On menstruation and thresholds

Yesterday I took my children swimming at St George’s Lake. Normally I go alone with the kids. Sometimes my mum joins us or I bump into a friend there, and for a brief moment I can leave the kids on the bank and have a swim. A proper swim. Yesterday my dad came with us. He was here for boxing day and he sat on the bank with Piran, who can’t swim yet, while I swam out into the deep water. I found myself feeling downwards, down through all the cracks in the rock where water trickles, deep down into the earth where they say a fire burns, unceasing. I imagined for a moment that that fire was water, and the earth was like my body, a mass of water-infused cells. Then I saw the fire at her core and the water at her surface holding the earth in balance, equals and opposites, working together to heat and cool. After the vision ended I swam back to the bank and sat on the drying grass with my feet in the water, next to Piran who was fishing with a stick. We played chasey on the hot black paths and then climbed back into the car and drove home.

In the lake, out deep, treading water, I thought back to the story of the woman with the autistic son, who as a last resort, went by horseback to see a reindeer herding shaman in Mongolia who said that a mischievous or malevolent spirit had got into her womb while she was pregnant and swimming in a lake. I was careful yesterday to speak with lake spirits when I swam, especially because I was menstruating. Because menstruation, like pregnancy, makes me more vulnerable to the spirit world. It holds the door open to the dreaming realms, especially in those first three days when the blood flows deep and red.

I never wanted to menstruate. I wanted to be a boy. I wanted to be taller than my dad. I wanted to learn to hunt, to shoot a gun. I wanted to be stronger than all my male friends, and faster, and more exposed. Instead I got blood. My mother wanted to celebrate. To invite women that we knew to welcome me into the ranks of menstruating women. But I wanted none of it — blood and pain and incapacitation. I was embarrassed by my body, which I could not control, which every month betrayed me. I bled so profusely in those first three days of each cycle that I didn’t join my friends when they went swimming that time on the south coast of South Australia. What if I leaked? But I couldn’t rest either. I wanted to be out there with them, playing in the waves, jumping off cliffs. That cliff jump was a rite of passage for the young men and I wanted to be among them, if not risking the jump then waiting in anticipation, water dripping off me, watching to see if they had timed their leap accurately to catch the full body of the wave as it brought the water level up. I wanted to be a dare devil, but my body wouldn’t let me. Instead I sat in the motorhome, waiting for the neurofen to kick in. I imagine myself instead, standing on the clifftop, dripping wet, a trickle of blood running down my leg, watching the water shift beneath me until such a time as it was okay to jump. And then leaping. Would the possibility of death by miscalculation have been any worse than this monthly debilitation?

Years later I had a baby. In order to give birth to him I had to learn to trust in that same body that had never done what I wanted it to do. I had to learn to let my body be in control. It did a fabulous job, but it was not easy to surrender. I got sick. The labour was long. The midwife had to flick a cervical lip out of the way so that he could be born, which was painful as Larry. Twice his heart rate dropped and there was general panic, and I was left alone, in the black hole of trust without vision or sound or any sense to navigate. He came out all in one slithering mass and the first thing I noticed were his feet. Long slender feet. I didn’t even see that he was a boy. I had spent his entire pregnancy thinking he was a girl, collecting girl’s names, and imagining the girl that he would become. And here he was. Squashed face and slender feet.

I needed him to be a boy. I didn’t know it then, but if he’d been a girl, I would have squashed him, like I did myself. So that no-one else could do it to me. I don’t know how it works but my body stored a memory of being squashed, because of being female. Like me, my grandmum bled painfully. She also drank coffee. Coffee makes good pain relief when there is nothing else to do the trick, with the caveat of making the pain worse when the coffee wears off. But there was pain there, associated with being a woman, and the caffeine was like a panacea for all the ills of going unrecognised because of female. When I started bleeding, I unconsciously started drawing close to my grandmum. She had died a couple of years earlier, and I took on some of her things — her love of the colour green, her sewing needles, some pieces of unused cloth, an old mosaic brooch of flowers with a red border. Did I inherit the pain she carried of being female and give it voice in my body in the same way that she did? I wonder.

When I went to get my insides checked out at a screening place in North Melbourne, my doctor, on receiving the results, said that I had a bicornate uterus and might not be able to have children. They always say that when things are slightly out of the ordinary, ‘You might not be able to have kids’. They said the same thing when I had amenorrhea when I was anorexic, ‘Even if you recover your periods, you might never be able to have kids.’ How ridiculous to think that science has any idea what a woman’s body can and can’t do when deeper things are moving within. Science seems to think it has a handle on women’s bodies, that women themselves don’t have. That’s the ridiculous thing. When I was pregnant with my first child, all the medical people I saw except for the home-birth midwife we met at 40 weeks, treated me like I was sick and unable to make a rational, informed decision for myself, expecting me to do exactly as they said, which wasn’t always the best thing for me and my baby. But that’s another story. The doctor who informed me of my unusual uterus also said that I had endometriosis, which cleared up after I had my second child. After that, my periods were never as painful. Mostly now, they are not painful at all.

People talk about a lineage of women — daughter, mother, grandmother, great grandmother — as ‘the red thread’. I am the only daughter of an only daughter of an only daughter. The red thread that I inherited was not a linear thread. Somewhere, somehow that thread got all tangled up and steeped in shame, so that it came to me like an out of sorts boa-constrictor, ready to squeeze the life out of me if I engaged in anything that smacked of feminine power, which is the power of the body surrendering to the power life.

The day we went swimming was boxing day, so I am going to refer back to the story of Mary, mother of Jesus. It says an angel came to her and informed her that even though she had never had sex, she was going to have a baby who was the son of God. I’m not a fan of all this son of God talk. Its too abstract for me. I prefer to think of him as light made flesh. Not the light of ‘I’m better than you’, but the light of love which is compassionate, forgiving, bold. And I can’t envision the conception of such a child by any other way than Mary copulating with the angel. The light and the flesh merging and unmerging through some kind of ecstatic climax. And she surrenders to her fate, to carrying the child, even though in all ages and times, abortion has been possible — either through manual extraction or herbal preparations. She surrenders to a design, that is like a dreaming story being played out, through the vessel of her physical body. She surrenders to life. Its a powerful example of the power of the feminine to bring things into the world that would not otherwise find form. What if at any point she had said, ‘No’? The whole thing would have been turned on its head.

In those first three days of my cycle now, when my bleeding is at its heaviest, I enter into a kind of dreaming state. I need less sleep. Sometimes, I don’t sleep at all. Without even trying, I see things clearly from this place, that the daily grind of life obscures. Yes, I have trained for this, to be able to enter into this dreaming state with ease. But menstruation brings it on, without effort on my part. And I can chart time with my cycles, just like time on earth was charted first by the cycles of the moon — the fullness and the emptiness, the fading down to nothing and the fleshing out again, birth, death, growth, decay, renewal. Menstruation is like standing in the doorway, in the threshold, with one hand on the full belly of the moon, and two feet buried beneath the shifting sands of the earth, and the winds that blow from that in-between place tugging at my hair. There is lots of work to be done at this time. Not the waking-life, walking around, talking to people kind of work that we do every day, but the work of dreaming in those things that are waiting at the threshold, ready to cross into this world, or helping to usher out all those waiting to pass through to the other side.

Some time ago I did an attunement to a plant named Shepherd’s Purse. For the first few minutes all I heard was a long drawn out scream. A scream of suffering. A scream of the suffering of living in cracks, in wastelands with other plants who, unlike those in a forest who support each other and thrive together, couldn’t care less whether the other plants live or die. Shepherd’s Purse controls the flow of blood in the body. I used it when I was giving birth to my third child to stem the postpartum bleeding — I have always bled too much — and then later, I drank it regularly for a month and found it shortened my bleed time from seven to five days. Shepherd’s Purse is a plant of thresholds, it grows in inhospitable places — like the side of our shared driveway that our neighbour regularly poisons, or down the back of our block where there is no soil, only a thick layer of angular grey stones which supports only thistles and shepherd’s purse and one lone kale plant.

When I was pregnant with that same third child I noticed that the air around me felt permanently dark. I guess it was my aura, or a visioning sense that told me. It was uncomfortable and I tried to shift out of it a few times without success. When I felt him move in my womb for the first time it shifted of its own accord. I realised that his spirit had arrived earthside and I was no longer required to stand in the in-between place with him, waiting for him to be ready to come all the way here. It was a different kind of threshold then, to the one that I enter when I menstruate. That was a forced period of waiting in an in-between place, a kind of holding room for the souls of babies who have been conceived but aren’t quite ready for their soul to enter the physical realms yet. My third son took six months. My daughter was fully present here from the time she was conceived, she needed no holding room, she was more present here than me.

The kind of threshold that comes with menstruation is different. It feels less like a holding room and more like a treasure house. The realms of all potential. Earlier this year, I was introduced to the Goddess by way of podcast called, The Emerald, and discovered that I had known her all along. At around the same time I was doing a series of intuitive creativity workshops in which I kept coming up with this lizard woman — who was chaos, who was life, who had access, by way of a snake, to the underwater streams in which deep, clear wisdom is found, the wisdom of the body of the earth. Those subterranean bodies of water are like my body during menstruation. It gets full of liquid. All my flesh fattens up as if it is trying to get full like the moon, and steep in the wisdom of water. My body steeps in the wisdom of water.

And each blood letting is a dual purpose gift — the gift of nourishment, because of the nutrients present in the blood and the old discarded egg, a gift of promise and potential of what might have been, a gift of grief and regret, and a gift of joy and hope — to the earth. Even if I don’t make paintings of my blood, as some women do, or take my menstrual cup and pour it out on the earth, it finds its way back there eventually — by way of sewage systems or landfill — although my days of using disposable menstrual products is well and truely over. And also, a gift of entering into a state of clear vision, so that I can carry back with me those things of the spirit world that are waiting to find form and give them form.

The red thread of my female lineages is still a bit of a mess, but it no longer threatens to suffocate me each month when the call to release the strings of my mundane existence and enter the place of crossing over comes. The beauty of that monthly resting place is unsurpassed. Even by a free-fall off a 25m cliff into a rising ocean swell. It is a different kind of free-fall, and the timing is just as important. It is good to know the death defying beauty of my body’s pace.

Originally published at https://inthematrix.substack.com on January 2, 2023.