Menstrual Blood, Peanut Butter

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,” she'd call 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 and showed it to 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 vegannaise.   Beside the ketchup, there are jars of salsa and pickled turnips. Somewhere around there, you will also see 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 peanut butter menstrual blood 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.



Menstrual Blood, Peanut Butter
Exuberant Bodhisattva on Facebook
Twitter: @mypelvicfloor
 
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I Do Not Want Jesus's Love Today

This morning found me void of my usual defences.  My wonderful coastal boyfriend had taken our big black dog to the vet.  I hadn’t done my usual two hours of Ashtanga yoga, since I am shedding the internal lining of my uterus and I don’t want to subject myself to a nose bleed by inverting my pelvis.  And finally, I had spent more than five strenuous moments sifting through my sparse closet in attempts to determine which hand-me-down outfit was more likely to get me hired.  When the doorbell rang, I had decided on a mini-skirt, but had not yet gotten around to putting on underwear.  Thus, I arrived at the door with no big black dog, no yoga, no internal lining of my uterus, and no underwear.  I was ill-equipped. 

The visitors were two balding middle-aged men wearing ill-fitting casual dress-pants, button-up shirts, and light fall jackets.  It’s almost certain that there was underwear beneath their unflattering pants. The heavyset man in the front looked like the younger of the two.   The hair around his bald spot was just starting to go grey and his face was full and jolly.  The man in the back was paler, and thinner and more stooped over.

“Good morning,” said the man closest to the door. 

“Good morning,” I replied.  They must be looking for Rob, I thought.  He is important in these parts, whereas pretty much nobody around here knows about me.  Then again, they might be starting a new business.  Do they need business partners?  I have nothing to invest, but I do own one short skirt.  I could go door-to-door.

“We’re just walking around, visiting.  Talking to folks,” explained the older man in the back.   

“Oh, I see,” I said.  Then the two men pulled out their books.  Leather bibles that zipped and unzipped to reveal slick, flimsy pages with columns of writing.  “Oh, I see,” I said again.  Our exchange was not going to be lucrative. 

“We know people are very busy these days,” said the younger man in front.  Too busy for Jesus.  The man in the back stepped closer.

“I’m not busy,” I said flatly.  “I don’t work.” 

Both men flipped to the book of Revelation.  The younger man continued his spiel:  “Do you know the Bible at all?” he asked.

“I’ve read the Bible,” I answered.

These men didn’t know, but in the past I have made exceedingly thorough attempts to become a Christian.  At sixteen, I used to go on long bike rides, sacrificing a healthy body weight just to find Jesus.  At nineteen, I was baptized in the United Church.  I began a major in New Testament Studies.  Then I quit school and moved to a Catholic community for people with intellectual disabilities, in the hopes that Jesus would reveal himself as I cleaned toilets and changed diapers.  While I was living in the community, I attended Catholic mass twice a week for two years.  All this time I kept listening for “Jesus whispers,” the soft voice inside my heart, proclaiming “Erica, you are my beloved daughter.  With you, I am well pleased."  Inside my heart, there has never been any sound but the slow, steady swishing of blood.  It turns out that Jesus isn’t that pleased with me.  It turns out that Jesus loves me much less than he loves everyone else.  Jesus should have whispered this fact to the men at my doorstep.  They are wasting their time.  Today is a very bad day for a Revelation. 

“So you know about the apocalypse then?” asked the white-haired men at the back.

Swish, swish, went the blood inside my heart.  Drip, drip, went the blood from my uterine wall into the menstrual cup between my legs.  A cool breeze flew up my skirt.  I knew all about the apocalypse. I could not wait for the apocalypse.  I began to cry. 

“I don’t want to hear this right now,” I said.  And just like that, I became one of those repugnant human beings who close the door on the Jesus people. 

The End.

Exuberant Bodhisattva on Facebook
Twitter: @mypelvicfloor
I Let Go by Erica J. Schmidt

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