Menstrual Blood, Peanut Butter, Part Two - Happy Mother's Day

Every time your vagina bleeds, it means that you won’t become a mother.  My mother hated getting her period.   I remember the sobbing, the wailing, and the devastated voice, “I’m getting my period,” calling out through tears. 

At least once, I saw a toilet full of blood.

It looked a little bit like this.

What the Blood Looked Like

I was around four years old when I saw the toilet full of blood for the first time. 

The people who wrote the Vagina Monologues complained that they couldn’t find any positive images related to menstruation.  How is this possible?  Look at the beautiful blood in this toilet.  It is hardly original.

Usually in life, your dreams don’t come true.  When I was a little girl, I dreamed of becoming an excellent brain surgeon, or president of the United States, or a nun.  None of these things have happened.   Maybe it is not too late, but probably it is.  That’s okay.  Other dreams have come true.  Or at least one did.

A couple of months ago, I had the dream of pouring all of the internal lining of my uterus and whatever else comes out of my vagina into a jar throughout an entire menstrual cycle.  Then I would have all of the blood in one place.  I could look at it, keep it in my fridge, maybe water the plants with it, or use it for arts and crafts. 

Friends, it wasn’t easy, but I persevered.  Everywhere I went, I toted along my peanut butter jar.  If you aspire to do this yourself, I recommend opening the jar before you pull out the diva cup.  Opening the jar with a full diva cup can be a little precarious.  Good thing I have such excellent dexterity. Be sure to firmly secure the jar’s lid in place.  One evening, I took the jar out of the fridge where I kept it at night to show the Boatman.  “Look at all my blood so far,”I said, holding out my right hand.

He was rightly mesmerized. 

Then he said, “Babe. Is that blood on your hand?”

Oops.

After five to seven days, the blood stopped flowing and the jar was as full as it ever would be.  For one and  a half weeks, it sat on this refrigerator shelf next to the jam and the peanut butter and the ketchup and the vegannnaise.   Beside the ketchup, there are jars of salsa and pickled turnips.  Somewhere around there, there is also a banana.  One and a half bananas.

My jar of blood, amongst other jars of other things

I hate veganaise and regular mayonnaise.  I also hate cleaning my fridge.       

Now it is Mother’s Day and blood is flowing from my vagina once again.  The jar has long ago been carried away by a recycling truck. 

These photos are the only proof it ever existed. Behold the red, and see how it makes you feel.

Thank you to the Boatman for supporting me in my dreams and taking such revolutionary pictures.

Thank you to my mother for supporting me in my dreams and giving up menstruation at least nine months in my honour. 

Happy Mother’s Day to my mother and everyone’s.

The End.

Joys and Victories
Twitter: @mypelvicfloor
New Little Savage and the Hermit chapter comes out today
Little Savage on Twitter: @littlesavage2
Everyone on Facebook: Ecstasy

Menstrual Blood, Peanut Butter

This is me with a jar of menstrual blood in one hand and a jar of peanut butter in the other.

More on this later.

The End

My Quest for Fame, Money, Weight loss, Prizes and Sex:

Fame: @mypelvicfloor!
Sex
Money

The weight loss and the prizes come later.

Twenty-Seven and a Half

The daffodils, they do not live for very long.
As for me,
today I am twenty-seven and half years old.
There is not one moment I would like to repeat
Nor a single thing I would like to change.

Once William Wordsworth saw some daffodils.
They fluttered and danced in the breeze.
Then William went home
and lay down on his couch.
And while he was masturbating, he pretended he was dancing with the daffodils.
And probably he had an orgasm.
And now William Wordsworth and the daffodils are dead.

The End.

Daffodils

I really wanted to tell you that I was 27 and a half today

William Wandered Lonely As a Cloud
Twitter: @mypelvicfloor
The Little Savage and the Hermit
Facebook Adventures

Navels

Children love their own belly buttons.  They constantly lift up their shirts to look at them.

“Look,” they say to their friends, lifting up their shirts and sticking out their bellies for all to see.

“Oh, you have one too,” say their friends.  They take turns poking at all the navels within reach.  And then they giggle. 

I never really thought about this, but I guess your navel is a scar from being cut away from your mother.  Remnants of the trauma of birth.  Yet when the children see their navels, they feel pure delight.

Miscellaneous Navels, Remnants of the Trauma of Birth

Haha, they’re thinking.  Mommy has stretch marks and ripped apart abdominals and a torn vagina, and I got out with just this little hole.

Probably that is not what they are thinking. 

But they do like belly buttons.  Their own, and everybody else’s. 

The children at the Small Children slash Montessori school sew buttons onto small squares of fabrics.  It helps develop their fine motor skills and teach them that when you poke yourself in the finger with a needle, it hurts and sometimes it bleeds.  Once the children are good at sewing on a button, they are allowed to embroider small pictures onto a larger cloth.  For their first embroidery project, me or the teacher draws the picture, but the children get to choose what we draw.

In the class, there’s a little girl whose name sounds like it should be a last name and if it is going to be a first name, it sounds like it should be a boy’s name.  Since I’m not allowed to tell you her real name, let’s call her Connor.  For her first embroidery project, Connor wanted an elephant.  As it happens, the only thing I can draw is a cartoon elephant.  So this was convenient.  I drew the elephant for Connor and she got started right away.

A half hour later, I stopped beside Connor’s table and saw that she had drawn a small circle at the bottom of the elephant’s belly.

“Qu’est-ce que c’est?” I asked. What is that?

“The elephant has a belly button,” said Connor.  Connor asked me to thread red yarn onto the needle and she stitched the elephant’s belly button red. 

Elephant with Navel.  I didn't draw it.

After Connor finished the elephant, it was time for her to design her own embroidered image.  She drew an enormous triangle onto the piece of fabric.  It was so big that it didn’t fit inside the circular embroidery frame.  In the middle of the triangle there was a small circle.

“Qu’est-ce que c’est?” I asked.

“A continent,” she said. 

“Lequel? ” I asked.  Which one.

“The pink one,” she said, walking over to the globe and pointing to South America.  “And that’s its belly button,” she said, returning to her picture.  Connor stitched the triangular contours of South America in pink.  South America’s belly button is red, just like her elephant’s. 

Connor is the sort of child I can imagine running a country, large or small.  It seems to me that she’d do a pretty good job.  I’d vote for her. 

Some people are afraid of belly buttons.  This is called omphalophobia.

I looked for the Big Black Dog’s belly button, but I couldn’t find it.  There was too much fur.

And I think that’s all I am going to say about belly buttons.  For today.

Big Black Dog gazes at camera, not at navel.  No navel in sight

Navels are relatively close to your pelvis:  @mypelvicfloor

Navels are probably relevant to Facebook

A New Chapter of The Little Savage and the Hermit Comes out tonight!  I don't think that there will be navels in it.  There are pelvic basins in it.

The Little Savage has a new twitter account @littlesavage2.

I mentioned navels 3 to 4 times, even though I said that I was finished.
Now I am finished.

Blackberry Blues on the Bus

Blackberry Blues on the Bus

The sky gets dark. 
A shitty poem begins. 
And ends. 

Have a nice day, I said to the crossing guard who is on duty where my bus leaves. It is painful for me to say this. Why is it so hard for me to wish someone well? Because the offering is pathetic? Because the crossing guard has no teeth and his voice is squeaky from smoking and his skin is leathery and yellow? When I get off this bus it will be hard for me to say thank you to the busdriver. Thank you, I will murmur. There is hardly time to wish him a nice day. Do you want gratitude or a good wish? I will never ask the bus driver this question. I hardly notice his face or if the driver changes from day to day. 

Children step on with their grandmother. The boy and the girl with knapsacks. The girl is the youngest and her knapsack has princesses on it. She is probably seven or eight. Too old to believe that princesses are real.  Keep wishing anyways. The grandmother's mouth is drooped into a permanent frown. She does not strike me as a particularly unhappy person. Some of us have happy faces, some of us don't. No one will ever quote me on this. On the boy's knapsack, there are cars. Red knapsack with cars. 

A lady gets off. She is fatter than I ever want to be. Many people on the bus are fat. Maybe driving burns more calories than we think. I know someone who thinks that calories don't exist. The theory is not working out for him. Rita macneil, cape breton's beloved singer died at age 68 of stomach surgery. In my last sentence, I resisted mentioning how fat Rita Macneil was. Now I am not resisting mentioning how fat Rita MacNeil was. She was very fat. You could see her a mile away. Poor thing. Poor little thing. 

We passed a cemetery many blocks ago but I was talking about something else.

 This morning I woke up at 4:55 a.m. and had to shit immediately. I shit and flushed the toilet three times consecutively. On the third time, the shit was watery diarrhea. Maybe everything is getting clogged up in my spleen. Like the fat psychic said was Robbie's problem. The fat psychic at the Psychic Fair took Robbie's pulse in six places on Robbie's wrist and he said that he could detect Robbie's spleen and small intestines and diarrhea and mommy issues. The fat psychic didn't take my pulse.

The handsome man with yellowy white greasy hair got on the bus. He always gets on at Sobey's. Yesterday he started wearing sunglasses. I don't know how to describe sunglasses very well. They are grey. Long square ovals. The Montessori children know the difference between ovals and elipses. There may also be an ovoid. And everything changes when the shapes go three dimensional. None of this information is stored very well in my head. The old man is chewing gum. He turns his gaze, scanning the bus perhaps. Hard to say with his sunglasses. Is he looking at the children with knapsacks? Soon he will get off. He's hardly on longer than a few sentences. There he goes. A burgundy hoody under a light jean jackets. Light jeans on his legs. He walks with his feet turned out, but only slightly. He is nowhere near the size of Rita MacNeil. 

The other day the children found a worm crawling in the dirt in front of the balance beam outside. They stared at it for 5, 10 , 15 minutes. Whenever one child tried to poke the worm with a stick, the other children screamed at him. All the children with sticks were boys. Is he dead? They kept asking. They also asked what worms ate. Dirt, I said. And then they poop it out and they eat it again. I am mentioning the worms and the poop and the dirt because soon the worms will eat Rita MacNeil and she will turn into worm shit. First worm food.  Then worm poop. Worm food, worm poop.  Over and over again. And the phrase, "worm food, worm poop," only has one vowel in it which is rewarding.

The End

When I got off the bus, I said "Thank you" to the driver.
The children found another worm on the playground.
Once I was almost arrested on the playground.
Almost is a relative term.
Today is Glendon Murphy's birthday! He must be twenty-one years old.  Happy Birthday, Glendon Murphy!

Happy Facebook Adventures to All!

The Bird found a worm and tweeted: @mypelvicfloor!
@littlesavage2

The Little Savage and the Hermit, Chapter One

The Little Savage and the Hermit, Chapter Two

End of Advertisements.

Busted

So everyone is posting about the bombings at the Boston Marathon.  I read one article about it and discovered that people had their arms and legs bombed off and I decided that I couldn’t take it anymore. 

I can't deal with other people's bombed arms and legs.  (See this post on  the woman with no arms)

Someone called the cops on me this afternoon.  I totally deserved it.  The Small Children School where I work is located inside a church.  Today was a busy day for the Church People.  Some Christian ladies had a big event where they learned about cataracts and tried on different kinds of sunglasses.  Afterwards, there was some sort of debriefing with cake and cookies and coffee.  In the sanctuary upstairs, an organist was enthusiastically preparing for a concert that I have yet to be invited to.

All this is just to say that by the time my break came around, there was nowhere to meditate. 

Since today was one of the first days I didn’t have to wear my obnoxiously heavy Northface Parka, I decided to take a go at it outside.  I walked past the windows of the school and around the corner, where the children wouldn’t be able to see me.  Even though I wouldn’t be able to hear them, I didn’t want them gawking at me as I sat still with my eyes closed. The idea irritated me and so I hid.

My meditation session began rather unserenely.  I was late.  Cars kept driving by.  Images of amputation permeated my psyche.  The internal lining of my uterus is just ceasing to bleed today and so I am in the process of mourning every baby I never gave birth to, every book I haven’t written, every person I have failed, and everything I’ve ever meant to do, but have not done.  Plus I inhaled too much dark chocolate after a somewhat nauseating lunch with four-year olds. 

I looked at my timer.  Barely ten minutes in.  Persevere.  Be like Kino MacGregor.  Return to the breath.  I hear a car, closer than normal.  Footsteps.  No one ever comes here.  Who is it?

I look up and two cops are approaching the fence behind the playground.

“We’ve had some calls,” the female cop said.  “Do you know that this is a daycare?”

“Yah,” I said.  “I work here.” 

“You work at the daycare?”

“Yes.  I’m meditating.  Usually I meditate in the church.  There’s an organ concert.”  I didn’t elaborate about the cataracts Christian ladies’ group.

“Oh okay.  Don’t worry about it.”

Inside each one of us is an animal, tamed to varying degrees.  But each and every one of us is programmed to feel terror at the sight of cops.  Where does that come from? 

I don’t know.

Oh well.

Some people from the apartments next door had probably looked up from their traumatic Facebook newsfeed and seen that some chick with a maroon and pink jacket and a baby 7-year-old face was sitting on the ground around the corner of a daycare with her eyes closed.  Who knows who she was and what she was doing.   She could have been Very Dangerous. 

Oh well again.

At least now I know that if anyone ever shows up trying to blow my arms and legs off, the children and I will probably be safe.  

End.

A post-script you click on:  Me and Terry Fox

I could get my PhD in Hyperlinks.

I was hyper today.

There is something in the world called SexTweeting.  I learned about it on the bus.  Every day someone on the bus smells like stale crushed mildewed garlic. I take note of this every day.  Today, I figured out how to tweet on my phone and I tweeted.  About the stale crushed mildewed garlic person.   I don't think that it was a Sex Tweet.  

My twitter account is @mypelvicfloor.

A new chapter of The Little Savage and The Hermit comes out tomorrow on the blog 

thelittlesavageandthehermit@blogspot.ca.  I'm not sure if this is a hyperlink or not.

The Little Savage and the Hermit has a Twitter account as well.  It is called @littlesavage2.

The Hermit is not involved.

This is the Exuberant Bodhisattva's Facebook Fan Page

I wonder if you are allowed to have Facebook in jail.  

Bumster Update

Yesterday morning, Jacob and I were examining the "Bumster" book.  If you have been living under a rock and don't know who Bumster is, you will have to read this post immediately.  It should take you all of about thirteen and a half minutes.   Otherwise, I can explain Bumster in three and a half sentences.
Bumster was a ceramic container for jewelry, comprised of two small ovals that were attached with a hinge.  The Montessori children had to perfect their life skills by practicing how to open and close Bumster, among other containers, over and over again.  Then Bumster got dropped a couple of times and shattered.
The biggest regret of my life is letting Bumster die in the garbage can.
I should have brought him home.
Anyways, the Bumster Book, which is also Bumster's favourite book, him being a very narcissistic container, is an illustrated French dictionary for children.  At the end there is an annex of sorts where different categories of nouns are grouped together.
There is a page for animals who live at the pond, and those who live on the farm, and those who live in the ocean, and those who live in the zoo.  How wonderful that we are presenting children with the fact that some animals naturally live in the zoo.  I could be more precise and explain how things really are, but in French, I don't think that they would understand.  Oh well.  After the animals page there is a page for fruit, and one for vegetables.
Jacob and I peered at the page of vegetables.  Jacob hates eating at school. At school, we are not allowed to say we hate something.  Not food.  Not anything.  Instead we have to say, "It is not my favourite."  Eating is not Jacob's favourite. But he seemed very interested in the vegetables page.
I pointed to the spinach and the cabbage and the lettuce.  Les épinards, les choux, la laitue. 
Then I pointed to the carrots and the celery. "Et les carottes, le céléri?" I asked.  "Tu les aimes?"  You like them?  Jacob has been known to nimble on carrots and celery sticks.
But now he was thinking of something else.  Jacob was peering very closely at the picture of the carrot  and the celery.  His nose was almost touching it.  Then he moved his face away from the picture, before pointing to his two favourite vegetables once again.
"That's what Bumster turned into," he said.
So now we know.
End of Bumster Update

Splashnboots Rockin Vegetable Video:

I don't know why I am never invited to be a part of these.

This evening, I tried to learn a children's song in sign language and the movements brought me to tears.  How unusual.

Also, I decided to post me and Simon's first book, The Little Savage and the Hermit online.  The first chapter's already up.  I'm next.  Read it all here:  http://thelittlesavageandthehermit.blogspot.ca/

I'm on Twitter @mypelvicfloor.

The Little Savage and the Hermit are on Twitter  @littlesavage2

And likes at the Ecstatic Adventures of the Exuberant Bodhisattva are still free.