Want to Get in Touch with Yourself?

Try a Menstrual Cup.

This may seem like a lot of steps, but just hear me out.

Start by going off birth control. And for the first time in your life, take an earnest interest in your menstrual cycle.

Next, have two children, two years apart. Care for them. Slowly but surely, become an ideologue about the importance of—hmm, how to describe it? Motherhood? The female experience?

Read something about the environmental toll of tampons and pads and switch to a menstrual cup.

Whoa. You’ve never seen your period blood accrued like that! Start talking about it with your female friends, with anyone who will listen, really. Things like, “Oh man, I love my menstrual cup.” All the while, begin to understand that you have a heavy flow. Spin this heavy flow as a good thing because you’re grateful to be a woman. No, seriously. You are!

Panic about your career. Take a job as a substitute teacher at a private high school. Get called in at 7:30 a.m. Put on some professional clothing and in your haste, forget about how it’s the heaviest day of your cycle. Understand suddenly, while on campus, that you need to change your menstrual cup. Like badly.

Experience the physical challenge of emptying an overflowing cup in a public restroom stall. You always wash it out before reinserting but that’s impossible now. Then, even once it’s back in there, you must emerge from the restroom with one of your hands covered in blood. Understand that this isn’t super workable.

Live through a pandemic. Be at home all the time again.

Turn forty, forty-one, and forty-two. Your kids are eight and ten now. They’re both really into sports and so are you. You lift weights, do yoga, and play tennis. You even volunteered to assistant-coach their little league team last spring. Think of yourself as not a regular mom but a cool, athletic mom.

In the fall, chauffeur your older child to his first baseball practice of the season. It’s not a travel team but it’s more involved than what he did in the spring. The field they practice on is a twenty-five-minute drive from your house. And practice is two-hours long. It doesn’t make sense to go home in between. Realize at that first practice that there is no bathroom. Just a porta-potty. Feel the discomfort of needing to pee. Hold it until you get home.

A few weeks later, get your period. You’ve been noticing changes in your cycle. Sometimes the flow is lighter. But, wait. Okay, wow. This particular period is old school. Like: so much blood. Assume that you’re through the worst of it when it’s time to take your son to that baseball practice half an hour away with nothing but a porta-potty.

This specific week, you actually have to bring your younger child along as well since your spouse is “working” late. (Your childcare-is-work ideology sometimes requires you to put quotes around the word work.) Your younger child is the one you jokingly refer to as your “spirited child.” Because of this, you’ve brought his baseball glove and your baseball glove along to help keep him occupied for the two-hour practice.

Ten minutes into practice, have a catch with your younger son. Think about what a cool, athletic mom you—Oh, shit. Feel that primordial sensation of blood leaking out of you and onto your underwear. Maybe even your pants? Say Fuck softly to yourself. Tell your son you can’t play catch. Start walking to the car.

Hear your child protest: “But we barely even started!”