Letter 15: Bleeding

Life with a uterus is a life of bleeding. It is the uncertain beginning of bleeding, it is pretending we are not bleeding, it is the hushed cessation of bleeding. And it is the expectation that throughout we bleed, and smile. And smile, and bleed.

When you’re being pursued by a pissed-off mountain lion, you don’t stop to worry about the blisters you might get running away. This is how it felt when I was told my cancer treatment would cause early menopause. I was sitting in my radiotherapist’s office having the Talk. The one in which they impress upon you how serious your cancer is, and how important your treatment is, and how there may be side-effects to that treatment. We didn’t discuss the specifics in that appointment. Instead, we talked about the likelihood that I might die if I didn’t start treatment urgently. I was okay with this approach. I wasn’t thinking of the side-effects either. I was thinking of you, five years old, playground-bruised knees and a missing tooth, and how I would wrestle one hundred raging mountain lions if it meant I would be alive on the other side.

Two years after that treatment finished I received the call from my GP confirming I was ‘in menopause’. Which sounds like a terrible place to be, at any time of day.

I’m not proud to admit how winded I felt on hearing this news. Because enough time had passed since those mountain lion days. Those just-diagnosed days when the hollow fear of mortality allowed me to mean it when I said, ‘I don’t care what happens, just let me survive.’

‘What happens’ was more tangible by the time I got that phone call. And menopause sounded disappointing and dusty. Maybe it’s my vanity, but the very word felt like someone had scrubbed out big chunks of my person. I felt less female, less powerful, less attractive, less strong. I just felt less.

Menopause feels like another badge I should proudly pin to my twenty-first century Equality Uniform. I am proud to call myself a feminist. But menopause? Menopause isn’t something discussed at the dinner table. Not even ours. I may be a woman who Instagrammed her bum cancer, but in the early days I could barely say the ‘M’ word aloud to your father without flinching. Because even in this time of growing enlightenment, I thought menopause needed to be suffered through.

Going through early menopause at thirty-six meant, much like the inducement of labour, I never knew what it felt like to naturally move into the next stage of my reproductive life. And boy, it hit me hard. My skin, my hair, my mind: everything changed seemingly overnight. Yet even then I – the person who seeks medical reassurance like others pop out for a coffee – dragged my feet to see the specialist.

My period was something I got young: in 1992, at eleven years old. Which meant for twenty-five years I bled, cramped and clotted my way through a week in every month. I don’t miss my period. It was tedious, inconvenient, and – when we were trying to get pregnant – a monthly blot of failure on white toilet paper. Despite all this, having stashes of tampons in office drawers and moaning about monthly cravings anchored me in a demographic I felt comfortable in. I left that team and all it contained behind with thirty sessions of pelvic radiation. My little shrivelled ovaries: I picture them like sad raisins.

It’s acceptable to moan about periods because they’re something that almost half of us have for over half of our lives. A little flag of fertility that even if we don’t choose to wave, we might. Then why couldn’t I moan about menopause? Why did the medical declaration of my menopause feel like such an attack on my womanhood? Why, my girl, was I so quiet?

Lesson #110: Menopause is a feminist issue.

I think it’s because to acknowledge menopause is to also acknowledge what it takes away. For some women, it asserts the absence of qualities we are meant to have, but mustn’t admit directly to coveting: youth, elasticity, composure, sexuality, tranquillity. To feel the loss of any of these is to reveal you enjoyed them in the first place. Which – in my experience – is the very opposite of how a serene woman must act. She ‘must’ inhabit youth and verve, but incidentally, rather than in an ardent way.

This woman must wear the jewels of femininity across her hands, wrists and ears – but never be seen to admire them, to never be observed watching them dance and twinkle in the sun.

Lesson #111: Wear your jewels and be proud of them.

Do not hide your bleeding, your pain or the movement of yourself from one state to another. Swing between the two and land somewhere else. Say ‘vulva’, shake hands with gusto, talk about menopause over dinner. Do not quiet yourself.

Lesson #112: Bleed loudly

~ This is a chapter from my book, 27 Letters to my Daughter ~