four stupid days, came back after some particularly transcendent sex. (Nice to meet you, Reverse Cowgirl, I love you forever.) Though he didn’t have any particular reaction about it, the Rogue Period’s return set off a series of alarm bells and triggers that I’m still trying to parse a week and a half later.

2.     WAY worse: First Poly Partner broke up with The Good Boy via text while I was halfheartedly writing my morning pages. I gave him space to call or process or freak, but I couldn’t figure out how to help. I also couldn’t figure out how to not be the asshole who’s pissed at how much our time got interrupted, not mad at him or her, just crabby at the circumstances and still trying (and succeeding, I think) to stay sweet.

I’d planned to make brunch, but the vibe was completely unbrunchlike. I don’t know how my neurotic, hurt caretaking and his kinetic grief could have even lived in the same universe as brunch.

My heart was broken for him and them and a little bit by them too. I have so much new empathy for BFF-Formerly-Sweetie who had NO END of happy days interrupted by heartbreak and why-doesn’t-he-text and metamour pains. (Later, after The Good Boy had gone home, I called to apologize to her and she said shush.)

The Good Boy and I held each other for a good long time before I sent him off into the beautiful snow. My heart physically hurts while I’m typing this. He didn’t feel able to make plans with me, and I was jangled by both the calendar upset and by my currently broken body clock. A couple of days later, we decided to take a pause, and that’s where we are now.

I’m so lonesome for him. In my head I’m so sure he’ll fall for somebody else or decide to be monogamous or just forget me. In my heart, which is wiser, I’m grateful that the universe (or just the internet) put us together for at least this little while. Love will help me untie him from me, if that’s what he decides he needs, but I’d rather bind him close.