Question for those who menstruate*

Can we talk PMS for a minute? Because over the course of my menstruating life, my cramps went from incapacitating in my teens and early twenties to just seriously painful in my later twenties and early thirties, and now that I'm in my later thirties, after a year or two of occasional post-childbirth weirdness, they seem to have resigned themselves to being a non-event, but (you know there's a but, right?) my emotional shifts used to be something that I took in stride. Used to be. Not so much anymore. As my cramps have become negligible, the days before my period have become this righteous emotional spotlight of a bullshit detector, zeroing in on anything that is off in my life. Post-childbirth, my periods have gotten shorter, too. I'm wondering if this is something other women in their thirties have experienced. Are my hormones going after different receptors in my body as I age? Is this perimenopause? And does it give other women towering superpowers of emotional truthtelling? Or is it just a way my own personal limbic system has developed to cope with my not uncomplicated emotional life?

(*Cismen and transwomen can weigh in, and of course if you're reading I'd like to hear your thoughts, but I also really do want to know whether this is a common experience or just the way my own biology has gone.)

Does this happen in your house?

Okay, this is one for the two- (or more-) parent families out there:

Z. has serious trouble coping with the transition between spending a lot of time with just one parent and then adjusting to the arrival of the other parent. She ignores, she's flat-out rude, she pushes, she tantrums. We hold a fairly hard line on it, and she's gotten a lot better than she used to be, but the problem hasn't gone away. It's worse when she's spent a lot of time with A. and I enter the scene (A. thinks this is because Z.'s relationship with me is deeper and more intense so her reactions to me are deeper and more intense), but it can go in both directions.

Does this happen in your house? Are there tricks that work for you? Advice would be appreciated.

Danse Russe

A long time ago, E. pointed out to me that when I stay up into the middle of the night and on into the early morning hours, what opens up for me is not simply more time in my day, but time of a different quality.

E.'s comment has been sitting with me for all of these months, as I've been paying more attention to the rhythm of my wakefulness. My life is not much the same one I was living when I wrote the post she responded to that day--as far as sleep goes, the most important difference is that Z. is now sleeping through the night almost every night; therefore, I am, too. When I lie down, I now expect to sleep until morning, and I do, almost every night. During the years of broken sleep that started early in my pregnancy, sleep was not much more restful than waking. Other women look to the end of nursing as when they get their bodies back, but this is it for me. Sleep has become worthwhile again. The circles under my eyes are less fierce than they were, and I can imagine a time when they fade altogether.

I made a commitment, this Fall, to go up to bed when A. does, and to the extent that I'm able to honor that commitment, I am asleep before midnight, sometimes before 11. But I'd say about once a week, often twice, I'm not going up to bed at anything like a reasonable hour for someone who intends to get a toddler to school by 8, knowing that toddler takes a good two hours to get to school some days. Instead, I am staying up for hours past midnight, and sometimes until so late that there seems to be very little point in sleeping when A.'s alarm is going to go off so soon.

So there is something about those hours that I need, and those nights when I seize that time, I need at least two hours after my last human contact, my last email or goodnight kiss.

As the people I love go to sleep, I'm freed up to fritter. There are nights I've spent importing cd's onto my computer, nights I've spent reading the New Yorker, nights I've spent re-reading love letters, nights I've spent knitting and absorbed in the latest mystery novel, nights I've spent researching a topic I only just discovered I needed to know everything about, nights I've spent in tears writing email I knew I wouldn't send, nights of alphabetizing, shopping for clothes, doing laundry, sorting yarn, cleaning the stove. And one night last Spring that I spent washing the kitchen floor with a sponge, listening to NPR turned down low.

I have not yet danced naked before the bathroom mirror (yet!), but I have sung to myself "I am lonely, lonely./I was born to be lonely,/I am best so!"


Who shall say I am not
the happy genius of my household?


And you, my friends? Are you ever also lonely, lonely, and best so? Tell me all about it.


(All due credit to Wm. Carlos Williams, and tonight I am going to bed now, and not two hours from now.)

Year to Come

On this day of last year I was walking around less than one cross-eyed look away from falling and crashing into sharp, jagged shards of myself, the result of living too long without sleep and compressed by the full, combined vulnerability of motherhood and small business ownership. But a day or two later, there was something about the turn of the year that encouraged me. Sometimes it does. The Fall was behind me and the just-finished retail season's numbers were very good compared to the previous year's. The store was closed for the first week of January, which gave me a break, and our first day of inventory seemed to go well. Major plumbing work happened that was long overdue. It seemed like even if I was still fragile, I was getting a little more functional, and that there was reason to think things would settle down enough for me to catch up on lost sleep, at least.

Then Helen Hill was shot and killed by an intruder in her home. A few of you reading this knew her and were rocked by her death as much as I was. I spent January in shock and tears, searching the internet for answers that weren't there. I read every newspaper article. I combed her memorial site constantly. I read every blog I could find. I listened in on message board discussions between her friends in Halifax and between slime who'd never met her but were willing to say that her political views led to her death.

Anything that mentioned her name or her husband's, anything that gave me a scrap I could use to understand what had happened, I searched it out, hour after hour for weeks. I wanted to spin those scraps into a story that would let me contain the shock of Helen's murder, but what I found instead was a map of the way one violent death in one doorway in one American city tore into person after person, uncontainable.

It tore into her husband and son more than anyone, of course.

I've been sending them care packages. I sent the first one the day I heard, a package of books that had in common that they held no mention of parents. The exception was Michael Rosen's Sad Book, a simple, searingly honest picture book about the author's anger and grief at the death of his mother and son. Charming Boy's father and grandmother later told me that during the weeks they stayed with Helen's family, that was Charming Boy's favorite, the one he wanted to have read to him over and over.

Since that first package, I have tried to send one box a month. I haven't quite met that goal, but maybe every six weeks, I've collected a few books and toys and added things Z. or I have made and sent them off. Z. is only a few months younger than Charming Boy--if he were going to her daycare, they would be in the same class, so she takes a close interest in these care packages. We usually have a box going, collecting things over the course of a few weeks, but after I sent the last one off--late, as usual, mailing out my blue-and-silver-wrapped tchotchkes a few days after Hanukkah ended--well, I haven't started a new one.

What could I possibly send for the beginning of January, the end of the first full year without Helen? The beginning of the next year? The beginning of all the next years? I'm stuck. All of a sudden that next package feels beyond me.

I think I need to send it anyway, though, and I think I need to get it in the mail before Friday and Helen's yahrzeit. But I have no box going and I can't begin to think about what to put in one. I sort of want someone to give me a shopping list this time so I don't have to think and can just do. So I'm asking you for one. Be my autopilot, will you? What should I send this time?

And, no, at the risk of sounding snarly, I don't want to be told about what a nice gesture the care packages are. I just want to get a push to get over the lump of my grief so I can keep going with them.

In Z.'s pocket

• rocks
• binky
• old cookie
• dreidl
• Cookie Monster
• spare kisses
  

And, again ... what do your kids keep in their pockets? Assuming you have kids and they're big enough to have pockets they put things in and little enough that you still know these things about them.

In my pocket

• Folded paper money--almost always less than $20--and a little change
• A brown hair elastic, the kind Scunci makes that looks like a miniature pot holder loop
• A binky
• Some miscellaneous bit of plastic from some wrapper or other, waiting til I find a trash can
• Sometimes, my cell phone
• Sometimes, my camera
• Often, a tissue

And yours?

Writing prompt

Today A. used this as a journal topic for her 7th graders. (It's getting late in November, isn't it?)

What's the most dramatic way you've altered your appearance?

Me, I'm tempted to answer it three different ways.

The single thing I did that people noticed most was to cut my hair off, from the middle of my back to above my ears. Close friends didn't recognize me, from even a foot or two away. But hair grows, and in time mine grew back, so that as dramatic as that change was, it's gone now. As far as my hair goes, I look about the same way I did in high school and college.

The thing I did that felt the most dramatic at the time was getting my first tattoo. It's pretty discreet, a vine around my ankle, hidden easily under a sock, but it took hours and it hurt with a welcome kind of pain, and it is never going to not be there. Doing it felt like it radically changed my body, from pristine to deliberately marked. My second tattoo, a snake, is almost hidden under my hairline (catch the Helene Cixous reference, anyone? Yes, I am a theoryhead, thankyouverymuch) so it's even less dramatic. But both of those body alterations felt very intense in the way they insribed and acted out my own ownership of my body, at an age and a stage in my life when claiming my body as my own was central.

But, well. In the end I have to say that the most dramatic thing I've done to change my appearance--and it was both temporary and radical--was to go get pregnant.

And you, my commentariat? How about you?