oh wait there’s more

I love my cycle. I love to cycle. To move, to change, to get another and another and another chance. I don’t want to lose my ebb and flow.

I knew there might be. After this last piece of brain goo. Even though I sort of hoped there wouldn’t be. I think I probably share and share and share into the void out of not just a desire to be known, but to be understood. I want the freedom to wander through my days without any concern over being misunderstood. What privilege is that? What a dream! What a lark! I want everything to be on the table. I want to feel safe. And I want everyone around me to feel safe, too. Maybe it’s impulse. Maybe it’s justification. I’m not sure how much I care.

I also never want to stop getting my period. And somehow these two things feel utterly enmeshed right now. For the first time in my life I’ve been bleeding for 15+ days. I don’t actually know. I stopped counting. Ok not really the first time in my life, but postpartum and miscarriages don’t count toward this tally. Or maybe they do, but like in a different lane. There has to be a distinction, right?

I have been living inside this terror lately, that when I finally bleed for the last time that what comes after is like suspended PMS. I’m worried that menopause will deposit me in the perpetual unresolved tension of the days leading up to a bleed that never comes. In other words, the worst, most existential, despairing part of the cycle. How do I not know if this is what will happen or not? Are we all in the dark or is it just me? Why aren’t we sharing this information?

I love my cycle. I love to cycle. To move, to change, to get another and another and another chance. I don’t want to lose my ebb and flow. And I definitely do not want to be liminal forever. I want seasons. I want variety. I want evolution. Please let there still be an evolving current to move and grow with.

On occasion, my husband refers to me as “doll face”. It is a term of endearment, I know this, and he has been showering me with it for years. But good grief, it is not the term for this new and frightening form of meg. I am no doll, not that I ever was, and how dare you look at my face, like that, or maybe at all. I am a holy terror. My face is the face of a python mixed with a rabid coyote. I am a monster, a pit viper, and it is foolish to draw any lines between me a some lame doll. A child’s toy. I am equal parts beast and bitch. Or sure maybe continue to mess with me so that I may retain some sense of humor, but only between the hours of who knows when and who know how but sure sure sure I can sustain my carrying of this discontent for years and years and years.

I am in a new season of endurance, this time carrying the heft and discomfort of discontent. I understand why middle-aged women are a threat, especially to our own lives. I know that the one whom I should fear the most, who risks burning it all straight down to the ground, is me. I see the cabin built for one deep in the woods and know that it was built first for this version of woman. The witch who has nowhere left to shed the last vestiges of her maidenhead and motherhood and is cast off and away to both rot and revel on her own. She is my shadow walker. The version of me that lives at the edges, where nightmare rubs up against fantasy.

I try to focus on the daily parts. Eating protein, building muscle, getting good sleep, and having a medicinal orgasm once a week or so. All of this is almost enough and holds my attention for most of the day. But if I do succeed at sleep, then I will often dream and in those dreams the other version stops lurking and steps into the full light of my subconscious. And she is everything. Doctor, farmer, preacher, mother to the whole world. Criminal on the run, for arson or murder or whatever other treachery soaks my veins as easily as any.

I am nasty. Asleep or awake. I am unknown and unknowable. I do not even attempt to seek myself. Instead, I try to stretch and breathe and make new shapes and treat my spine like a holy snake, a bridge between worlds. I want to think less and be more. I want to fade into oblivion but also metamorphose into the North Star so that, at the very least, my children can still look up and find me.

If this is perimenopause, then fuck you to everyone who hid the truth, and also, I am sorry you were taught to believe you must. What a sham. What a hoax. What highway robbery. I see now why the world is scared of the women who cross over into this second-season space. We were always meant to craft the culture and call the shots. We were always meant to rule and rage. Not to be anesthetized until our bodies shrivel and brains melt. That was always just a temporary, bullshit strategy, designed by the ones who forgot or never learned to hand down the legends of the Great Mothers. Scaredy-cats. Bozos. I forgive them, but not really and barely. I am you too. I am us. I am everything and everyone and everywhere all at once. Which I guess is both the problem and the solution. Whatever. I am exhausted. And irritable. I’m sorry. Sort of. Onward.