“I can’t go,” I told Sophie one Tuesday. “I have my period.”
“A period isn’t a reason to cancel something,” she said, annoyed. “You just do everything you would usually do, but with your period.”
But to me, it felt like the onset of the flu. A dull but constant backache. A need to bend and crumple at the waist for comfort. And an itchy sting, like an encounter with bad leaves, in my vagina and ass. How could anyone do anything when they felt this way? And would this really happen every month until I was fifty? My mother was fifty, and her nightstand was stacked with books with titles like A Woman’s Cycle and Second Puberty. I asked her if she’d ever had cramps like mine. “Nope,” she told me. “My period didn’t give me any problems at all until it went away.” Now she had to take all kinds of pills, use creams. I had recently found a medication of hers whose instructions said, “Insert pill vaginally at least five hours before a bath.”
It didn’t happen every month, as it turned out. Some months it happened. For days on end, it happened. Other times, it would seem like it was gone, and then I would wake up and think I had been shot in the crotch. The months it didn’t happen at all never concerned me until I became sexually active and started keeping pregnancy tests in my sock drawer.
When I was sixteen I went to the gynecologist for the first time. They tell you that you can wait until you’re either eighteen or sexually active, and I was neither, but I needed help. My period—the pain, the volatility, the feeling of utter despair—was taking my family hostage. And if my father asked whether I was possibly menstruating I screamed in his face so loud his glasses shook. Despite my virgin status the gynecologist prescribed birth control, which has helped with regularity, but nothing can help the mood that still descends a few days before my period begins, like a black cloud rolling in. I am uncharacteristically dark and nihilistic. Everyone is out to get me, to hurt me, to uninvite me from their tea parties, to judge my body and destroy my family. I am like a character on Dallas, obsessed with subterfuge and revenge, convinced I have discovered unlikely yet real-seeming plots against me. Once, while in the throes of PMS, I became convinced a man in a black overcoat was following me down La Cienega Boulevard. “The police will never believe me,” I sighed, and began hatching a plan for losing him on my own.
When menstruating, I am the definition of inconsolable. Cannot be consoled. My friend Jenni swears my eyes take on a catlike slant and my face grows pale. If someone suggests it’s hormonal, they are met with a deluge of verbal abuse, followed by aggressive apologies and pleas for forgiveness. Tears. I lie facedown and wait for it to pass.
Menstruating is the only part of being female I have ever disliked. Everything else feels like a unique and covetable privilege, but this? When it began, it held a morbid fascination, like a car crash that happened inside my underpants every three weeks. I was happy to be admitted into this exclusive club, to finally regard the tampon machine with the knowledge of the initiated. But it soon became tiresome, like a melodramatic friend or play rehearsals. There’s something so demoralizing about the predictability of it all: We want chocolate. We are angry. Our stomachs puff out like pastries. Early on, I made a promise to myself never to use menstruation as a comic crutch or a narrative device in my work. Never to commiserate in a group about which pills actually take care of cramps. Never to say anything but “I have a stomachache.” And I do.