I am woman: watch me bleed

It’s here again, this fucker. Eminem’s ‘Guess Who’s Back’ comes into my head like it does every time. Guess who’s back, back again… I lean forward and open the cupboard, hoping to find what I need. There are three of the good ones left. Why don’t I just buy the good ones? Why did I buy the other ones? Always, purple, extra long with wings. I grab one and open it. 

‘Are you on your period, mummy?’ My (then) four year old son. 

‘Yes’, I say.

‘Can I see the blood?’

I show him the tissue. He recoils slightly but keeps looking, intrigued.

‘Does it hurt?’

‘Sometimes’

‘Will I get a period when I’m bigger?’ he asks, head leaning to one side.

‘No’, I say. ‘Boys don’t have periods’

‘Phew’, he says.

Phew, indeed.

I got my first period when I was twelve. It appeared straight after P.E. - talk about adding insult to injury. There it was, my new unwelcome friend, streaked across the gusset of my knickers. I sat on the floor of the corridor outside the girls’ changing rooms with my friend, clutching my lower abdomen in agony. I had no idea. The blood I was expecting - one day - but the pain was a surprise. Nobody had said it would hurt. In fact, nobody had said much, really. Just that there would be blood for a few days each month. A boy walked by and asked what was wrong. My friend said I had a stomach ache. The pain was like nothing I’d felt before - excruciating. It took my breath away. Years later when I was in labour with my first child, I learnt that it was the same pain. At least I’d had plenty of practice.

My periods weren’t the ignorable type - if there is such a thing. They came with crippling, white pain, every single month. And diarrhoea: ‘the period poo’. I regularly had to miss a day of school. I was prescribed a strong painkiller which took the pain away but knocked me out. Even now, I still recall the bliss of abating pain followed by heavy eyelids and the sensation of floating away. I grew to dread this monthly agony - pain that would leave me trembling, unable to speak, gagged by my menstrual bleeding. How’s that for a metaphor.

The big problem with periods (apart from the fact that they’re onerous), is that we’re all gagged, unable to speak. It’s a bloody little secret, taboo, rude even. Like a poisoned chalice we pass it on as if it’s self-explanatory, as if it’s as simple as taking a sip. 

At the age of twelve or thirteen, while boys are free to continue just being, girls are expected to take on this secret, this unrequested responsibility - because it is a responsibility, a burden. To bleed in silence, to rock back and forth in pain, to make sure you have the sanitary products, to feel emotional, anxious, angry, to panic that the blood has leaked onto your trousers, onto a chair, to feel the blood glugging out of you as you run. You see, when my friend told that boy I had a stomach ache, she knew. She knew the code, the implicit rules. You don’t speak of periods - certainly not to boys. There’s a solemnity around menstruation. We must bear it quietly, apologetically, as if deep down we all believe in original sin. This is our punishment and we’ll endure it with grace. We’ll hide our pads and tampons like they’re crack pipes, only pulling them out once we’re safely hidden inside a cubicle. Heaven forbid the men folk should know we’re bleeding from our vaginas. 

Of course back then we didn’t have the words or the insight. So when a male P.E teacher told you periods were no excuse to not get in the pool, we didn’t know how to say: ‘I’m 12. Have you considered that I might not want to insert a tampon into my vagina?’ Now we have the language. We speak about the patriarchy, about misogyny, about the experience of being a woman in more detail than ever before. But for some reason we still don’t speak about periods, not really. 

Periods only happen to women and girls. You have a uterus, you have oestrogen and progesterone, you have a vagina and there will be blood. It’s woman 101. As a man you might think women are always talking about periods to each other, but in my experience, we don’t - not in any detail. What does this mean, in a broader context? 

It means shame. Biologically speaking it’s the ultimate difference between us - we bleed and bear children, while they don’t. They have to be involved in the impregnation but what of the other? What of the one that happens every single month for around forty years of our lives? It may be many years since people believed women on their periods could destroy crops or that having sex on your period would lead to bearing ‘deformed’ children or that period blood could cause leprosy - but fundamentally one thing remains the same: periods are suspicious, disgusting, discomfiting. They’re shameful. I suppose it means that our very existence as women is taboo, contemptible. What if having a penis was suddenly entrenched in shame, something to be hidden away, embarrassed by? What if it was shrouded in suspicion and disgust? What does that do to an entire sex? 

When you have to hide something about yourself, something so intrinsic to being female, it diminishes you. It’s all part of making yourself smaller, quieter, less. It serves only to satisfy the male gaze, to protect them from this nasty business of blood and gore and vaginas. I remember working in an office, calling up to tell my boss I couldn’t come in because of my period pains. I didn’t have to finish the sentence. I might as well have been shoving my bloody muff in his face. The panic in his voice, the shock of hearing about ‘women’s issues’ was more than tangible. He’d have given me a whole week off with no questions just to stop me saying ‘period’. 

With the exception of my sister and my best friend, I’ve never told anyone about the period diarrhoea. As it turns out around 25% of women experience it - but how would you know? If you’re 12 or 13 or even 27, you might think there’s something wrong with you or that you’re the only one whose bleeding is accompanied by diarrhoea every single month. But if it stopped there, I wouldn’t be writing this. The silence goes beyond the bleeding. It goes to the very heart of being female. 

For me, periods are the ultimate metaphor for the female condition. From the moment we draw breath we are coerced, guided, instructed to be less, to be ladylike, to apologise, to be nice, to view ourselves and other women from a male perspective. To be the enemy within. We’re moulded, asked politely - before being told explicitly - to quieten down and doll up. Our periods are just too grotesque, too primal, too subversive. Men don’t have them so there’s nothing to see here. If a tree falls in a forest and a man isn’t there, did it fall at all? So we change the truth, we adapt it for patriarchal fragility, for male approval, for the omnipresent gaze of Man. 

They will never need to buy pads or tampons but you wouldn’t know from the adverts. Funnily enough I can’t remember the last time I wore a crop top and rollerbladed around listening to ‘It’s My Life’, looking sexy for da boyz while my vag exploded with blood. That was back in the 90s though and I’m showing my age. Now it’s taken a new, more insidious guise: empowerment. Yes, that’s exactly how we feel as we wonder if the blood is doing that thing where it travels up our butt cracks or when we’re slowly dying from a period migraine. And they scream: Look ladies, look how feminist we are, we’re celebrating your empowerment! You can do it girls! No cheap, tokenistic, patronising marketing tricks here! 

Periods are not a symbol for the male concept of ‘feminism’. We don’t want you saying ‘you go girl!’ while we’re bent double on the loo. They’re not empowering or sexy. Neither are they dirty or mystical. We don’t choose periods - because guess what: nobody would choose them. 

What we need is to tell it like it is, to have our lived reality reflected: periods are brutal and we are forced to be warriors. And we are. As our biology is more complex, more awe-inspiring, so are we. Men cheering us on from the sidelines is the equivalent of me shouting to Shelly-Ann Fraser-Pryce that I reckon she can do it if she believes in herself and digs deep. We’re ok, thanks. And also, we’re not ok. But it’s ours, unfortunately. That’s why it’s up to us to speak the truth, to break the code of silence, to vanquish shame. 

There are times when your hormones make you feel as though you’re being lowered into a pit of unending doom, when you feel like an underworld banshee with the rage of a hurricane. It hurts and your hair goes weird and you feel raw, unconfident, ugly, and you get spots and you can’t do up your jeans and you’re five times more likely to injure yourself at the gym because the relaxin has softened your joints and you get headaches and you cry because someone smiled at you and you have low blood sugar and you don’t want to get out of bed and you can’t sleep and you’re too hot and too cold and it smells bad - period blood stinks and it’s not just blood, there’s matter as well - and you’ve ruined a lot of good bedding. When we sanitise all these things, we sanitise ourselves, we lessen the enormity of being a woman. We season ourselves for the male palate - or our perception of it. But there should be no choice, no option to look away. Instead we should scream: I am woman, watch me bleed. Not just to the people who don’t, but to each other. We need to talk about periods.

My son asks me what the bits are on the pad. The gungey bits of tissue that look like liver. I tell him it’s the lining of my womb. I haven’t invited him to the toilet with me but he always comes to chat. He’s interested in my periods - he’s also worried about the blood, about if it hurts me, about if it’ll end up all over his bed when I lie next to him at night. Both of my children like to join me in the bathroom so my periods are very much a family event. It’s happened accidentally but I’ve taken the opportunity to unshroud the mystery of this infernal, monthly bleeding. I tell them why it happens, I tell them how it makes me feel. I tell them they wouldn’t exist, I wouldn’t exist, none of us would exist without this blood. My son asks if it’s like magic. No, I say. It’s beyond magic.