On Being Female

From my journal on January 19, 2004

My body has always had her own timing.

As the clothes slid off this evening, I thought of the wisdom kept within me no longer shed at the moon’s regime. Then memories of waiting for it to flower flood my mind.

Fear that I would never open up, when not only had all my friends made the passage, but even my little sister had done so.

All of them had left me in the dust of my humiliation.

I should have taken the hint then. Instead I fretted and feared that my only form would always be a familial tendency to have a small pouching belly, no matter how, there I would be for the rest of my life.

However, at fourteen the first drops of promise arrived. Red is the completion of a journey. My red gift from within finally made its appearance. I would fluctuate and maddeningly comply with its own cadence for over forty years.

In the end it had to be chemically ceased because it exhausted the natural iron in my body. When we first talked of ending the cyclical flow, I found myself resistant.  A great sadness filled me as if I was giving up something I had dearly earned.

It took a few years of dealing with the consequences of depletion for me to finally say yes. And then I never thought much about it again until tonight.

What is the purpose of these monthly cleansings? The Navajo medicine women say you are at your most powerful. Concentrating our bodily functions on something so vitally linked to reproduction and creativity makes us focus. That focus will bring forth life in the right circumstances. The cessation of this solely feminine event is said to concentrate wisdom in ourselves rather than in another.

I do feel wiser but that may be age. The big scare about artificial hormones made many women switch to herbal substitutes. I did that. Even though the flushes occasionally raged through my body, I looked at them as physical Self speaking to wisdom Self.

Pay attention, they say. Despite all the stained clothes, inadequate supplies, backaches and cramps, I am grateful for the opportunity to be female.

But then, wisdom comes in various manners and little epiphanies over time. And my body has always carried its own wisdom.