This essay is a bit of an experiment (aren’t all writing projects?), and is mostly factual.
I only remember because my mom told me I couldn’t swim that afternoon at the Moore’s pool. Hitting every other stair, I ran to my room, pulling a torn spiral-bound notebook from its hiding place under a stack of books. J—- was still young enough to scribble through pages if she was mad at me. At twelve, I had been a compulsive writer; but having decided three months previous that writing might be worthy habit, I vowed to journal at least once a day. For that reason, my first journals reveal a Pepy’s style monotony. The lines are dull and tedious. Junior high is not interesting; whatever Ms. Blume would have us think. But then, life itself is primarily eating, drinking, and sleeping, is it not? Perhaps these journals paint life as it is, especially when read in contrast to my college writings, which suggest that life is equal parts acceptance letters, break-ups, and opening night jitters.
Pressing through several pages, I unconsciously (It is a strange fact of humanity that our hands can be fully engaged in the action of forming words which the mind chooses; but we will not understand what we ourselves have written. I write “God is three is one” and am both physically and intellectually conscious. But I do not comprehend that which I have written.) renamed myself in the emphatic declaration, “I hate being a woman.” In the heat of physical limitation I pronounced myself both female and adult. I was not a man, because I bled; but even more, because I could not go swimming.
In my junior high discomfort with self-awareness, I could not conceive of actually explaining the predicament I found in myself. I did not own this as “my” predicament; it was something happening to, or against my body. I’d tripped downstairs toward the smell of hot buttered toast, and peering through the kitchen door found, not Mom and Dad over the newspaper, but the Nile of the first day. Dark and strange as a foreign god.
This was not my body. I bowed out of hikes, soccer games, and beach trips with the feeble excuse that I didn’t feel well, which was true. My mother vainly assured me that I was not ill, but her explanations would not weigh against the sharp cramps beneath my belly and laguidity utterly new to a twelve year old. I pushed away the suggestion that I must accept the limitation of menstruation as normalcy.
The physical limits inherent to living in a body do not have the same tenor (although a chest cold still brings self-directed anger). I know that I can only run so fast, and jump so high—but this I claim in common with all humanity. To be human is to be limited; but that summer I knew that to be woman was to be more limited.
I could run faster than any boy I knew. But I could only race him twenty-nine some odd days out of the month. I spent many of the following months persuading myself that those couple days shouldn’t matter.
But I still cannot escape the suspicion that they really do.
R
There must be hundreds. Thousands. Hundreds of thousands. I mean, if I started at 11 and won’t end until I’m 45, and I multiply it by 12, that’s 408. And in my ninth grade biology class I was told there were many many others which didn’t make the cut and for all I know, disappeared. But when one is chosen (who knows how?) it enters a waiting room of sorts. It doesn’t know what its waiting for, but I do. I also know it waits in vain. For now.
Finally, when the moon changes, its waiting season is over and it glides, Elaine-like, into the void. What might have been a womb rejects its failure with a rush of blood which should have fed life, but instead smells of death. The veil becomes a shroud and we are doubled over in groans at its arrival. Another barren month.
I wonder if perhaps Eve was not forced to say goodbye to her children in this way. When an egg was chosen, it would wait until met, and when met, it would grow, and when grown, it would proceed with grace to be met with Joy.
I’ve already lost at least 144. If, like a good American, I have my 2.3 kids, I must look forward to saying goodbye to 261.7 more. In a culture which considers 6 children to be extravagant, I am perhaps silly to mourn the loss of hundreds. But tonight, I will sigh.
Caitlin