This is (Partially) About Periods—you’ve been warned.
The first bleed postpartum holds a lot of release for me. I realize the oxymoron in that sentence I just wrote. How does something hold release? I don’t know either.
It’s been 15 months since my last bleed, which happened in the desert right before Egyptian Mother’s Day 2022: we were preparing for the ecoversities alliance global gathering and I just sat in bed all day writing poetry. I didn’t know my life was about to change. Oh sweet ignorance.
After the gathering, we went to Sinai, where I found out I was pregnant. Then I attended a series of funerals. It wasn't just that, I also touched my friend's dead body and my hand shook for days after.
With a growing baby in my belly and the heat of summer peaking then receding into the cold of winter nights, there's a lot that happened: my birthday being ignored and forgotten, being accused of eating too much as a pregnant woman who doesn't work and told to go to my father's house, and other drama I would rather not name.
During my first pregnancy, I had my own money still, having just left the (paid) labor market, I still had savings, so I could treat myself to massages and hypnotherapy. But with baby M, born on Christmas day after her brother kept singing Petit Papa Noel as he played the day before, I had none to my name.
And as you can probably tell, I went through a lot.
Seven or eight hours into my solitary labor (which lasted a total of 10 hours), I realized she was pushing forward not down. I called my doula and asked to be taken to the hospital immediately. My uterus had begun to bleed a little. But we were both safe.
Anyway, that's not what I'm here to write about.
Back to the first bleed. With it's old, dark blood and calcified emotion. One after the other, the images come back to me with the pain, loss, loneliness and grief painted all over them. Encoded in the colors and scents and sensations. The drop of sweat that ran down my temples or the hardness of a muscle after a morning cramp.. The childlike nonchalance of a giggle - momentarily giving me a sense of freedom - and the heaviness of what is.
I had a dream a couple of days ago, as if gathering this cube of pain, by pressure, huge and heavy, and handing it to someone I would not name.
I don't know which is denser: the heaviness of what is or the yearning for what isn't.
When I was in Dahab, South Sinai, pregnant and exiled, I dreamt of my cousin and I messaged him when I woke up, turns out he was going in for a surgery. I told him I loved him, I think, but that was the last time I spoke to him. When I held my almost two month old as I stood outside the car that took his dead body to his grave… I spoke to him again, I prayed for him. But he's gone with his hope and his humor.
And now when I go to the club at least three days a week, I think of him.
All the tears are here now to be processed and released with the blood. The darkest burgundy, like the blood on the wounds that killed Aya. Last time I saw her, I didn't tell her I was pregnant, but I was. She sat next to me and we sang together.
But they're not flowing. They're fighting for space. I'm finally, it feels, processing the loss. All the death. All the exile. All the sense of abandonment and imprisonment.
A prisoner of my own life: in this body, in this house, in this community and in this society. And if I choose to break free, like the blood that left the lining of my uterus for the first time in 15 months, announcing the release of an ovum, an egg, potential life..
Did it give up? Are we judging that egg for giving up and that lining for shedding?
We’re not, actually.
So why do we do it with women who we've forgotten at home with the kids fighting for a moment of sanity. A moment of silence or sense of relief. Why do we do it with women who have hope for a life that no longer feels like prison?
