13 minute read

Compared to my friends, I got my period late. I think I was fourteen, maybe even fifteen. I wanted it to come so badly, felt like I was waiting for admission to a special club. I craved initiation into the domain of women, that place where secrets flourished, and blood ran thick. Of course, in Ireland in the 1980’s we didn’t refer to ‘periods’ or ‘menstruation,’ we talked about ‘being in your flowers’ or ‘on your yolks.’

In the yoga world, at least here in the States, I’ve mostly heard women refer to it as your ‘moon cycle’. This makes sense when you think about it as the moon too has monthly cycles going from waxing to waning and all the phases in between. I’ve heard tell that in societies where people lived in closer relationship with nature, with less light pollution, environmental pollutants and the like, women’s menstrual cycles were in rhythm with the phases of the moon. That ovulation occurred when the moon was full and people were out dancing and singing under the light of that radiant orb, this was a good time for procreation; while the spilling of the blood was best suited to those dark days when the moon’s light could not be seen.

Whatever it was, I wanted it. When it came on, it did so heavy and dark. I think I was in the toilets at school when I found out. I must have gotten a pad from the dispenser, I don’t really remember but I know I was happy to be inducted into this new phase, to step through the portal of womanhood, or onto the path to womanhood. My memories of that first year of menstruation are mostly of severe cramps, heavy bleeding and furtively buying sanitary towels that were always placed in a brown paper bag with a knowing smile by the cashier lady. But I was glad to be at last in the club and to be able to use euphemisms to signal my belonging.

Between the ages of nineteen and twenty, I experienced very significant tragedy and loss including being in a serious car accident with a head injury that left me in and out of a coma for five days. My life became quite dark and difficult, although there were bright spots and fluffy white clouds in there too, and I was under enormous psychic and emotional strain. So much so that my periods stopped for a year. I was living in Amsterdam at the time and I don’t think I ever saw a doctor about it, deep down I knew it had to do with how unhappy I was and badly I had been traumatized.

My living in Amsterdam had nothing to do with it. I was a university exchange student there and discovered new parts of myself with new friends who knew nothing about the traumas I’d come from. I got to start afresh and find things to like about myself, broadened my horizons and made some inroads into building my self-esteem and sense of worthiness. By the time I got back to Dublin, I was happier and more confident than I’d been when I left thirteen months prior. And my period came back and was regular up until this past month. That’s twenty-seven years ago and here I am at forty-eight, in near-perfect health trying to accept the fact that perimenopause is insipient and I’m not super loving it.

I’m aware that approaching menopause is a gift, I’m alive and still have a uterus, and yet I’m resistant. Which is futile, because nature will take its (Her) course so I may as well go with the river. But I have feelings. I love having my period.

Maybe it’s because I waited for it to begin with such anticipation and was happy when it arrived. But happiness isn’t quite right, it’s more that I something settled in my being, I felt a sense of belonging to my body or in my body that created inner congruence. My menses bestowed a deeper feeling of integration in my being.

I have always loved the feeling of being connected to my body, to its changes and cycles, the inner rhythms that are constitutive of my unique blueprint and physical makeup. Yes, cramps weren’t always fun, although they had significantly abated by the time I was in my mid-twenties, and I never loved the feeling of being bloated in the week or so before bleeding. A ‘beached whale’ is how I’ve mostly referred to myself during those interims. And can we talk about the boobs? Jaysus. For much of my menstruating life, I have felt like a walking breast in the week or so leading up to my period.

Oh, the girls. Definitely bigger and sore. Ohhhh, often very sore. Wear two sports bras while running sore. Usually, I know when I’ve ovulated because my boobs start feeling tender and that feeling of tenderness and heaviness increases until just before my period comes and I start peeing even more than usual and my boobs get less tender but the nipples a bit more sensitive. Yeah, I know my body really well. Don’t all women? I suppose truthfully I haven’t gone into this level of detail with that many.

But now something funny has happened, something weird and surprising. The last two cycles my boobs did not get their usual tender and noticeably bigger before my period came and I missed it. I realized that thing I had found annoying and so wanted to get rid of is actually a beautiful way that my body has been expressing itself, talking to me, if you will.

I’ve realized that these rhythms are precious and intrinsic to my sense of self as a woman.

I always knew I’d ovulated when I felt those first signs of increased sensitivity in my boobs. That and the telltale underwear signs. Those secretions felt (I hate that I’m using the past tense, it seems so indicative of the insipient reabsorption of my blood) like secret messengers from my body’s innermost chamber, now is when your creative potentiality is at its highest, now, these couple of days, is when you are truly the embodiment of the feminine generative life-giving principle. You are part of the deeper cycles of life and cosmic creativity, your very body a microcosm of the macrocosmic force that will not be stopped. A cyclical force of rebirth and regeneration.

But that too has been missing the last few months. In fact, my body’s innate signalling system did not communicate as usual and I found myself totally unmoored from my inner bearings. Without breast changes and sticky, glutinous discharge, I had no idea where I was in my cycle and had to look at the app on my phone to figure it out. I’ve been tracking my period using an app for years now and have found it a handy guide for comparing cycle length, but nothing substitutes my body’s intelligence and communicative finesse. These last two months the message I got was not entirely welcome. No ovulatory goo and no over-sized boobs. It hit me hard like a loss. Like something is changing and there’s nothing I can do about it.

Listen, I know the platitudes: flow with grace, accept the change, love your body in all its iterations. They are right on time and absolutely right. And I’m not ready. Not ready to relinquish this life-giving force that is my uterus: my cycles of ovulation, openness, receptivity, invitation to be conjoined with and co-create new life, a spark to set the flame; and bleeding, letting go of the possibility of bringing forth new life, retreating into the temporary cave of renunciation and release.

I am not ready to leave this part of my life behind, I know it’s inevitable and I know that I’m fortunate to be alive and well. And I’m not ready for the next phase.

Maybe it has something to do with the fact that I’ve never been pregnant. I really, really wanted to be for a long time. First in the abstract sense, in so far as from a young age I always wanted children, but I was a responsible contraceptive user as I knew that I didn’t want to get pregnant at the wrong time. In fact, when I moved to the US as a twenty-eight-year-old graduate student embarking on a Ph.D. in philosophy I was quite sure that, had I become pregnant I would have procured an abortion. I was in a stable, happy relationship but there was no way I was going to let my graduate studies be overtaken by an unwanted pregnancy.

I met my husband two years later and it was two years after that that we got our first home in Chicago, a funky loft opposite Oprah’s Harpo Studios. We were enjoying a lot of beautiful sex and were both feeling like a soul was flying around waiting to incarnate but that it just wasn’t the right time. I got an IUD and we agreed I’d leave it in for five years.

Later I understood such an agreement was a certain kind of lunacy. I put a copper coil in my uterus aged thirty-two that stayed there until I was thirty-seven. Five years in the prime of my ability to conceive. It’s hard to know how to unpack this. Maybe I didn’t really want a baby after all, maybe I was ill-informed and glibly thought that all the usual constraints didn’t apply to me, that I’d be able to get pregnant in my late thirties. Well, I wasn’t and I never have.

Maybe it’s all been for the best. My musician husband was touring all over the world for the first ten-twelve years of our relationship. There was a lot of turbulence and I don’t know how well we would have dealt with becoming parents. Yet I’ve heard it said many times that babies bring blessings, that things change, you become a little less crazy, maybe don’t shout as much, let things go more. Alas, we don’t know.

I do know that the doctor who inserted my IUD didn’t really discuss these things with me, that in ways I was not my own best advocate. I was a lot less confident at thirty-two than I am now, less empowered.

I also know that the pain of having it inserted was indescribable, that I lay in a ball on the floor crying for quite some time when I got home, that my husband was on tour and I felt very alone. For around a year I had eleven-day periods with severe cramps and for at least the first few cycles I was haemorrhaging lumps of blood. It was gruesome. Having the device removed was also very painful, though not quite as much.

What did it achieve? Well, it certainly prevented conception. Doctors I spoke to here said it would have no bearing on my ability to conceive going forward at the ripe age of thirty-seven, that any difficulties in conceiving would stem from the usual sources, declining fertility etc. They were right and we never did conceive. We had a great time trying, until we didn’t. It got to a point where tracking my ovulation and creating amorous scenarios even when we weren’t feeling it became tedious. But worse was the rollercoaster of me thinking I was pregnant, being wildly excited, and then crashing hard when my period showed up. It was brutal and despite the fact that we saw a fertility specialist who was gung-ho about IVF, we decided it was better for our marriage and my nervous system not to go down that road.

It took me some time to move through the grief of repeated failures to conceive and to accept that I was not going to experience pregnancy. For years I’d fantasized about how it would be when I discovered I was pregnant. Would Dave be on tour in another country, if yes, would I tell him on the phone or wait till he got home…what would my body look like as I carried the baby, would my yoga practice change significantly…on and on. It took a while for me to stop thinking like that. Embarrassingly I started crying a couple of times in shops or on the street when I saw tiny babies.

But eventually, the grief subsided and I came into acceptance and began to see that maybe it’s for the best that Dave and I have not become parents. He, on the other hand, is still holding out. Read that again! I’m forty-eight years old, we have not used contraception for eleven years and my husband would welcome a pregnancy. Oh hell no. Not now, not when I’ve had to go through so much emotionally, the yearning and misplaced anticipation, the years of trying and finally the relinquishment and finding peace.

Coming back to my insipient menopause and reabsorption of the blood, this past moon cycle lasted 34 days. I checked my tracker app obsessively and by day 29 was mildly freaking out. Usually, my cycle is 25 -27 days with the odd 29 day in there, but it has never gone over 30. Dave was hoping I might be pregnant while I was contemplating which would be worse, that or moving into perimenopause for sure. I decided the former.

My period, the faintest trace of pink blood, started on day 35. Relief is not the word. At not being pregnant and at still being connected to this thing that makes me feel intrinsically a woman. I cherish the blood and all that it signifies. It’s so much shorter now, one day of medium bleeding bookended by a couple of days of light bleeding that tapers off into nothing. This evidence of my raw generative force, my ability to give life is precious and meaningful. It’s a thing to cherish and nurture, to honour.

In many yoga traditions, it’s taught that women should observe a ‘Ladies Holiday’ during the moon cycle, should refrain from practicing, or only do very light practice with no deep twists or inversions, no arm balances. In my thirties, I gleefully dismissed this teaching and did strong practice throughout the month. I didn’t take time off to slow down, to honour my menses, the spilling of the blood, the turn towards the possibility of the new cycle. I regret that now. As I progressed through my forties and became more relaxed about my physical practice, but also stronger, more equanimous, I started to observe the time apart of the Ladies Holiday, the sacred ritual. I realized that the yoga practice lives in me, that I don’t have to prove the point. I came to understand that embodying a yoga practice is a living, dynamic thing, that as a woman whose body changes much throughout the course of the month, I can allow my physical practice to change too, to reflect the trajectory that my body goes through.

I’d be lying if I said that I’m not trepidatious about going through the change. Since I was fifteen years old, thirty-three years, I’ve defined my womanhood in terms of my menstrual cycle. What will it mean when I’m no longer menstruating? Will be womanhood reside in my memories, somatic and psychic, of menstruation? In my breasts, the curve of my hips, the slant of my waist? I have no idea. This all feels so unknown, what choice do I have? And I know I’m not a victim, I’m lucky to be healthy and well with no brain fog, weight gain, mood swings or other perimenopausal side effects. This train is coming and there’s nothing I can do to stop it. I’ve resolved to focus on enjoying the ride.

Dearbhla Kelly, September 2021