Our bodies, our selves

Years ago, and well into my seventh month of pregnancy in New York City, it occurred to me one day that, as I would be unable to run from a fast predator, I was lucky not to run into an urban panther. These weekly blogs will consider women's lives from the perspective of one who is now older.

We carry our eggs before we are out of our mother’s womb. Girl children become something else when menstruation begins. Women continue this monthly fertility ritual, interrupted only by pregnancy -- which epitomizes how vastly we can physically change. But menopause brings it all to a halt; it wasn’t called “THE change” for no reason. 

Sometimes this overhauling of the cycle takes months, sometimes years. My body took an extended time to close up the fertility shop. During those years, I began to observe myself constantly, alert to changes, taking measure of mood, looking for signals. 

What disturbed me at first was the unraveling of pattern in a body whose rhythms I long had known. Every month I had recognized the awareness of my beauty that meant ovulation; two weeks later, feelings of utter ugliness and raw-edged nerves signaled the imminence of menstrual flow. I was so familiar with the aspects of my body’s cycle, it was ingrained. I ate and read and dressed accordingly, in unconscious, not self-conscious, reflection of where I was in my cycle.

I never could understand those girls in high school who called the incipient ability to bear a child “the curse,” though at least they were straightforward in their self-prejudice. Those girls who used euphemisms like “my friend” troubled me more; what had forced them to live with such dishonesty?

Neither curse nor friend, it’s a small monthly miracle. Every thirty-four days my body, with no attention from my conscious self or will, made a place to nourish and cradle a cluster of mingled DNA (another miracle) that would become a baby. How do our bodies know exactly what is needed and how to do it, performing all the necessary functions, omitting no details? This brilliance of our biological bodies, constantly going about the agenda of potential, is thrilling. 

It seems a privilege. I’ve made jokes about redoing my uterine walls and have had my share of cramps and floods, but, truth be told, I felt honored to be entrusted with such important work, and grateful that my strong body did it so well. 

I think the conventional wisdom of menstruation as a burden is a sham, was brought to us by the same vandals who reduced the magnificent ability to bear a child to craving pickles and ice cream. In the 1950s and 1960s, maternity clothes were all tiny pleats, bows, Peter Pan collars -- as if, instead of having a baby, a pregnant woman was a baby. The power was drained away.

But the power is in us. Living this cycle of monthly participation in creation, as women do, makes those philosophical ponderings on the separation of mind and body unbelievably ridiculous. No one who has gotten her period on the day of the prom, or who has felt cramping pain that melted her knees, has any questions about whether the mind and body are separate. Such intellectual posings are a waste of time; they are so often set up as conflicting poles -- either/or -- and the body/mind setup is all of a piece.

We need all our power to handle the last shift; menopause rattles everything we know about ourselves. I lived my rhythms instinctively; they had been my standard for thirty-five years. Then it began to change, was different every month, like a butterfly that repeatedly alights but, for reasons indiscernible, each time rises into the air again. 

The entire process of being a female human is remarkable. We undergo change as an integral part of who we bodily are. And what of our spirit, our heart, our soul, our inner light? I think the changes we live also deepen our spirit but, unlike our bodily changes, soul change is also a conscious effort. 

Be alert, my soul.