Pre-Flow
A little bucket of monthly brew tips over and spills into my veins. A swirl of three substances called hormones mix and pour through my body, course along every pathway, and twinge both body and mind. Everything begins to tweak, reality shifts a degree off-center, balance is thrown. Premenstrual syndrome has begun.
There has been a dilation in the senses and the world is streaming in. There’s a wobble, an extra charge in the network, a surplus of sensation. More data, more feelings, depth in every direction, and this overload of power needs a clear path to move through. It’s on a mission, fierce and determined, and it’s pissed.
On the day the hormones begin to swirl, it’s like a pair of cloudy shit-stained lenses has descended in front of my eyes — every person looks ugly, everything smells bad, and it's everywhere I turn. It's in my house, at work, in the grocery store, especially in the parking lots, and even my friends seem all wrong. I know the brew is coming on strong when the children’s call of my name — Mom — sends a thrum of fury through my body. I put down the sponge, take a deep breath and say, Please, can someone pick me up and take me away for a few days? A quiet place where the senses can rest? I’m not fit to be around the humans right now.
Forget your favorite jeans, you don’t even fit into your lover’s arms anymore, it’s all elbows and knees. Where once there was music now it’s only noise. Your body has taken on a strange dimension, padded, clumsy, graced with a muffin top and lopsided bra spillage.
While the hormones cascade and the body prepares to bleed, the world becomes all corners and edges. A wide and glorious berth is how the world usually feels, life is like an open swish, and the chosen path feels supported from below. But not on these days. The world is obtuse and everything is an extreme irritant, nothing feels worth it. As things slip from my hands and shatter, as the coffee spills onto my lap and seeps into my crotch, as I walk right into the doorjamb for the third time that day, a core of despair rises.
Tragedies break you apart, shoot right to the heart and rend it. Injustices light a fire under your ass that demands action now. PMS feels like a force that is here to right the wrongs and correct the misguided. When my idle thoughts become an unbidden list of every single thing that so-and-so is doing wrong, I know I’m in deep. I didn’t ask for it, but there it is, a ten-page litany of grievances on a repeating loop in my head, gaining force with each repetition.
The wells of self-pity open to their darkest depths. Hope becomes a pinhole in the sky. Catastrophe is on the verge. At best, everything is an irritant, at worst it’s a nuclear meltdown that demands immediate, emergency action. Like when your husband drank the iced coffee you had looked forward to all afternoon — you stand in front of the open refrigerator blinking while alarms of rage clang through your head and grip your chest, code red, code red. For this, he must die.
We are crushed by the chemicals of ceaselessly cycling fertility, and in turn, we will now crush everything that enters our path.
This is what the earth mama’s say — when we are out of touch with our center, with our goddess awesome, when we are not fitting rightly into our potential, this is when the menstrual experience delivers its most potent dose. If our life is already out of whack, the blood brings the super whack and makes certain we break down into tears of reckoning at least once.
If we are living through some grief, some confusion, a deeper question, PMS will elevate this sensation to another level and amplify it until it cannot be ignored.
If we can tolerate passive-aggressive husbands, entitled lazy children and farting dogs most of the time, this bridge to peace weakens and collapses into a river that is raging. Zero to sixty in a heartbeat, mamma bear is angry and is ready to kick some ass the next time someone isn't nice.
The buffer is gone, the chemicals have sheered it clean off. There is no mediating grace. The oil that keeps the engine smooth and running cool has drained out of the system, and now it’s all friction. Friction that threatens to melt the metal and destroy the machine.
An excerpt from Written While Bleeding.
