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Wildblood feels the rage, the joy and the tears

Stating the bleeding obvious

Kate Wildblood

Thursday, 13 November 2008

I’m furious, I’m fuming, I’m filled with rage. I’m more angry than a hive of British honey bees facing the prospect of colony collapse disorder thanks to a virus from the US of A. In fact I’m f***ing livid.

And now I’m not. Now I’m in floods of tears, bowled over by a wave of emotion, crying my eyes out because of something on the telly. Something involving a spindle-legged impala, a string-filled orchestral soundtrack and a sweet talking voiceover.

I’m bleeding; it’s a simple as that. I’m talking menstruation. (Boys of a sensitive persuasion you’d best look away now because it’s only gonna get worse.) I’m talking PMS, PMT and PISSED OFF. Imagine trying to decipher the worlds most nonsensical flat pack instructions and double it. That’s the lunacy of the menstrual cycle. All that talk of being able to live life per usual as you stubble through it with some refined cotton wool stuffed down your knickers is bollocks. Because I don’t have any. Bullocks that is. Instead I have ovaries, organs that control the way I weep, laugh and rage. Organs that decide how my moods will be each and every 28 days – or 21 or 33 or 42 depending on the games they fancy playing.

And then there are the names we call it, if we call it anything at all – a cough would suffice when I was growing up. The choices are many, be it on the rag, menstrual cycle, period, the cockney rhyming slang of George Micheal, Henry (god knows where that comes from), Aunt Flo or on the blob. And of course the classic “I’ve got the painters and decorators in”. Although what exactly that is supposed to mean is beyond me? Could it be it takes ages to track one down, it costs three times as much as you thought it would and you have to stay in all day waiting for one to turn up?

Of course there are those that celebrate the menstrual cycle, standing together as sisters in sync, wimmin with wings, natural sponges and all. But I’m not one. You try sharing the bed with a missus on the same bike. (And no that’s not the ultimate in lesbian lovers coordination.) There you lie, both overheating, both furious, both on the verge of tears and both engaging in a hot water bottle tug of war. There’s nothing sisterly about it.

But give me a couple of years and I’ll be wondering where my periods went, no doubt reminiscing about sore tits, mood swings from hell, midnight cravings for piccalilli and my first ever purchase of tampons. (Did the checkout girl really have to shout across the shop floor “how much for the Lilets?”)

But in the mean time I’ll grin and bear it. Living somewhere between the rollerblading, trampolining, abseiling unreality of a Bodyform advert and the reality of the prospect of having to rinse one’s Mooncup out in a service station loo. (As some sisters suggested we do way back when.) No, I’ll carry on bleeding. Because, as some bird in flares sang in the Seventies, it makes me “feel like a natural woman”. Now would someone please pass the codeine?