Among the wondrous mines on the battlefield that is a woman's body postpartum lies a trap we inevitably all fall into eventually.
We will, after glorious months of its absence, get our period back.
I never understood those girls in high school and college who sneaked over to you before class asking timidly, "Hey, do you have a tampon? I'm totally unprepared and, you know."
I would look at them incredulously.
HOW?
HOW DO YOU NOT KNOW?
For ten days before my Aunt Flo came to town, I would be a hormonally charged rage monster. I had unreasonable bouts of fury, jags of crying spurred on by a song or a random sentence said to me by a complete stranger. About three days before it arrived I fell into a quagmire of self hatred and depression so dark I could barely see straight. Then when the biological evidence finally showed up, I barely had time to be grateful I wasn't going insane, just having my monthly, before the crippling cramps doubled me over and I took turns between shaking with chills and sweating from pulses of heat.
Wasn't everyone getting it like this and just dealing with it better than I was?
No.
No they weren't.
Some girls didn't know it was coming, some girls had cramps for an hour, some girls had none.
Some girls had it for three days, some girls had it for five.
Some girls took aspirin and lay down for an hour and were fine.
I was none of those girls.
After two days of blinding agony so bad it kept me from sleeping, the pain would finally subside and I would settle in for ten solid days of flying through all the paper and cotton products in our household. Then, after twenty days of being held hostage by my hormones, I got between 10-14 days before the whole thing started again. Yes, I was one of those girls whose business only showed up every 35-40 days, so yeah, I had no idea when it was coming either, unless I pulled my head out of the paralyzing depression the day beforehand and remembered it might actually not be all in my head but in my ovaries. Hurray.
This changed when I developed my eating disorder.
I got so thin, my cycles slowed and then stopped altogether.
I remember being egged on in my unhealthy behavior by the development.
I was stoked. Gone were the mood swings, the cramping, the bloating, the stupid need for tampons!
Who cared if I was doing irreparable damage to my reproductive system!
After I began to gain weight, it crept back, at first not as bad as it had been before, but by my mid twenties, back up to full incapacitating wonder again.
This was when I first went on the pill.
It regulated everything, giving me what I had always wanted: predictability, lesser pain, less mood swings, and it even kept the whole messy process to a punctual 28 days, with the last four being the ones marked in red on the calendar. It took me three months to go through a box of tampons.
If I had to get a period, this was the kind I wanted.
Then, after about three years, I decided I was ready to try getting pregnant.
I went off the pill, and it took about six months for something to start.
But it didn't get much further than that.
Another year went by, no pill, no anything, and my cycles got back to their gut wrenching, sweat drenching, shudder inducing craziness.
Then I got pregnant again, and this time it stuck.
Nine months of no period is hard to celebrate when you're busy growing a human, I'll just say that right off.
But then you eject the human into the outside and you start breastfeeding and all the books tell you, don't worry, it will be another 6 months before you get your period back.
Of course there are exceptions.
There are always exceptions.
There's the girl who got hers back after eight weeks.
The girl whose milk dried up after three months, and whose period crashed down on her worse than it had ever been in her life the week after.
Then there's this girl...me.
Baby boy just turned 14 months.
And I still haven't got mine yet.
I know of women who breastfeed until their kid is 18 months, or even 2 years old, who get theirs before the babe's first birthday.
Most recently, a friend of mine bemoaned her first triple p (postpartum period) which arrived a week after her daughter's one year party, and all the comments on her instagram were in awe of how long it had waited to return. (This I like, by the way, the idea of a period like a nasty little monster, waiting in the darkness to seize upon your innards).
I checked her math, and then did my own.
I was about 10 weeks ahead of her, and I still didn't have mine.
I still don't have mine.
Obviously there are as many different factors influencing this as there are women experiencing their bloody tuesdays right now, but it's different when you've already had it go away once before.
It makes you wonder if you're doing something wrong again. If maybe you pissed off the little scarlet bugger and he went off in a huff.
Don't get me wrong, every month that goes by in which I don't find myself lying awake, holding my swollen abdomen, feeling like my whole body is a tooth with a cavity in it, is a blessing as far as I'm concerned, but now I'm concerned.
Beard and I have been thinking all along that we'd have a second one of these little critters, and the longer I go without a regular cycle, the longer we wait before even considering a timeline for that.
And here's the really fucked up part.
I don't want to be pregnant again!
Not yet!
I mean, the babe's only just learned how to walk!
We still haven't got him properly sleep trained yet!
I still can't drink more than one glass of wine without the whole room going sideways.
The idea of going through another pregnancy and then the whole newborn period...whew!
It is tooooooooooo much right now.
But it's amazing how all that stuff pops into your head when you start wondering if your body has taken it off the menu for you.
Of course the one truly clear indicator that I was about to bleed was always psychotic anxiety to match that bottomless despair, so perhaps all this ranting is just a symptom that the crimson tide is yet to come.
Anyways.
If you have any experience you want to share in the comments, I'd love the solidarity.
We need to be able to talk freely about this shit.
What was yours like as a teenager, and how has it changed?
Have you gotten a triple p, and what was it like?
What's your go to comfort routine when yours has just hit you like an oncoming truck.
Mine used to be a heating pad, a slice of chocolate cake (or more likely a brownie because I was lazy) with a glass of red wine and a violent heist movie of some variety. Snatch was always good. Heat or Jackie Brown were awesome too.
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