Nonfiction / Rachel Neve-Midbar

:: Traveling the Red Road: The Life of a Menstruant ::

I am bleeding the day he disappears.

A wave of cramps hits me, making me nauseous. This body, my body—my body that bleeds—how has it led me to this constricted place?

~Ψ~

“Thy soule foule beast is like a menstrual cloath,
Polluted with unpardonable sinners.”

—Barnabe Barnes, The Devil’s Charter

~Ψ~

“Blood is magic
Blood is holy
And wholly riveting of our attention.”

—Judy Grahn, “All Blood is Menstrual Blood”

~Ψ~

All the kids on Brookside Circle play together. I am perhaps four years old. A. and I are kneeling at the edge of the road, drawing with chalk on the concrete. A. tells me her mother pees blood. “No,” I tell her, “Mommies don’t pee blood.” She offers to show me and takes me into her house at the end of the block. We remove our shoes in the front hall and walk up the stairs. A. enters her mother’s bathroom first and then motions me to join her. We look together into the bowl of a beige toilet where a bit of paper stained with the smallest whiff of blood floats in the water. “Will she die?” I ask.

~Ψ~

“the flowers,” “the courses,” “the terms,” “the misery,” “monthly disease,” “the time of her wonted grief,” “excrement,” “those evacuations of the weaker sex,” “the moon,” “weeping womb,” “package of troubles,” “jam & bread,” “on the rag,” “too wet to plow,” “a snatch box decorated with red roses,” “can’t go swimming,” “tide’s in,” “tide’s out,” “flying baker” (a Navy signal meaning “keep off”), “riding the red tide,” “the red flag is up”

—Houppert, The Curse

~Ψ~

When my sister gets her first period, she is perfection, light. In the guest bathroom: right across from the TV-room where my mother is always splayed in her orange easy chair. Just the right age for a good girl: thirteen and a half. “Mommy, Mommy,” she calls, “I got my period.” How my mother touches her, “Honey I’m so proud,” smiles, takes her into her room to get belt and pad. Our father is equally proud as he has her dress in Danskin, put up her hair. He then spends hours photographing her, over and over: profile, chin up, chin down. “Now take down your hair.”

~Ψ~

“The word ‘taboo’ itself even comes from a Polynesian word that both means ‘sacred’ and ‘menstruation’”

—Why Are Periods Still a Taboo in 2018?

~Ψ~

I know it’s the time for bad girls when mine comes just two months later. Only twelve, the age for sluts, for trash, for other dirty things. In the upstairs kid’s bathroom.

Maybe I wasn’t born for joy because just before I discover the red stain I am joyful at a sixth-grade square dance. Do-si-do. Just once allowing myself to fly around the gym not worrying how I look. And then this. “Don’t forget,” my body whispers, “don’t forget what you are.”

So, I tell no one, stuff my underwear full of toilet paper, go on as usual, a secret between my legs.

~Ψ~

“The duplicity of blood as both the source of life and the cause of corruption was concentrated most in medieval and early modern perceptions of menstrual blood. Despite the menstruating body’s function as an exemplary model for nature’s expulsive and self-regulating power, menstrual blood itself carried the period’s anxieties about woman’s moral duplicity and biological weakness. Menstrual blood and menstruating woman were thought to be corrupting: they could bring madness, disease, and death to those who touched or looked upon them….”

—Johnson, Decamp, Blood Matters

~Ψ~

I’m not really sure what happens to you if you swim while menstruating. Probably it’s lethal if my mother’s reaction is any indication. So, because of a swim invitation, I finally tell my secret.

I arrange myself in the guest bathroom, call, “Mommy, Mommy.” She does ask me what the bloody wad of school paper towel is in the toilet. “Nothing,” I mumble and push the flusher. Then, yes, the belt. Yes, menstrual pad that covers me from naval to backbone: though those don’t last too long. It’s 1975. Tampons will be possible. Swimming too. Eventually even for my mother.

But, no. No Danskin. No Leica lens. Now in the moments my father gets close enough to me he lifts my arm and yanks on the new hairs growing there. And laughs. If I fight him off, he takes a pinch of newly budded breast. And laughs harder.

~Ψ~

“I have periods now, like normal girls; I too am among the knowing, I too can sit out volleyball games and go to the nurse’s for aspirin and waddle along the halls with a pad like a flattened rabbit tail wadded between my legs, sopping with liver-colored blood.”

—Margaret Atwood, Cat’s Eye

~Ψ~

The summer after my second year at Sarah Lawrence I meet D. and start to keep kosher and Shabbat. The paperwork is complete for my junior year abroad, and sometime that summer I will leave for Israel. I tell myself I am looking for freedom inside a system of law, but really I am looking to run as fast as I can into some other life.

I follow D.’s family to a cottage on a lake in Pennsylvania. My otherness is always on display. They don’t like the way I pronounce “Torah.” They don’t like my bare feet, and when I walk around the house in socks they say I dress like a mourner. His little sister asks if I am a shiksa.

When I menstruate I take a tampon from the box hidden in my closet. I carefully wrap what is used in toilet paper, set it in the basket. One morning his mother takes me by the arm and pulls me into the bathroom. She shows me a pile of old newspaper inside the bathroom cabinet. She is 5’10,” European; upright and proper, her girdle always in place, even under her bathing suit. In her accented English she tells me I must wrap my used tampons in newspaper. No one can know. “No one needs to see that.” She is almost spitting.

~Ψ~

OED. taboo | tabu, adj. and n.
Etymology: < Tongan ˈtabu
The putting of a person or thing under prohibition or interdict.

~Ψ~

“Women’s regular bleeding engenders phantoms.”

—Paracelsus

~Ψ~

D. later follows me to Israel, asks me to marry him. I want to say, “Wait.” I want to say, “I don’t know who I am.” But I see how much he needs me.

I am 21 years old.

~Ψ~

Leviticus 15:19 states: “A woman who has a flow of blood in her body shall be a ‘niddah’ for seven days, and all who touch her shall be ritually impure until sundown.”

Leviticus 18:19 states: “A woman in the ritually impure state of niddah, you shall not approach for sexual relations.”

The first verse refers to the laws of ritual impurity (tumah v’taharah), most of which are no longer applicable today.

The second verse, however, appears in the list of the most severely forbidden sexual relationships, such as adultery and incest, which remain fully relevant to this day.

“A woman ceases to be niddah—and returns to a state of ritual purity (taharah)—by confirming that bleeding has ceased (hefsek taharah), counting seven blood-free days (shivah neki’im), and immersing in a proper mikveh.”

—The Niddah Status

~Ψ~

C. is my kallah teacher. She has a face creased to smile and she smiles a lot. She is also a very stringent woman, careful in her practice, and she passes that carefulness on to me. In the weeks leading up to my wedding I visit her twice a week. She teaches me how to keep the laws of family purity: how to understand the workings of my body, to come close to my rhythms and join together with them, to watch for stains, to examine, to check, to prepare and finally, to immerse my body deep in living water and return each time to myself.

~Ψ~

The night before my wedding, I walk to the mikveh with my mother and C. I take my time preparing. I have never before given myself this permission—this concentration. What can I tell you about this carefulness, attention to myself with no one to witness, no one to watch, no one to ridicule? No one looking to see how deep and long I bow during shmona-esrei, no one to taste a good meal I’ve prepared so I can see the pleasure in their eyes. Here in the mikveh bathroom there is only me. Does God care if I comb my eyebrows? I have no idea. I only know that in the warm living water His hands reach around me, cradle me as I loosen my fingers and half open my eyes so the water can touch every part of me at once. I bow my head, fold my hands across my breasts, “Blessed are you, God. Blessed.”

~Ψ~

My mother asks me after if I feel different. “Yes,” I answer and she looks surprised. We don’t say anything else.

~Ψ~

The next morning I rise early. I go to the apartment in Jerusalem that D. and I have rented to make up our bed. I am fasting and it is summer, so I take a taxi to the Kotel where I pray for happiness, for peace. Yes, perhaps that would be enough.

It would be enough to hang some dresses in a closet. To open that closet in the morning and choose what to wear. Finally to just be home.

After a long Viduy at the Kotel, I make my way west and south to the Bayit Vegan neighborhood, to the Holyland Hotel. There I will stand under the chuppah.

~Ψ~

“The Halakha details strict rules governing every aspect of the daily lives of Jews, including the sexual lives of married couples. Jewish law expressly forbids any physical contact between spouses during the days of menstruation and for a week thereafter. According to stipulated ritual, an Orthodox Jewish wife is responsible for ensuring that she is no longer exhibiting vaginal bleeding by swabbing herself carefully with a linen cloth for each of the seven days following the overt cessation of the menstrual flow. The seven clean days after menstruation culminate with the wife’s obligation to immerse that night in the Mikvah, the ritual bath. It is only at the end of the Niddah interval, after the ritual bath, that spouses are permitted to physically touch one another. This ‘‘two weeks on/two weeks off’’ pattern of contact characterizes marital life until menopause, with two notable time frame exceptions: pregnancy and nursing (until postpartum menstruation resumes), when uninterrupted contact is permitted. These ‘Laws of Family Purity’ represent an integral aspect of identity as an Orthodox Jew.”

—Guterman, Archives of Sexual Behavior

~Ψ~

The first mikveh night about a month after we are married, I come home to find fresh sheets on the bed, a spaghetti meal, a beautiful note of love and hope for our future family. D. is wearing my short, black-silk kimono. It makes his green-gray eyes shine. Wow, I think as I fall into his arms, I could get used to this marriage thing.

That is the first and last time. I never see this version of him again.

~Ψ~

I remember the stillness, the stillness of thunder left behind, the stillness of knees held tight together, breath exhaled once, twice.

Over time, each second, sweat on my palms. Broken records stored in a closet, their shards gleam in the darkness, each groove a year of life. Moments on the floor, surrounded by books written in a language no one even reads anymore.

Don’t move or you’ll upset something. Wait. Don’t speak. Someone might think well of you. Hold your breath and time will stop, a sun held between my two palms, no bigger than the space between my fingers.

There is always that stillness. Quiet quakes in my chest, drips down my back. A chair flies across the room, hits me right on the temple. For some reason I live. Make-up covers the bruise, covers everything. He hands me a glass of something dark to drink. It changes from purple to black, a sun dropping to the bottom of an ocean.

Was it me who pushed back the entire wall of my house to become the doll inside?

~Ψ~

From the diary of Jane Sharp in 1671:

“sometimes flow too soon, sometimes too late, they are too many or too few, or are quite stopt that they flow not at all. Sometimes they fall by drops, and again sometimes they overflow; sometimes they cause pain, sometimes they are voided not by the womb but some other way; sometimes strange things are sent forth by the womb.”

—Sara Read, Menstruation and the Female Body in Early Modern England

~Ψ~

Twice I have hemorrhaged, left bathrooms looking like murder scenes.

~Ψ~

I will tell you about the second time first. It’s the easier story. It’s an after birth story, from the time right after my youngest son was born. My hormones mis-calibrating, my uterus six weeks after the C‑section, just starting to return to itself, suddenly filling with blood balloons like a washing machine gyrating too much soap.

In my paper gown in the examination room the Dr. tells me to take off my underwear, sit on the chair that becomes a bed with stirrups. How can I undress when I am gushing blood like a faucet? When I glance down, he says with so much kindness, “Don’t worry. I have seen everything.”

Later when I walk into the operating room for the D&C, the Dr. is waiting for me, capped and gowned all in white, his hands clasped in front of himself, swaying slightly as if in prayer, he looks like a groom, completely kittled, waiting for me under the chuppah. What would my life be like if I had married instead this kind man?

~Ψ~

“we need a god who bleeds now 
a god whose wounds are not 
some small male vengeance”

—Ntozake Shange, “We Need a God who Bleeds Now”

~Ψ~

“red light,” “red letter day,” “my redheaded friend,” “cherry in the sherry,” “the red king,” “traveling the red road,” “the red sea’s out,” “the reds are in,” “bloody mary,” “the chick is a communist,” “white cylinder week,” “mother nature’s gift,” “it’s raining down south,”

—Houppert, The Curse

~Ψ~

The first time I hemorrhage I am in my mother-in-law’s house. I am ten weeks pregnant. My arms are already full with a two year old and a ten month old. I carry them up and down the steep stairs to the attic where we sleep. Something hurts. I am exhausted. I can’t do anything but sit all day, letting the girls play at my feet. Something is wrong. Something is wrong with this pregnancy. A pull. It hurts.

Finally it tears. Something tears inside my abdomen. The pain is excruciating. I set the girls down, run to the bathroom. There is blood everywhere. I clean up as best I can and go downstairs to tell my mother-in-law that I think I am having a miscarriage.

She looks at her watch, tells me we can’t go to the hospital for a few more hours, until her husband comes home to watch my twelve-year-old sister-in-law. I feed my girls dinner, get them tucked in.

On the drive into Manhattan several hours later she tells me “it’s all for the best.” But I know she is wrong. I am twenty-four years old, mother of two, and her son blames me for every bad thing that happens to us. Everything. Both big and small: when he loses his driver’s license from too many tickets. When he fights with someone in shul. From our money problems to his own desire for other women, everything is my fault. I can’t imagine what he will do to me if I lose this pregnancy.

~Ψ~

taboo: adj. (syn.) illegal, restricted, unmentionable, unacceptable

~Ψ~

The baby isn’t dead, though I won’t find this out until the next day. At NYU Medical, the bed they give me is broken, the floor is covered with blood. Not mine. I am no longer bleeding.

The Dr. who examines me tells me my cervix is still closed. Matter-of-factly she explains this means: 1. that the fetus was already expelled and my cervix then closed right back up after her like a slammed door. Or 2. that I have yet to expel the little life and that she will find her way out in the next few days. Or 3. that I am still pregnant. “So why all the blood then?” I ask. She shrugs.

No blood test, no ultrasound, I ride back to Queens, absently listening to my mother-in-law talk about the man in the bed next to mine who had slashed his foot on a can top when he stepped on his kitchen garbage. Forever after, as long as I will know her, she will very carefully insert the top back into the empty can before throwing it away. She will tell anyone who is willing to listen that you can’t be too careful with the torn top of a can.

The next day I drink a half a gallon of water and travel alone back into Manhattan for an ultrasound to see my daughter. No, she is not lying quietly inside me. She is not sucking her little thumb. On the screen my daughter is upright and break-dancing just above a placental tear.

~Ψ~

“Many medieval Jewish mystics saw menstruation differently. According to a section of the Zohar, the most popular work of medieval Kabbalah, the menstruant’s title of niddah tells us that ‘God flees from her.’ God abandons menstruants because God cannot suffer impurity. The niddah repels the forces of the holy, and her spiritual vacuum is immediately filled by the forces of evil and impurity.”

—Zohar, 3:226a (RM)

~Ψ~

There is always something we woman can’t do, somewhere we can’t go, something we can’t touch because we menstruate. We are not allowed to touch the Torah, even when it’s “dressed,” meaning there is a boundary between the holy vellum and our tainted fingers. We cannot dance with the holy scroll on the holiday of Simchat Torah, even if we have gone to the mikveh and are as ritually clean as our husbands. Why? Because then “people will see” who is in niddah among the women and who is not and that is “immodest.”

My husband loves the idea of my immodesty and whenever he wants to ridicule me and set me in my place he brings it up. My immodest dress, my immodest speech, my immodest behavior. When I wear sandals that “show my toes” or a dress in a shade of red, when I stick my tongue out at him in the street, when I use the word “putz” at a family party—any of these and many more are reasons to punish me.

He travels often, leaving us alone for weeks at a time. He never needs to be home for any reason because I am always there. My menstruation gives my husband complete control over me, it renders me weak, dirty, different. This is the tool of his power.

~Ψ~

And when I am “immodest”? Yes, there are punishments. Sometimes it is the set of his jaw, a cold stare. Sometimes it is a chilly silence that can last for days or weeks. It might be the havdalah wine thrown in my face in front of the children when I sing too loudly or my credit cards cut to pieces if I buy something without permission. Or it might be a backhand to the face or being thrown to the basement floor, his hands around my neck if I smile too warmly with the dishwasher repairman.

~Ψ~

How often does he show me his back on mikveh nights? After all the effort of bathing and the dressing, the undressing, the dunking, the dressing once again only to find him already asleep, turned away from me.

~Ψ~

“Come you spirits  
That tend on mortal thoughts, unsex me here, 
And fill me from crown to the toe, top-full 
Of direst cruelty. Make thick my blood, 
Stop up th’access and passage to remorse, 
That no compunctious visitings of nature 
Shake my fell purpose, not keep peace between 
Th’effect and it. Come to my woman’s breasts, 
And take my milk for gall, you murdering ministers”

—Shakespeare, Macbeth, (1.5.41–49)

~Ψ~

“Contact with [menstrual blood] turns new wine sour, crops touched by it become barren, grafts die, seed in gardens are dried up, the fruit of trees fall off, the edge of steel and the gleam of ivory are dulled, hives of bees die, even bronze and iron are at once seized by rust, and a horrible smell fills the air; to taste it drives dogs mad and infects their bites with an incurable poison.”

—Pliny the Elder, Natural History: A Selection

~Ψ~

I just want him to stop being so angry. I pray for this every week when I light my Shabbat candles and again when I burn a small piece of challah dough. In the mikveh I dunk seven times instead of the regular three and pray finally, finally, for peace.

~Ψ~

And then comes the day he disappears. He does call—once. I ask him where he is, but he won’t tell me. Instead he telephones our daughters, tells them he is in Hawaii.

Usually he telephones constantly, but he doesn’t call again. I wait. Every day. I am ice inside, walking ice as I pack the kids’ lunches, as I fold laundry, as I take care of the company banking, watch the trading accounts. I know he can’t be alone; he always needs someone to talk to.

But he doesn’t call. Not Tuesday, not Thursday. Not before Shabbat to wish his children a good week.

My clean days come and I don’t check; my mikveh night arrives and I don’t go. When he finally comes home I am still in niddah. I tell him this when he reaches his arm out to bring me close and says, “Babe, come to bed.”

Later that day he reveals that he wasn’t in Hawaii alone, that he is in love with someone else, has been for the past eighteen months. It turns out she is the consultant he hired to help us locate gold mine deals in Nevada. It turns out there are no deals in Nevada. It turns out I have been paying $5,000 a month, about $40,000 total of company money, to his mistress, and that it was me who put through and signed the wire transfer orders.

I ask him to leave.

~Ψ~

“we need a god who bleeds
spreads her lunar vulva & showers us in shades of scarlet
thick & warm like the breath of her”

—Ntozake Shange, “We Need a God Who Bleeds Now”

~Ψ~

In the dream we are as we are now, aged, layered, yet our passion grows as it always did, our appetite for each other in my cries that still echo thirty years later down from the long corridor of a college dorm, our desire takes root, intact and as you reach your hand between the parted branches of my legs there flows a Niagara of blood—the blood that so repelled you shoots forth, an artery opened, pushed out of me with each heartbeat, a river that moves the water-wheel that circles between the secrets of life and death, and remains in that pungent place between, that place I am in now where my breasts hang, two tears upon my chest and my face is an abandoned land.

~Ψ~

I am menstruating the day we go to the Rabbinut for the ghett. And I am acutely aware of it as the three rabbis have me stand sideways in front of their dais and hold my hands up to receive the folded vellum document. “Higher,” they say, “higher.” I stretch my hands over my head. I can feel their eyes moving up and down my body.

~Ψ~

OED: taˈbooness n. the state or condition of being taboo.

1974 Verbatim I. i. 4/1 The tabooness of fuck.

~Ψ~

Then come the years alone. My menstruation starts to change, my periods getting longer, stronger, lasting for weeks with days when I can’t leave the house because I need to change my pad/tampon combo every hour.

~Ψ~

The moon rises full, overwhelming the dark sky and all of us on the deck of this boat in Yafo port tonight. We are all women, praying and meditating together. M., sitting next to me, tells me her story: how she left her parents’ religious home for college and never went back. How after graduation she got a job on the sea and, for the next twenty years moved from job to job, from port to port, from ocean to ocean. “I have never slept with a man who wouldn’t go down on me when I had my period,” she tells me.

Incredulous, I ask, “Not one?”

~Ψ~

My girls are getting older. They are young women. They reject the pill; spend long weeks hiking in the desert, working on kibbutz, traveling the world with backpacks. They ask me to order them menstrual cups from Amazon. Small rubber bowls to be inserted inside: healthier and better for the environment. They tell me their blood will be used to water some organic garden. I wonder, can they taste themselves in each tomato bite?

~Ψ~

I buy a pair of hiking boots, look at myself in the mirror. There are no lines on my face.

~Ψ~

I google “Tel Aviv clubs for the older set”; I google “Best online dating sites in Israel.” A catalogue of faces. What many of these guys are into, I learn, is mutual masturbation via Skype. So many of them are wearing baseball caps and shades—incognito and holding their computers.

One guy keeps nudging me to meet in person. His face stands out, sculpted and strong. F. writes in English, already a relief.

I haven’t dated anyone except my husband since I was nineteen. I slip into a filmy red blouse, spread Jo Malone Lime Blossom along my neck and wrists and head to Tel Aviv.

~Ψ~

I have no idea where I am—a dark room, a nightlight switching from red to blue to the backbeat of what sounds like old disco. He touches me, kisses me, undresses me. His arms are long, reach around me. The sandpaper of his hands moves over every part of my body. My eyes adjust and I see him, long lines of satin skin, taut and strong. And his cock. Thick, so heavy it doesn’t stand away from his body, beautifully proportioned. He is talking to me. Whispering that he doesn’t do well with condoms, that he will lose his erection. I am on my back on his bed; he is standing over me. I think, “I want this.” I want this more than I have wanted anything in my life. Acronyms like STDs and AIDS flit through my mind. Six children, all mine. Tomorrow. I will deal with the consequences tomorrow. Tonight I just want the gift on this bare cock in me. “Yes,” I say, and as he slips inside, a forearm under each of my knees, he carries me through a door and into the life of my own desire.

~Ψ~

It’s like this every time we see each other. Electric. No conversation, very little sleep. I would happily see F. every night, but he tells me he “has church.” Monday night church, Thursday night church. Lots of church. Really?

We average twice a week and I become a stretched cord of desire. I walk around the house waiting for him to call and when he does, I fly to the car, speed all the way to his lips, his hands, his penis. That beautiful cock that soon becomes a divining rod to my uncertain menstruation. Our sex calls my body to bleed. More time apart. But not like D. Not Orthodox apart. No, F. will still get his: in my hands, my mouth, against my ass.

~Ψ~

“I fell off the roof,” “I’ve got my flowers,” “I’ve got my friend,” “I’ve got the grannies,” “lady in the red dress,” “Grandma’s here,” “Aunt Rosa is coming from America,” My redheaded Aunt from Red Bank.”

—Houppert, The Curse

~Ψ~

Finally the day comes when he calls and, as I get ready for a shower, I see a small stain of blood in my panties. And I’m done. Done. It is, after all, the smallest stain and what is this? It’s not some God thing. No, it’s a most human thing. My thing. My body. And I am done with letting it stop me.

I tell him nothing—shower and drive to Tel Aviv. We are together for hours in his pitch-dark room, fall asleep in each other’s arms. The next morning I leave very early to get home to my children.

~Ψ~

For the next five weeks I don’t hear from F. He doesn’t call and when I telephone him the phone rings and rings. When he finally invites me to Tel Aviv it’s to show me the stained sheets. Sheets he never threw away, that have sat all this time in the corner of his room. He holds up the cloth and informs me he wants no part of my “bad-lady juju.”

~Ψ~

Ntozake Shange, we need a “God who bleeds.” Is she here?

~Ψ~

“This is my blood.

A little history of the rules, of those who have them and of those who make them.

The menstrual revolution, in any case, is in progress. And it will probably be the first in the world to be both bloody and peaceful.”

—Élise Thiebaut, “The Menstrual Revolution”

~Ψ~

“The name—of it—is ‘Autumn’— 
The hue—of it—is Blood— 
An Artery—upon the Hill— 
A Vein—along the Road— 
 
Great Globules—in the Alleys— 
And Oh, the Shower of Stain— 
When Winds—upset the Basin— 
And spill the Scarlet Rain— 
 
It sprinkles Bonnets—far below— 
It gathers ruddy Pools— 
Then—eddies like a Rose—away— 
Upon Vermilion Wheels—”

—Emily Dickinson (J 656)

~Ψ~

At last a man steps out of the catalogue of faces, a man who sees me, who lets me know that I am seen. This is pleasure of a whole new kind, a deep pleasure. I am handed drinks before I know I am thirsty. Nothing I do or say ever upsets him.

He touches me, massages me, loves me—everywhere: between my toes, the base of my hairline, the place at where my back meets my buttocks, which he calls “nabakoo.” It might mean “dimple” or “space”; he never says. He does tell me, his voice thick with passion, that nothing is more beautiful. He sees me beautiful and this makes me beautiful. His hands are huge, but they never touch me with anything but gentleness. And they never stop touching me. In the street, in shops, everywhere. And, wherever we go, people stop to look at our grey-haired happiness.

~Ψ~

Two weeks after we start dating, I am accepted as a PhD candidate at a university in California and from that time our relationship forms itself around the knowledge that I am leaving. Four days before I am due to fly, my suitcases mostly packed, I begin to stain. I ask him if he has made love to a woman who is bleeding? He tells me he has not. Then he kneels in front of me, takes my hands in his. His face carries years, years of travel, of hardship, of life, but his eyes hold mine. “We are one body,” he says. “When you bleed, I am also bleeding.”

He makes love to me then, holds nothing back, touches me everywhere. If his penis is covered with blood after, he doesn’t burden me with it, just steps away to wash and comes back to bed where he wraps his arms around me, braids his legs with mine into twisted roots.

~Ψ~

“thirty-eight years and you 
never arrived 
splendid in your red dress 
without trouble for me”

—Lucille Clifton, “to my last period”

~Ψ~

“Our bodies shape-shift and writhe”

—Darcey Steinke, Flash Count Diary

~Ψ~

“Nothing can prepare you for this.”

—Mary Reufle, “Pause”

~Ψ~

I am newly arrived in L.A. for graduate school, staying in a North Hollywood McMansion with friends, when the bleeding becomes full. The bed in the guestroom is massively pillowed, the sheets pristine. Luckily I brought a towel from home to tuck under me at night. Despite this, I still wake in the murky light before dawn, a fresh gush slipping from me.

In the bathroom I reach down to remove my tampon and look at the full pad attached to my underwear, the streaks of brown and purple and maroon there, run a finger over this sunset of color. Sometimes, when it was especially bad with D., I would lock myself in the bathroom, sit on the toilet and lay my head down on my knees. The smell of me in those moments, the scent of how life and death could coincide inside me would bring me comfort. Now, seeing a streak of blood caught on my thumb, I touch it to my tongue before wiping it away, taste the salt and rust of me.

Forty-three years of monthly periods. At fifty-five I am facing the change. The first signs of perimenopause have started to creep in, the heat and foggy brain, the exhaustion. But haven’t I always been changing? Or has my monthly flow kept me in rhythm, provided a back-beat to my life? And in this next iteration, who will this new woman, this new being be? Will I know her, recognize her better than I saw myself at 21? Or accept her as I never did that girl of 12, a girl who identified inside a dime sized, rusty stain the representation of every misunderstanding, every mistake, every embarrassment of her young life? And the biggest question: will I ever find it in me to forgive her?

~Ψ~

From the writer

:: Account ::

My journey into this piece began in the first semester of my PhD at the University of Southern California. I took a class in Shakespeare wherein we analyzed each play via one word from the text. In addition, we each needed to choose one word for our own semester research. In an irreverent moment, on the day we needed to announce our personal words, I chose the word “menstruation,” not comprehending in that moment that I was completely changing the direction of my research and my life. It didn’t take long to realize that I had inadvertently put my finger on the very pulse of the most ancient and pervasive way a patriarchal society has abused women. My answer could only be to tell my own story not only as an Orthodox Jewish wife but as a woman in modern society. How do we undo misogyny? We learned from #MeToo to share our stories and find power in solidarity.

Rachel Neve-Midbar’s collection Salaam of Birds won the 2018 Patricia Bibby First Book Award and was published by Tebot Bach in January 2020. She is also the author of the chapbook What the Light Reveals (Tebot Bach, 2014), winner of The Clockwork Prize. Rachel’s work has appeared in Blackbird, Prairie Schooner, Grist, and The Georgia Review as well as other publications and anthologies. Her awards include the Crab Orchard Review Richard Peterson Prize, the Passenger Poetry Prize, and nominations for The Pushcart Prize. Rachel is currently editing the AuntFlo2020 Project, an anthology of writing about menstruation, and she is currently a PhD candidate at the University of Southern California. More at rachelnevemidbar.com.