If you haven’t gotten to peri-menopause yet, just know that it’s very like being twelve years old again. You no longer know whether your period is coming, when it’s coming if it is, or what kind of period it’s going to be. Sometimes you go months with nothing; sometimes you go weeks with absolute, relentless carnage; sometimes you get the tell-tale pink blush on the toilet paper, and then nothing else happens at all. If you’re in deep enough, you can imagine each one being the last one, but you have no way of knowing if the whole deal is finally over, or if you’ve got years more of it ahead of you.
So, yesterday my husband of almost thirty years and I went to a concert. We do this a lot. We’d just come off a road trip during which the pink blush turned out to lead no further, and we’d had an absolute blast dancing our asses off, tromping around an unfamiliar city, and making friends with other concert goers and the sex workers two doors down at our cheap motel. (Pretty sure their drug dealer thought we were crazy, but we’re pretty obviously harmless, so good times all around.) The only relevant blood was from blisters where my dancing boots betrayed me after three flawless years of boogying in the upper decks.
Post-show blues are the real deal, so it was especially nice that we got to come back from that, and right into a show at our home venue. Pretty soft landing, to start out the summer tour season. Since the show was at home, we drove over hours early to fuck around in the parking lot, with a fully stocked cooler, a boat load of (totally legal) drugs, lawn chairs, a portable speaker, and a patio umbrella - because it was approximately 400,000 degrees out there. Good times again. Sweaty, but good. We’d paid for early entry, because we’re GA on the lawn, and looking for room to shake it with full abandon. So the sun is still doing it’s best to annihilate all carbon based life in a hundred mile radius, when we join what’s supposed to be the fast line. Then somebody else in the fast line goes down. Doors, which were supposed to be imminent, are delayed while the medical team does its thing, and everybody is missing the water they just had to throw away to get in, and hoping they don’t go down next while we wait. Success! Doors open, we tromp the lawn, pick a spot, spread out the show blanket, and I grab our empty water bottles to fill, and head for the restrooms. The port-o’john in the lot was still pretty clean when we’d gotten there, but that was a long time ago, so what with the early entry pass, I’d opted to wait for the women’s room inside, to go again. Of course that was now a long time ago, too.
Fortunately, it was still early enough that there were very few other people in there, because sweet mother of fuck, look at all the blood. Turns out, the amount of sweat that was pouring off me all afternoon had masked the fact that under my skirt, it wasn’t sweat at all. Seriously, I can’t express to you the amount of blood in my life at this moment. This much blood should come with a coroner. The pads of my thumbs were bloody just from pulling down the waistband of my underwear. They were black, so I couldn’t see it immediately, but they were evidently made of some kind of super-industrial-wicking material, because when I tested how far the damage went, my hands came away completely red. They had been soaking up blood the whole time I was standing in line. The damage was total. I had to take them off.
Now, when you’ve been dealing with this peri-menopausal bullshit for a while, you learn to carry everything with you that you could possibly need, at all times. So I had tampons, and a menstrual cup, sponges, and pads (I was never a pad person in the before times, but these are not the before times. Everything leaks. You have to have a pad.), and wet wipes (endless thanks to my husband for that suggestion, or I wouldn’t have), and I got to work. I basically had a sponge bath of the undercarriage in a bathroom stall, pelvis to knees. It was pure vampire porn, but 700 wet wipes later, that part of the situation at least, was under control. By some miracle (not really a miracle, just that this had all happened while I was standing in a line instead of sitting down - but maybe the miracle was that it hadn’t happened while I was sitting, because I’d have had to go home if I had been), my skirt was not that bad. Yes, there was clear evidence, but the skirt was dark gray, so it wasn’t like that day you wore white pants in the 7th grade and had to spend the rest of the day with your jacket tied around your waist. Also it’s a straight skirt, so I was able to spin the spot around to the front of my left thigh. It didn’t rinse out enough not to still be red, so anyone paying attention would have recognized it for what it was, but fortunately most people aren’t paying attention, and for the others, well, maybe it’s salsa. I’m sure they sell tacos in here somewhere. (If you can’t get to this level of shrug in a situation like this, try smoking a ton of pot. It super helps.)
Here’s where we get to the lasting problem. Remember the underwear? They were a total loss. Even if I’d been able to rinse them completely, I wouldn’t have been able to wear them and sit down without soaking my whole ass. I did what I could as far as rinsing, without freaking out anybody at the sinks, and put them in the little netted water bottle holder on my bag, hoping they’d dry - but also knowing I’d be afraid to risk it, as I was pretty sure they’d still bleed all over my skirt even if I didn’t bleed all over it myself. But until they dried, if they ever did, I was left with nothing to stick a pad to. And let’s not forget: Everything leaks.
So back to the lawn I go, with my yoni in the breeze. (What is that feeling? Is that already blood leaking, or is it just a tampon string dangling between my naked labia? Is it actually wet? Is it sweat? Is the whole scene I just went through about to repeat itself? You can only spin the skirt once!) My husband greets me, and adds an eyebrow that asks if I’d gotten lost or if the bathroom had been located in Egypt, and I give him the bullet points of my current condition, including the fact that, as I am both bleeding and fully commando, I might not be able to risk sitting down all night. This, I am fully prepared to do - I might be a fucking mess, but I’m a gamer - only I don’t have to, because my husband’s reply was this: “Oh, no! I’m so sorry that’s happening to you!” <insert not even a single beat here> “Want me to take off my underwear and give them to you? I totally will - here, hang on…” And then this man went off to the bathroom, came back, and stuck his underwear in my bag. I was able to slap a pad into his boxer briefs, and he went free-balling the entire night. We danced like lunatics the whole show, and his testicles are sore as fuck this morning, but we had an absolute blast, and spent set break sitting down(!), snuggled up, and laughing our asses off.
He told me that to him, the answer was obvious. It was the only move, and came without question or hesitation. I can’t help but wonder what tiny percentage of men would have seen it the way he did. Husband, when you see this, please know from the bottom of my heart (and my aging uterus), you are a fucking badass.
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