Bleed like a woman
I am Pakistani. Pak like pure, like Quran-e Pak, the Holy Qur’an. Except once a month when I’m not pak, and so, not Pakistani. Once a month I am without ethnicity, I am a nowhere woman. Pak also happens to be the euphemism for menstruation (and I’ve just broken my Islam by placing Qur’an and menstruation together in the same statement). Another euphemism is saaf, or, clean. It is said of a woman who must excuse herself from prayer or may not touch the Quran that she is not pak, not pure, or not saaf, not clean. It follows logic that a society pre-antibiotics or any knowledge of bacteria and sepsis would arrive at these terms.
This was the way my cycle was explained to me at home, outside of sexual health class in school.
The #15Girls movement seems to have been forgotten as soon as NPR stopped pinning it to the top of their feed, but this story couldn’t leave my mind so easily. In case you missed it, it’s about menstruating women in rural villages in Nepal who are contained in primitive huts outside the home for the duration of her period. The huts are barely livable and the women are at risk of death from exposure. A flurry of saltiness from the first world came in, but to an extent, we all live in a similar reality to those women. When we are first taught about menstruation, it is always in the context of what you cannot do.
I remember my first period perfectly. It was just at the beginning of summer during the fifth grade graduation dance held in the high school cafeteria. It was my classmate’s older sister, a high school student chaperoning the dance, who took care of me. I was wearing a black tank top and a khaki skort, I had beads in the two braids in my hair, and my favorite blue and purple glasses on. My classmate’s sister made her way over to me, shimmying, with a cardigan in her hand that she told me to wrap around my waist. I didn’t understand her bidding but followed anyway. She indicated the pocket and then danced away. As if everyone had choreographed it, my best friend scooped my arm and ushered me to the bathroom.
When I saw the dark stain of hot embarrassment, I cried and said I wanted to call my mom to come pick me up. My biggest fear was that everyone, all the boys and girls, including my crush, had seen me menstruate. It didn’t matter that more than half of them probably couldn’t have even understood what it meant.
Oh, the miracle of womanhood! I remember my first attack — yes, attack — of PMS in that same year at a video game arcade. I had gone with my friend and as I was exchanging tickets for glitter neon jelly bracelets, I saw a nerdy, overweight kid there with his mother. They were having such a wonderful time together, just the two of them, that I broke immediately into sobs. I was still choking down the sobs when I told my mom about this later at home. I have no idea why I was so emotional; was it pity for a loser kid who could’ve easily been me? Was it joy at the fun they were having as mother and son? Was it heartbreak at missing such a pure, innocent moment as that with my own mother? While my entire world fell apart, I felt my heart open and vulnerable and cleansed in a way that it had never felt before.
I have always felt very connected with my period, despite receiving indications that I should not do so. I love the feel of my endometrial lining breaking down, I love feeling the weight of a loaded pad or cup, I even love the smell of myself when I’m menstruating.
But young womanhood is ruthless.
In the gym locker room at middle school, that breeding ground for juvenile dystopia, budding sexuality, and that feeling of being very much stuck in your own bodily cage, I was one of the only girls with fully developed breasts before the end of seventh grade. I envied the slim, size nought, Abercrombie kids models around me. How fun it must be to ask your mom for a bra with teensy cups in them when mine gave me training bras built to minimize. I wanted the cute, frilly things with underwire and a pretty little bow in the center, the kind of bra that placed two soft, overturned bowls right at the junction with the armpits. I wasn’t even a teen yet and my breasts were already halfway down my short torso. And most of all, I envied dainty, little pink nipples instead of brown salami slices with a hair or two sprouting out of them. I wasn’t just discontent with my body, I was angry with it for growing wrong.
Matters were made no better by reading teen magazines. Photo spreads of naturally camera ready Nickolodeon stars featured opposite horrifying tales of sexual harassment, abduction, and bullying. So the message seemed to me to be: be beautiful or else bad things will happen to you. Add to this mix the confusion of porn and chat rooms, schoolyard gossip of the latest sexy scandals, and the awkward tension at home where dating and sexuality did not exist for young girls, and the result is a lot of dissonance over what exactly my body portended for those around me.
My safest haven besides my journals, of course, was Gurl.com, which used to be a janky upstart and has since sorted out its capitalization crisis (from gURL.com), gained a Snapchat, an ultra-sleek makeover (though the hand-drawn comic gifs were amazing), and features in other huge publications. There were embarrassing body stories, pop quizzes about sexuality, myths about virginity, and advice columns for everything from crushes to queer identity. The site was a huge solace for me, though I could never say so.
What was a young woman’s sexuality in our Muslim household? If you had asked my parents at the time, I’m certain these words would have tumbled out: dangerous, morals, pure, haram, and gunna (sin). My parents were never strict, it must be said. They have never forbidden my from doing anything. They framed their moral concerns for me far more passive aggressively and thus effectively, however: What would other people in the community say? Even if acting upon my sexuality made me happy, would I really want to invite the judgment and scorn of others and alienate myself from a society that ultimately loved me because I was one of them? Would I really be happy knowing my decisions would break the hopes and hearts of every brown person worldwide? That my actions could displace me, possibly forever, from the people I called home? Would I really want to step out of the comforting womb of our community and make one in which I was the only constituent? These questions, far from making me consider my self-worth, made me think that every single person in the world, especially brown, was out to get my vagina, to covet it, to take it away from me.
For entailing so much, menstruation itself was not to be discussed. It was very strange: if I wanted to ask my parents about my cycle, I would receive broad answers that always led to the same conclusion — do not have sex. It was like asking the dentist about a filling and he responds by extracting the whole tooth.
Menstruating girls and women huddled, hugging their knees tight, in a dark and musty corner of the women’s prayer area at the mosque, and everyone who saw them understood their condition and respectfully looked away. But periods are a special occasion, not an excuse to be infirm. I was a girl who exploited the opportunity and scanned, watching closely how people prayed, whether they closed their eyes, cried, rubbed their noses, covered their faces in du’a, or looked around as I did. When I would chance to meet someone’s gaze I felt their eyes bear down into me in a curious defiance. I was looking for someone to reassure me that I was normal, not incapable. That my body was cleaning itself, not rendering me impure.
With one leg up on the edge of the bathtub, I lifted the skirt of my tankini and my aunty talked me through inserting my first tampon. All the women were crowded around me and guarding the bathroom door, my mother was freaking out, and I was crying. The boys were shouting at me from downstairs to hurry up. They had no idea what we were up to.
After an hour of painful attempts, I gave up and decided to wear a pad instead. It broke my heart that this would be my first time ever going to the shore and not being able to swim.
When we got there all the kids were splashing around, body surfing, playing in the water with a football, a beach ball, and those Velcro paddles you strap to your hand and play catch with a tennis ball with. I sat, depressed, watching from a rock, crossing my legs and arms tight, writing my initials in the sand then kicking it over, repeatedly. My brother yelled at my mockingly to stop acting like such a teenage girl and get in the water. One of my girl cousins deflected after my best friend ran over to me, asked if I was okay, gave me a long look, and immediately understood.
I was self-imposing my own exile because I thought that was what you were supposed to do in your “condition”. I’d seen girls do this at the mosque, in gym class, even from school entirely. I thought behaving like a killjoy was what you were supposed to do. You were an invalid, as in, invalidate yourself from normalcy.
Thank goodness my brother playfully threw the football at me that knocked me off my rock. Enraged, I decided to enter the water and kick him in the groin. Ever the natural-born amphibian, I submerged my entire body and soaked my pad. I swore at my brother but missed in my kick and ended up having the best day of that summer, even as he dunked my head under the water a few times.
