misplaced mama

There is just something not quite right about tampons.  The strangeness of insertion, the yucky sensation I get when I remove them, all slithery. My shoulders always rise to my ears when I pull one out which is an indicator that something just isn’t right. Not to mention the feeling ‘of being ‘corked’ or "plugged". Like I can’t breath down there.  Like I am sufficating my yoni.  I’ve been using tampons since I started bleeding, just about 20 years ago.  My mother always warned me, telling me not to use them while I was growing up. Everytime I’d add "tampex regulars" to her grocery list she’d remind me nothing should be going up our vaginas (and I suspect with her Catholic-induced sexual frigidness and fear,  she really meant nothing). "It’s not healthy to stick something up there. You’re just asking for bacteria, keeping that blood sitting inside you like that."  I’d just sigh her off, not grasping her unknown wisdom at the time and sassily asked if she wanted me to use the enormous kotex belt that looked like a sling and terrycloth diapers she had in the closet from 1955. And I’d be sure to add that since she had gone through menapause already, she must have been saving them for me and I. Didn’t. Want. Them.  "Don’t get smart with me. Listen to your mother. Use a pad," she’d snap back.  I never listened.  Nobody used pads.  Pads were gross.  Big, thick, stinky.  And just the thought of leaking through my two-toned acid wash jeans in 8th grade mortified me.  And what if the boys could see the bulk.  As if I’d ever use a pad.  Please.

And for years I didn’t think twice.  I purchased box after box of tampons.  Even though it’s not recommended, I still slept with those things in.  I figured Toxic Shock was like eight days of keeping a tampon in, not eight hours. Until I moved to L.A. and met my future husband and we spent the first three months after meeting in bed, I never thought about using another method.  My friends would call me and I would ignore their demands to get out of bed with my new man and to go for drinks or dancing with them.  No way.  I was in ecstacy. This was too good to last and I wasn’t about to get dressed if I didn’t have to.   The sex rocked and I was so needy for it, that when my moon cycle came along, I racked my brain about how I could go on getting laid without making a big embarrassing mess?  Who knew how long this relationship would last, I wasn’t going to waste a week on bleeding. That’s when my friend Beth introduced me to The Cup. 

The Cup was exactly that except it resembled more of a bowl.  Like a diaphram, yet smaller and with more rubbery material that you just folded it in half and inserted all they way up your vagina near your cervix.  At the time I don’t think I even knew where my cervix was (my first problem) and although I had played around down there, I wasn’t really comfortable with three to four fingers entering me holding a little folded bowl, which was suppose to snap into place once it hit the right spot and open up.  When you bled, it filled up and held the blood like a vessel holds water.  It took me a few tries, and constant re-reading of the directions (did it really say three fingers were needed to put in place? Maybe four? Why not just say insert hand?) holding my breath and getting anxiously hot trying to insert it in the proper locale, not that there were many corners to turn once inside, but still I searched.  When it seemed to be in the right spot, I let go and it snapped opened, just as the directions indicated, although it felt a bit low (blamed it on having a short vagina) and if I wasn’t mistaken, I could feel it in me.  The directions did not say I would be able to feel it. Oh well.   I exhaled, lit some candles, put on the Rockers to Rockers album, and waited for my beau, the maybe- new- love -of -my- life to come home from work.

He called and said he was running late.  I poured some wine.  He called a again and said he’d be later.  I poured more wine.  The more red wine I drank the more I felt my blood thin and head downward.  I walked around the apartment like I was balancing a bowl of water on my head, but really I was balancing a bowl of blood in my birth canal.  I kept thinking it was going to ‘pop’ out of place and spill out of me.  I kept thinking that one side tipping and it was sliding down my vagina.  Maybe I was too loose down there for it?  Did it come in sizes? I never even checked. Maybe I got a small and I was a size medium? Something wasn’t right. Maybe it was the fact that I was drunk. When I sat down and crossed my legs and tried to relax on the couch I winced in pain.  It pinched me.  That little fucker! And as the wine hit me a bit more, I started to get really nervous about the removal.  How was I suppose to get this thing out?  I had tossed the directions in the trash!  I ran and dug through the garbage to get the paper.  My eyes searched the folded up paper frantically to see how to remove it.

Insert first and middle finger up vagina until you feel The Cup.  Use your finger tips to pinch a bit of The Cup and grab on to the bottom surface of The Cup. Gently tug until it begins to move down, being careful not to spill blood.

Blood spilling?  After the debauchery that I planned on happening that night, how was I ever going to get it out?  Could I sleep with it in, or would it over flow?  Or fill up so heavy with my blood that it would sag all the way down to my opening?  And then if there was a little morning glory action, my man would get close to me and his penis would bounce back out of me like a trampoline.  Or forget the morning, what about tonight? What if he could feel it up there during lovemaking?  What if he knocked it out of place? It said it was safe to have sex with it in, but what iif my vagina was indeed too short?  Or his penis was too long?  What if it spilled all over him and he never wanted to see me again? 

Just when I was about to call my friend Beth and bitch her out for this Cup Curse, Bill walked in the door.

"Baby," he looked around at the candles, the music, the wine.  "It’s so nice in here.  Let me jump in the shower…or better yet, why don’t you come in with me…." He smiled.

I just looked at him.  I shook my head no.  I could feel that damn cup in me and all I could think about was that cup and my blood drip-dropping into it heavier and heavier. Plop, plop, plop.  I was never going to relax enough to actually have sex. 

"I have a little bitty bowl in me."

"You smoked a little bowl? That’s nice." He looked slightly confused.

"No! Not smoked a bowl.  I put a bowl up me. Down there." I pointed to my vagina. "The Cup, actually, not a bowl, but it looks like one. A bowl that is. " I sounded like an idiot.  "Period.  I have my period.  It’s suppose to catch your blood so we could…you know… still do it."

"What? A bloodcatcher?" He smiled.  "Sounds Native American. Anything like a dreamcatcher?,"  he laughed.

I wanted to cry. I got serious. "Okay. Billy. Listen to me. Please. NO joking.  I just drank a bottle of wine, my blood is thinning and I am bleeding prefusily into this thing and I need to go! take it ! out!" I think I shouted. Drama queen, he must have thought I was an utter drama queen. 

"Okay, love, okay.  It’s okay.  Go right ahead. Let me know if you need me.  I’m going to be in the shower."

Since the shower was in the bathroom and the bathroom was really the only place I felt appropriate to remove a blood filled bowl, I guess we’d be in the same room.  You have to understand.  He was 22 and I was 23 and our relationship was slightly immature at that point; we basically kept it simple by dranking and eating and fucking and hanging out at the beach.  We had just begun to open up to eachother about our dreams and granted, we knew we had a spiritual connection, but we were so young we had no idea what that was or what it meant and like I mentioned we were newly together. This was going to be our first raw exposure to all things not sexy. I’m pretty sure we hadn’t even farted in front of eachother yet and now I was going to try to remove my modern day period-vessel while he was 3 feet away.

He jumps in the shower and I stand over the toilet with my skirt up and my hands under it.  Okay, let’s see.  Two fingers up me.  Okay, a bit dry since this felt like the most unattractive thing I have done in a while.  I look around the bathroom.  Neosporine?  Fine, that will do.  Better than toothpaste.  I lube up.  Two fingers up me.  Up.  A little more up.  I try to breath.  And finally…The Cup!  I felt it. A bit of success!  It was a sagging little bottom of a cup, though, and it was really. really. full.  I tried to pinch it between my two fingers.  I tried.  And tried.  And tried.   But there was literally no slack to grab onto. If only I had long nails.  Tweezers?  No, definately not tweezers.  My fingers began to have aches, my wrist was cramping and I swear my middle finger charlie-horsed.  I was going to cry.  My forehead sweating and dripping into my eyes.  I pulled my hand out of me and shook it to relieve the cramping. Ahh. Relief.  I tried again.  And again.  And no luck. I sqatted down and tried.  I lifted my leg up on the sink and tried. I tried to go in from behind.  I tried every pose imaginable and there was no humanly way I could angle myself and get a pinch of that cup.

"Um. Billy?"

He turned of the water.  Jumped out of the shower, dripping and glistening all over his body.  His tattoos.  His blue eyes. His beach boy tan.  Sigh.  I was in love. I was screwed.

"You’re going to have to go in." He looked at me blankly.  "And get it out." I pointed to my crotch.

And that is where I will end except to say he did indeed retrieve it without complaints and with no sexual favors from my part that night. Oh, and it did spill.  All over his hand and the floor. And he’s still with me. And I vividly remember him squatting down next to me, while I laid like his patient and saying, "Baby, I am still so very much into you regardless if we have sex or not. Okay?"  I felt pathetic.

This story has a deeper meaning for me.  I remember laying in bed that night curled up next to him feeling at first really ashamed that I tried to hide my bleeding. Feeling stupid that I tried to cling to Billy through a sexual journey, not having faith in myself to sustain the relationship without the lust.  Then I realized that when it was my time to bleed it just wasn’t a time for sex.  It was a time for me.  And I made a promise to myself to try not to think my bleeding as sick or annoying. The next month I stayed in and practiced being alone while I bled.  I wrote in my journal and ate mad amounts of chocolate and chamomile flower essence and I even started to meditate.  I walked on the beach and became aware that the moon was always dark, deceivingly absent, when I bled. I started paying more and more attention to the moon in general from that point on. It was the first time me or anyone in my life had honored my cycles.  I felt finally like a woman; full of mystery.  Full of knowledge.  Truly sexy.

I am on my moon right now.  This will be the 5th Moon cycle I have had since Decemeber 2002.  Between 2 pregnancies and continous nursing, my bleeding had stopped for a bit.  I am back to being a woman; ripe, moody, wet, my body waiting to be fertilized.  Each month the memory of what my womb is capable of creating flows out of me in mysterious and powerful rivers.  And tonight I just couldn’t bare to put another tampon inside.  They have simply become gross to me. A purchase and an act I do not enjoy making or doing. They resemble a punk rock rat after removal and the sight of it just rips from me the sacredness and psychic space this really is.  This blood holds highly sought secrets.  Secrets of being a women. Call me a witch, but I think it to be magic.  Should it be soaked up in a bleached out cotton pack, wrapped in tissue and thrown in the garbage?  As I would never throw my baby’s placentas in the trash, why would I block the tunnel in which they traveled, in which this blood travels, and then dispose of it? Like it was never meant to be when it is the proof we truly are to Be.

But what are my options?  I’m still not into those pads.  I thought about going outside and sitting in my garden and bleeding next to my mint and parsley while my girls painted on their easal, but I live in the city and there are gaps in my backyard fence and my neighbors don’t seem hip to the blood mysteries.  I saw an ad for reusable pads, but seriously, isn’t it gross enough that I have a big bag of dirty, smelly cloth diapers hanging on my bathroom door, waiting to be washed?  Do I need a bag of bloody ones, too?  Somebody told me a new and improved versions of The Cup has entered the market, but I don’t trust it.   I guess I could go on Lunesta Birth Control Pill and only get my period four times a year!  That’s only nine moons of dead energy locked in the uterus.

Anyone want to pitch a red tent out in the desert next new moon?  Because that is all that makes sense to me at this point. We can call in sick to our jobs because we should have the right to.  Our men can bring us fresh meals and a supply of chocolate (and take care of the kids).  We can cry and complain and tell stories. We can laugh hysterically and swear like there is no tomorrow.  We can let go of what it done and gone and take in what is the new.  We can honor our blood. We can forgot about sex.  We can celebrate the gift of death and rebirth we’ve been given each and every month. A time and place for us to just take off and be women, expected to do nothing and need nothing but the earth beneath us.

Now wouldn’t that be something?

(And apology for the type-o’s and spelling errors.  I have had computer issues this month and lost a hard drive which in turn lost all programs that enabled me to create documents which is where my spell check is.  As far as my eyes can see, I can’t find a spellcheck on blogsome.)