Blood on my hands
Of cringes and cramps
As one joke (the origin of which is unknown to me) goes: women have become so adept at getting blood off clothes, thanks to periods, that its no wonder more men get caught for murders than women.
Hell yes, as a part of the gentle gender, let me reassure you that this trivia is true.
To call periods a roller-coaster ride would be an understatement. Until of course your ride consists of perpetual free fall made interesting with rocks aimed and thrown at your abdomen. And sometimes at other random body parts too (just because).
This is an almost life-long relationship, one that was defined as ‘a gift that only women are privileged to have’ by one of my teachers in school. You gotta give the woman credit though, she was simply trying to ease out a bunch of bewildered young girls when the topic popped up. And you gotta give credit to the naiveness of the girls, as we all got neatly hoodwinked into believing it.
A love-hate relationship it truly is, i.e. until aunt-flow decides to delay her arrival, just for laughs. The panic that sets in and the pain that arrives when it finally does is a phenomenon in itself. Shit like this should be documented I tell you.
Give me a shout-out if you were baffled/shocked/scared out of your wits when it first occurred. Now you see kids being educated about periods and other body functions since an early age, but I belong to the lot who had no access to such enlightenment through the school syllabus.
We bloody well knew all about long division and that mitochondria is the powerhouse of the cell, but PERIODS? No. That was insane. Why educate kids about something this essential at an age when they are most likely to encounter it? That’s madness. Class, please derive the area of an octagon and make a worthless project on ‘Types of leaves in my neighborhood’ while you are at it. ’tis real life.
Being the over-imaginative and under-informed child that I was, my first reaction was: ‘This is how I die’. Which is understandable if you look at it that way, your orifices don’t usually start spewing blood out of the blue you know.
Up until I walked up to my mum and got an explanation, yours truly had already decided her funeral plans.
But understanding shone through in the form of mum, the ‘gift’ was explained, and along with it came the bonus deal. Periods would arrive every month, of every year, till you reached the age group of 50+! Yay!
Now, there were girls in my class who carried this bitch-slap with dignity and elan, but not me, no sir. During my ‘those special days’, I transformed into a walking talking cramp machine who also doubled up as a stamp machine.
One does adjust though, I mean its not like there’s an option for us. But the only thing we can’t make peace with are the cramps. (Cramps: The feeling best expressed as a sucker punch to your uterus, the only difference being that the punches go on forever).
So why am I telling you all this? To make sure that the hushed and covered topic that this was during my growing up years diminishes by some measure. Because this Omg-periods-hawwww culture is gender neutral. Our mentality has been conditioned by popular beliefs to treat it so.
The advertising department of all things periods hasn’t been of much help in this case as it is divided into two broad, useless categories:
- The advertisements which still treat periods as a dainty-womanly-thingy-which-must-be-talked-about-in-code-words.
- The advertisements which just cross over to the Climb-a-mountain-wearing-white-tights category. The all or nothing kind.
There seems to be no middle ground to it. No ads showing women like me who like to spend their periods in their pajamas, at home, eating whatever we want, and avoiding the usage of legs in every way possible. Talk about misrepresentation right?
So what we understand by this is that its okay to talk about periods. Its okay to not be scandalized by period blood enough to represent it as a blue liquid (why blue?) falling sedately into the middle of a pad, which by the way never happens. Its also important to make the shame disappear, because I don’t really see any reason for it to stay, do you?
To conclude, a poem:
Blood on my hands,
Tears and tea.
Who wears white pants during periods?
Call everything PMS and I’ll rip thee.
Clap to let me know you if liked this. Always open to constructive criticism, discussions, and free chocolate!
