The Promise in Every Period

Approaching the end of my menstrual cycle with hope and curiosity

The moon is full and I just started bleeding. I love it when my cycle syncs up with the moon’s cycle. Though I suppose that’s not entirely accurate. It would be more in sync, energetically speaking, if I got my period during the new moon, and ovulated at the full moon. But still…I’m going to commune with the moon on this one, even if we are at opposite ends of our cycles.

My periods have a new weight this year. I recently had a 37-day cycle and it shook me up. I’ve always been pretty regular, my whole life. It’s true, I was in emotional distress after ending a difficult relationship, but it can’t be denied that at my age, my hormones are changing. My body is changing.

Every period is another egg of my finite supply being shed. I’m fascinated by the way nature designed us — that it supplies us with our eggs from the first moments of our life but only a certain amount. I love the fact that I, as an unfertilized egg, was inside my grandmother when she was carrying my mother. What a miracle.

Every period is another egg of my finite supply being shed.

Though with that miracle comes the sadness of knowing I will not know a granddaughter in that way. The only daughter I carried died long before she could have survived outside my body.

And now…each period is one last pregnancy unrealized. Each period is one more egg that won’t turn into a child. Each cycle is one more closer to my last.

I don’t know what to expect of my cycles at this stage of life. They say women who never gave birth have wildly different experiences in middle age than women who did. I’m not entirely sure why that should be so. No, I didn’t experience those surges of hormonal changes. But…does that really matter so much?

Apparently, from what I’ve heard.

My mother had her last period in her early 50s, and they say women mostly follow in their mother’s footsteps when it comes to menopause. Except, again, for those who didn’t give birth to a child. Supposedly, menopause can come much, much earlier for us. If you didn’t use it, you lose it? Is that how it works?

It makes me nervous, to say the least. I feel some comfort in the idea that I might have close to ten years of fertility left. But if it’s true, if there’s no predicting the onset of menopause simply because I didn’t give birth…then I don’t know what to expect. Every cycle becomes more and more precious.

Since I turned 40, my cycles have changed enormously. I’ve always had heavy, short, excruciatingly painful periods that were, in general, right on schedule.

After 40, they became more sporadic. My cycle shortened from 28 days to 24, if they kept to a schedule. I still had the pain, but mostly in the second day instead of the first. And they were still short (just 2 1/2 days) but sometimes heavy to the point of absurdity. Once, at work, when my bladder was about to burst, I stood up to make my way to the restroom, and I literally felt a wave of blood travel down my vagina, and in seconds, it was spilling down my legs. I was already wearing a pad, but there was so much blood, it literally poured right over the pad and out the edges of my panties.

You cannot imagine how grateful I felt that I was wearing red pants that day — seriously. Thank goddess for my practicality when it comes to the way I dress when I’m bleeding. But damn, cleaning myself up in the bathroom took nearly ten minutes. There was blood everywhere, from vulva to ankles.

And now…each period is one last pregnancy unrealized. Each period is one more egg that won’t turn into a child. Each cycle is one more closer to my last.

In my mid thirties, my breasts would become so tender just before and during my cycle, it was almost unbearable. And now, ten years later, I’m experiencing the same issue. I almost want to walk around with my arms up as shields. I shy away from hugs. I don’t want to go on my walks. I just want to attach a cage around myself to keep my breasts from any contact with the outside world or any movement in general, unless it’s the most exquisitely careful and gentle massage (which these days, I have to give to myself) to alleviate the pain.

My whole body, in fact, feels almost unbearable heavy right before and during my period. That’s really always been the case, but in my 40s, it can sometimes be so intense that I clench my jaw. I’m probably at the smallest that I’ve been my entire adult life, but I feel like I’m going to burst out of my clothes at this time of the month. I feel huge. My body feels like it’s filled with liquid mercury. Heavy. Viscous. Pushing out against my skin.

And along with some of these unpleasant symptoms comes a whole new one: ravenous sexual arousal. That’s something I never experienced at this time of the month before I hit my 40s. Great. I’m in pain, I feel like I’d sink to the bottom of the ocean if you dropped me into the waves, I might start gushing blood down my legs…but if I don’t have sex right now, I’m going to climb the walls and start shrieking. Okay, Mother Nature. Interesting move.

One of the hardest parts of this journey is that I have no one to talk to about it. Well, mostly no one. I can share with friends, my sister, my mother…but they all had children. So will anything they are experiencing help me understand my own body better?

And then there’s the problem that many of them are still in the process of building their families, which means their uteruses are busy making babies, not shedding endometrial lining.

And then there are the ones who finished having kids but they hate their periods and cannot wait for menopause. I have no interest in complaining about the greatest miracle of the female body, so that doesn’t help.

And for those who don’t hate their periods, they are on the Pill or have hormone-laced IUDs that stop their periods and as such, are on a slightly different journey than the one I am on.

Where is my wise old grandmother figure who can talk me through this? Or just talk about it, at all? Why don’t we talk about this more?

At my last pelvic exam, my doctor brought in an intern (with my permission) to observe. There, crouched between my stirruped ankles, the intern whispered, “I’ve never seen a cervix like that.”

I started to lift up my head. That couldn’t be good, right?

The doctor said, with almost a touch of awe in her voice. “She’s never given birth. This is what a pristine cervix looks like.”

I laid there as they continued the exam, my mind reeling. Had that intern never seen the cervix of a woman who hadn’t had a child before?

I tried to take “pristine cervix” as a compliment, even though something about it felt sad. Like the pristineness was the evidence that I’d committed some kind of biological failure.

One of the hardest parts of this journey is that I have no one to talk to about it.

As I write this, I think about my cervix, just chilling, slightly open, letting go of my egg, of all the preparation my body made for the baby that didn’t materialize.

I can’t help but wonder: If our grandmothers held the promise of our fertility within their bodies, how much information is actually inside us at any given moment? Did my body — my uterus, my ovaries, my cervix — know that I would not have children? Or are these parts of me as surprised as I am to have gotten to this age without a child? Does our body even recognize a difference between a promise and the realization of that promise? Is it all the same? Does the baby I lost count as much as a child who made it to and through birth? Does she count as much as no child, at all?

Is my pristine cervix irrelevant? Pristine, not pristine…does it even matter? Maybe the promise is the only thing that really matters. The possibility.

That, to me, is one of the greatest miracles of womanhood: possibility that constantly regenerates even when the last promise went unrealized.

Will there still be possibilities, I wonder, after the cycles end?

I have to believe that yes, there will be. Isn’t that what our periods are teaching us?

© Yael Wolfe 2019