Good Blood
Part 1
I walk slowly through the locker room, flip flops smacking against my wet heels. It’s a defiant walk for someone like me, who is usually pretty reserved. My lumpy breasts have begun to sag since I started weaning and are now traced with veins and little scratch marks from hungry hands. I don’t recognize the body in the mirror anymore, so I don’t look. And yet- it feels good to be seen, to exist in a space with so many other breasts also on their own trajectory between perky, lumpy, and saggy. When I get to the steam room, a large black woman looks up at me. Her one piece bathing suit is folded down to expose enormous breasts nearly resting on her thighs. I sense in her a similar defiance to my own. I smile. She smiles back, nodding at me. She says “I been coming here fo twenty two years. This the one place where you can be you and do-you sister.”
“Amen” I reply with a sigh. A-fucking-men I think to myself. I lie down on my towel and stretch my legs out straight and my arms up behind me, taking up a whole row. I feel myself beginning to unwind. It feels good to take up space. A smile crawls into the twisted mouth which I brought in with me. I loudly exhale into the hot steam causing it to swirl. I have learned to enjoy my child-free moments for what they are: fleeting, delicious, strange. I wonder if my boy is still crying. He was when the daycare attendant shooed me out, “Don’t look back he fine he fine go relax.” she insisted. But sometimes, he doesn’t stop crying. When that happens the intercom crackles on and everytime it does I flinch, expecting they will call my name, that they will pull me out of my hot, needed, rest. The last few weeks I haven’t been able to stay more than 15 minutes. I try to push time out of my mind, but I can’t suppress the worry that he is crying. After a few of these minutes of forced relaxation I can’t take it anymore, so I rush back to the showers and my locker, rubbing my shoulders and rolling my head in circles. I put the towels down on a stool in front of me when I see it: a red smear. Like an eye of a hurricane on a weather map; burgundy in the middle, bright red and fading to orange in the tail. Embarrassed, I immediately fold it over. I lean forward slightly, looking between my legs, trying not to tip. I slide my finger down the familiar path to my vagina and place it there for a moment, as if telling my womanhood to shush. I try to look at my hand without anyone noticing, but I know that any woman watching knows this choreography well, has also performed its movements many, many times. It’s faint, but there is the familiar burnt umber film on my finger tip. I stand up and the smell wafts up, that slight smell of iron.
I feel many things at that moment, it has been almost two years since my last period, before my pregnancy and birth. I feel that women suddenly arrive at the gym, the one I was before all this. But before I deal with her, I have to deal with the immediate problem of the blood on the towel. I fold it into my palm and walk to the sink. There are many women around me all looking suspiciously at my hand, so I place the towel down on the counter and pretend to wash my face. It doesn’t make any sense what I’m doing. Why am I hiding this? I unfold the towel and place it under the soap dispenser. The woman next to me looks at the towel and then up at me, before turning around to leave. I feel proud, I wash the blood away and look up at the mirror.
That’s when I see the second splotch of blood. This one is on the towel which I have wrapped around my head, and is a large flash of red just above my left brow. A big rose this time.
Again, shame is the first wave. Did anyone else see? Why didn’t they tell me I was FUCKING BLEEDING. Are they ashamed too? Would I have said something? I take the towel off my head, my knotty wet hair falling on my shoulders. I want to yell at the woman who just left for not telling me I was bleeding. I want to tell her it’s the good kind of blood. The kind that says, I could have made a life if I wanted to, but I didn’t, and now you all know that. I squeeze pink soap on both stains, scrub them and wring out both towels. I twist them up and carry them like a little ball in front of my belly before I toss them in the dirty towel pail. I take little steps to the tampon machine just in case I am dripping blood down my thighs.
The machine stares back at me with two bright blue stickers. 25 CENTS Tampon. 25 CENTS Sanitary napkin. As I make my way back to locker for money, I am thinking about how strange it is to pay for something that is just part of the way our bodies are built. There is a free water fountain, because we are humans who have to drink. The “feminine hygiene product dispenser” is next to the fountain full of endless free water. But the tampons and pads are not free. It feels like a punishment, to have to pay for this. I wonder if anything is for sale in the men’s locker room. I want to ask men to pay for this. I want them to think to offer. But they are never in here, how would they even know?
Back at the machine I smirk at the 25 cents sticker, I put a quarter in, I turn the nob and nothing happens. I read the instructions again, trying to understand. If machines takes coin then it is not empty.
I feel the warmth and wetness inside me begin to seep.
IF MACHINE TAKES COIN THEN IT IS NOT EMPTY. What the fuck does that even mean?
The intercom crackles on and I close my eyes to try to hear the words over the blow dryers. “Attention all - and guests attention all members and guest - Patricia Macys ple- report to Child Watch, Patricia Macys to Childwach, thank.”
I groan and go back to the sinks and grab a few brown paper towels.The women doing their makeup who have been watching me pace back and forth begin to give me that look. They too know this song and dance. But I don’t care about them anymore. Closing the bathroom stall behind me I wad the paper towels up into a ball, and hope it’s enough to not bleed through on my way home. But I don’t care about those feelings anymore. I don’t care about the pre-pregnancy Patti, or the trajectory of breasts on the perk spectrum. I pass the tampon machine one more time as I waddle slowly out, reminded again the price we pay, but am already thinking to the warm moment my son is back in my arms. I am thinking about getting him home and what I’ll be preparing him for lunch and how much I love strawberry season. I’ll sort out my bleeding, but it’s a good blood, a hopeful blood. I’ll spend the rest of the day counting clouds and singing hello and goodbye to each airplane with someone by that blood made.
Part 2
The first time I got my period felt like a gift. By that time, I had already found what my friends and I called the tingly feeling between my legs, and I could tell even at a young age by exploring my own anatomy that this was a place of lush beauty. I was eleven when I found the blood, and I was excited to show my mom. She too, met it with warmth and a sadness I couldn’t yet understand. She hugged me and pet my hair. I can’t remember, but I’m sure she explained my different options, showing me how to apply a pad and that one day I could use what she used, a tampon! I couldn’t wait. She bought a rose plant for me and we planted it in the garden together to celebrate my arrival in womanhood. I remember at 18 leaving home, and looking at my roses, wondering what kind of woman I would become.
For twenty years, every month my body produced and shed a new egg. WIth it, the contents of my uterus which was poised for life, emptied into my underwear, into cotton tampons and pads, into sheets and hands, onto partners and thighs and down the drain into the shower. The anger and tension the few days before it’s arrival, the relief and discomfort the day it arrived. For twenty years or two hundred and forty times, I found a way to live with this thing that made me a woman.
I believe that I felt the precise moment that my pregnancy began, if one can find such a moment. I was on an airplane back from our honeymoon in Norway and expecting my period. I felt a strange cramp before being lulled asleep my the humming warmth and vibration of the flight. A few hours later in the bathroom found brown spots in my underwear. I remember researching this, implantation bleeding. Could this be it? I returned to my seat with the secret hope that it was, took my husbands hand and smiled, saying nothing.
We had hiked deep into an empty fjord and made love in a cabin miles from any road or street light. I hummed and wondered at the stars if the semen would find its way deep enough inside me to spark life. That life, made itself known first as an interruption to that march of monthly periods. There was nausea, swelling, fatigue, dizziness, joy, weeks and weeks of waiting for the first heartbeat, months of growing and heaving and acid reflux and waiting more, hands and feet emerge, finally more news, a boy! And all this time I saw my body go into the machination that it had been anticipating since I planted roses in my mother’s yard twenty years ago.
The woman who stopped getting her period, the one I imagine suspended in the air over the Atlantic Ocean, between Norway and California was tan, plump, had long blonde hair, knew grief but knew fun, felt grounded, went dancing, listening to playlists she made, had favorite TV shows, made art but hated herself for not showing it to anyone.
The girl who planted the roses was scrawny, her hair a dirt blonde that deflected more light than it reflected. She read endlessly and liked to run away into the mud at low tide, chasing crabs into their holes and watching the last blue bits of twilight stretch out on the bay before coming home to her disappointed mother, dirty and exhausted.
And the mother here, on the other end of those periods, standing deflated in the locker room, scrounging for change? Is this what I imagined the other side of womanhood and motherhood to look like? Not the sex and the fun, but the things that happen to a life when a period doesn’t happen, when the universe is turned into another direction, the stars realigned to include a new member looking up at them, wondering about themselves.
That is the true ineffable magic of bringing a new life to the world. It’s not the marks it left on my spirit and body on his way in and out, although they are profound. The miracle is that in the absence of a few months periods I brought him here, and with him that shade of his hair between strawberry blonde and ash, and a love deeper than any void I have dared ponder or look into.