What We (Don’t) Talk About When We Talk About Periods
An Introduction
I’ll be honest, this is about periods. All 400 of them.
That’s roughly the number of periods a body with a uterus may experience in its time on earth in the current era.1 Four hundred. And that’s just a ballpark—some people will experience more, others less. Even if it’s something like 300 that’s still a whole lot of periods. And it’s an incredible amount more compared to women in the past. Between factors like quality of life, lifespan, and—most importantly—less ability to choose when it came to matters like pregnancy and breastfeeding, women have historically experienced far fewer periods. I’ve seen some estimates as low as 40 periods in a lifetime.
So these are a pretty unprecedented times for people with periods.
This newsletter is also about what happens between periods. Really, periods are the end of the story. So many of us—whether we menstruate or not—are given the impression that periods are the only thing happening in a menstrual cycle. Once the pads and tampons are put away things settle back into business as usual. Nothing happening on the menstrual front.
But it’s called the menstrual cycle. Somehow that seems to get lost. Other cycles we learn about in detail, seeing all the steps along the way. The carbon cycle, the cycle of the seasons, the water cycle, re-cycling. And yet when it’s the menstrual cycle, periods get all the attention.
If they get any attention at all.
I’m figuring I’m about 200 periods in.
I don’t know old I was when I started bleeding, but I was maybe thirteen or fourteen. I’m thirty now. From what I know, my period has usually appeared every twenty five to thirty days and I’ve never been pregnant. So, 200ish. Around halfway through.
For most of those 200 periods I’ve experienced I’ve hated it. I’ve resented it. I’ve been confused by it. I’ve been in fear of it arriving, but also in fear of it not arriving some times. I’ve been in a lot of pain, though still not as much pain as some people. And I know that’s not an abnormal way to feel about it all.
Also that was just the period part, the bleeding.
As a teenager and fledging adult, I couldn’t understand why sometimes my brain seemed hijacked and I would melt into my bed sobbing for hours without knowing why I was sobbing. Or why my energy and focus would suddenly plummet regularly. My body was a strange, mysterious land that I inhabited but knew little about. It’s sudden, extreme shifts could shake me to my core and make me question my sanity.2
I’d heard vaguely about there being very tiny eggs somewhere inside of me, but I was in my early twenties before I found out they were released at ovulation, the real big to-do of the menstrual cycle. It was a few more years before this concept made sense.
I was in the dark about a lot things for a while, and I don’t think that’s uncommon.3
I was in my early twenties before I started to really become informed about the basics of reproductive anatomy. I’d been raised in conservative evangelical churches and I was homeschooled from grade five on. Just like a lot of other folks, I didn’t have Sex Ed, even a bad one. Though I was a younger person on the internet, I somehow managed to avoid any kind of sexual content, even mild things. (And I had a Tumblr!) The first time I heard the word “contraception” said out loud I fled the room.
When I went away to college at eighteen I had a steep learning curve ahead of me. Even something simple like dick jokes were, well, a stiff challenge. Humorous treatments of reproductive organs aside, I knew very little about how any of it worked, including my own. I was in my twenties before I learned that the that the vagina and urethra are two separate openings. In fact, the body parts between my clavicle and my knees might as well have not existed for how much attention I could stand to give them.
As so often happens, I wasn’t just uninformed. I also had religious trauma that cut off my awareness of my body. I’d internalized much of the broken theology about bodies, purity and femaleness that streamed from the pulpit of the churches I’d been in. By my early teens, I was very much under the impression that my body was depraved and shameful. The message was seldom explicit, but I got it all the same: a female body was what led us down this path of sin and separation from God. Female bodies would continue to lead people astray.
So when I arrived in my twenties I had long since stopped living in my body. I didn’t understand the point of tracking them, so they just showed up like a big, bloody visitors barging into my life. Their surprise arrival forced me to begrudgingly remember that I had a body that needed attention. I got my pads out from their hiding place and resigned myself to a couple days of this curse. I took two, four, six, eight, ten ibuprofen to avoid the pain of cramps and muscled through fatigue or brain fog.
It was all just a nasty, mysterious thing that happened to me randomly, I thought. Just because I was born a girl. I couldn’t see the point of it. All I knew was that a period was a ticket to having a baby some day far in future, maybe. I was squarely on the fence about that endeavor for awhile. And the uncertainty of whether it might even occur made the regular intrusion of a period seem even more unfair.
That was it, I thought. That’s what all this mess and pain and confusion was for. Something that might not even happen, something I maybe didn’t even want.
If we have 400 periods, then at an average of four to six days bleeding, that’s 1,600 to 2,400 days spent bleeding in a lifetime. For some people this number is much higher, for some much lower.
But let’s say, as people tend to, that a menstrual cycle is twenty-eight days long. That’s 11,200 days living within a menstrual cycle. Let’s also say you live to be 79, which is currently the average in the country I’m in. You have 28,854 days. If everything goes averagely, the days you live within a menstrual cycle are nearly half of your days on earth.
It can’t be for nothing, surely. And it can’t just be for maybe, someday, possibly having babies.
In my second year of college, my roommate told me about a young couple she knew who were getting married.
The bride-to-be was our age, twenty-one or so, which to me now sounds incredibly young. But that was not the most thought provoking detail at the time. I don’t know why this was relevant, but my roommate told me how this couple wasn’t using hormonal birth control to avoid pregnancy. Instead, they were timing sex to avoid pregnancy. She could only get pregnant certain days each month.
This didn’t strike me as interesting for the usual reasons it would appeal to most twenty-one year olds. Thanks to all that religious trauma, I wasn’t planning on having sex anytime soon, but the concept of there being something more lit a spark in my brain.
So it wasn’t empty space between periods. It wasn’t something unknowable. It could be worked with and understood. Maybe then it also wasn’t pointless…
I began to investigate.
Investigation proved difficult though. If you’ve been told your whole life to not read about, talk about and really not even think about something (in this case, sex and anything related to it) then it’s going to be pretty hard to start learning about it. Even if learning about would really be advisable, since you are in your early twenties and only getting older. At least I went to a good ole’ liberal arts college, where less repressed friends and the study of anthropology began to show me other ways of thinking.
Maybe a year after learning there was more to menstruating than just periods, I was in my first serious relationship, and so getting a better handle on all of it seemed a bit more pressing. I made a furtive attempt to learn more: I purchased a book on reproductive health: Taking Charge of Your Fertility by Toni Weschler.4 From what I remember, I skimmed it and then gave it away to Goodwill.
I don’t even know how to explain it now except that maybe it felt like that book contained knowledge that was either forbidden and/or too good to be true. It was knowledge that required me to defy the lessons of the Church which said even thinking about reproductive organs in any context outside of marriage was sinful (even if what I wanted to learn first was how my own biology functioned). The broader culture and medical establishment told me that menstrual cycles were inconvenient things that I couldn’t possibly understand or control without a doctor’s help.
The Church and culture agreed on one thing though: don’t talk about any of this. These are intimate things. So intimate we can’t even know the truth of what’s happening in your own body. Take a pill, get an IUD, pop pain meds for cramps. You have no other sound choices.
I’ve come a long ways since I gave my first copy of Taking Charge of Your Fertility away.
I’ve bought the book again (plus many others) and I now practice its core piece of information: the Fertility Awareness Method, FAM for short. It’s a clunky term, but the premise of it is more or less what my roommate told me back in our sophomore year of college: a person can only get pregnant five to seven days out every cycle.
What I couldn’t bring myself to believe turns out to be true.5 None of it is random. None of it is unknowable. Cycles have a purpose beyond making babies. My body isn’t out to get me and I don’t need to put synthetic hormones into it to avoid pregnancy. In fact, during each cycle my body is intelligently moving through distinct phases that have their own hormone patterns, biological events, and psychological lessons. Maybe even spiritual lessons too.
It turns out having a full understanding of the menstrual cycle is a bridging of a solid understanding of biology and respect for our bodies and nature. It brings together truth and wonder. Or truth and magic, if you like.
I came to fertility and cycle awareness because I needed to know more about myself. It was a utilitarian exploration. I continue to study it because it turns out it’s liberating and enriches my life.
That’s what I want to talk about here. I came to this practice hurt and having seen others be hurt by the stunning lack of information we’re given as young people. I continue practicing and learning because I think this is a way forward for all people, regardless of whether you have a cycle or not. Because if you don’t have a menstrual cycle, you’re here because of someone who did, and/or you might also help continue our species with someone who does.
Fertility awareness and living cyclically also connect us to the natural world, which is something we desperately need now and for the upcoming stages of the climate crisis. Living with our cycles rather than against them, I believe, is ecologically necessary and also an antidote to oppression.
It isn’t too good to be true. It’s a balancing of our biology and capacity for wonder. Science and magic. Menstrual cycles light the path forward.
To be clear, I’m not a practitioner or a Fertility Awareness educator, though I may be heading down that path. This is just my story of trying to live cyclically and seeking to have conversations about the things they told us not to talk about. Join in, if you want to.
In the next few articles I’ll cover the basics of the fertility awareness method, something wild called menstruality and why I think something beyond “body literacy” is critical in these times.
Finally, it’s only with writing this that I realized I’m possibly half way through my cycling years, and I was struck not—as you might expect—by relief, but by sadness. I have only just come to love this part of my body and life. I love it in the way gardeners love gardening, or maybe the way practitioners of yoga love yoga. It’s something that challenges me, that—sometimes painfully, yes, but always wisely—brings me back to myself.
I intend to make the most of every cycle I have left.
Fun fact: I once went to the ER because I had zero idea about when my period would arrive or what was normal.
According to a study in 2016, 47.2% of women didn’t know what ovulation was, never mind when it happened. Of the women in the study 53.6% didn’t know when their next period was, 79.2% didn’t know the number of eggs released by an ovary each month, and 62.4% didn’t know how long an egg or sperm could live in a person’s body. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/27157718/
Living cyclically! This has been my journey too the last decade or so. I also had a similar upbringing and it wasn’t until I was pregnant (researching natural family planning) and then having my own kids (3 girls!) that really ignited my desire to know my cycle intimately. I will give my girls ALL the information I was never given.
I'm pregnant with my 4th, and my husband and I both appreciate how having babies slows the rollercoaster of the menstrual cycle. Looking forward to reading your publication!