Water Safety

Bodhi...and Keanu.

Life comes in waves. The good and the bad. And it never stops. That's important.

I learned that a woman's emotions are like a wave from John Gray, PhD, in his New York Times Bestseller Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus. I was lying in a hammock on a porch in the middle of the woods in Dahlonega, GA. The porch was attached to a cabin. Don't worry. This part is not a metaphor.

Destin, Florida: white sand beaches, buckets of crab legs, and Super Mario Brothers in the arcade in the lobby at the Hotel. I loved the beach. I wore a bathing suit all the time and my hair was (as usual) fantastic and mermaid long. I sat in the sand for hours, letting the waves of the Gulf wash over my legs, letting wet sand pour through my fingers. Swimming, running, building and tearing down sandcastles. I loved myself at the beach. I loved my parents at the beach, on vacation, our tribe, our pack.

I forgot how to enjoy the beach eventually, was seized with the fear of the sight of my own body. Be it too pale, too thin, too wide, too wobbly, too red, too scarred with psoriasis, I stopped being able to see myself in my mind's eye as anything but a deformed figure, confounded by the covers of magazines, the comments of others, the images in which we all find ourselves drowning on a daily basis.

Or maybe it was the fact that by the time I was in my twenties, my options for swimwear were suits that effectively "hid" my stomach or resembled my underwear drawer, neither of which I felt had anything to do with the original concept behind swimming: physical activity. Maybe it was the fact that, the older I became, the more my choices of ways to present myself to society began to diminish, to bottleneck as the road narrowed for my sisters and me.

Books, films, legends, and tales about life, all words for the ladies limited to the slender path on which slender women, girls with diet cokes, brides and bridesmaids, mothers and wives, princesses and queens saunter through life. As for the protagonists of those stories, let's be honest, what woman can't relate to the story of another man, conquering his fear and striking out on his own, men and women are the same, right?

Women see the world through our own eyes, and we are guided by forces of nature that, I can only speculate, were deemed too frightening and difficult to be talked about. But they need to be talked about.

Over the last few years, I have "come into [my] cycles," as Clarissa Pinkola Estés would say in a book a producer from the Mortified podcast recommended I read, Women Who Run with the Wolves. I've probably talked about it before. Anyway, I came into my cycles because I started tracking my period. All that to say, I got one (ten) of those period tracking apps. And my life will never be the same.

How funny, this little thing, this monthly incident, this "inappropriate" topic of conversation, as a good friend of mine would say, affects every single human being on the planet, not just the women. A period is not just the physical, and the physical is real, exhausting, terrifying, and an all around glorious ride; yes, I said glorious. A period is emotional, visceral, natural. It is not just that few days of bleeding, it's a constant cycle of hormones, instinct, and insight into what makes women, in fact, so very different from men.

I have a transgender friend, a man. He told me it was stark, the contrast between hormonal cycles as a woman and hormonal cycles as a man (and yes, men go through hormonal cycles), that it was easier, but unnerving how different he felt inside as a man.

My body changes every day. I eat, sleep, and think on this cycle, swell into my curves at just the right moment, and experience heightened senses, not because the "right man" walked into the room, but because I am an animal and my body screams to reproduce, to continue the cycle.

For a more...tangible example, along the same topic: I recently started using a Diva Cup instead of my old faithful, since period number two, tampons. It was time for me to stop pretending to be a feminist without always giving myself the option of actually saving my own menstrual blood if I felt like it. If I FEEL like it.

I had no idea...but now that I've spilled it into my hands* and watched my own blood run through my fingers...I deserve everything. Cookies. Cookies and Milk. Cookies and Milk Ice Cream (B&Js). Puppies. Flowers. The sun on my face. The wind at my back. And to wear whatever I want without fear of sexualization, assault, or eternal damnation. I am a warrior. I deserve better.

I already have the moon, though, he and I are kin, controlling the tides together along with every other beautiful woman on the planet.

Now, my life is just riding the waves, and I respect the waves. The crimson waves. I'll say it in the words of a dude, so my dudes can follow me through this one. As thrill seeker Bodhi, performed by Patrick Swayze in the hit action/surf/so much more film Point Break, put it, "Life sure has a sick sense of humor," and he was a surfer. He would know all about riding the waves.

So what does the world look like through the eyes of a woman? If you're not afraid the answer will be too bloody, you can always ask.

*it doesn't have to be so violent, but I haven't gotten the total hang and balance of this Diva Cup business

P.S. Ladies, track your period. Learn your cycles. For apps, try Hormone Horoscope, Clue, anything that isn't pink?

Nancy Caroline: A Timeline 1979-1998

Here it is, either my ultimate narcissistic gesture, or something I had to do to be able to see what others see in me. I started writing my timeline on the eve of my birthday, last Tuesday. Birthdays always offer an opportunity to reflect. Funny how that is. How, before, it was a celebration of milestones, and now, it's a time to look back and let go, to remember and look forward. Great time to do mushrooms or something, so if anyone's selling, I'm looking to buy.

Once I started, and the years began to reveal themselves to me, I realized how much fun it was, to look back over my life and condense it to fit a timeline of events. Each bullet point could fill an entire chapter of a book, and each time period, a volume, and that is the gift I have been receiving since I wished for it years ago, to own my life.

We begin with the beginning, my formative years, as a little girl in the world, connected to the ground through roots that grew out of my velcro tennis shoes, sent shoots out from my fingertips, and bloomed at my lips.

• Birth, Hickory, NC to James Anthony Allen and Martha Lois Nevills. Cesarean section. Explains how ravishing I am.
• Moved to Memphis, TN in a really cool 70s car so that my dad could go to school for Theology. I ate ice cream for the first time, I hear.
• I make countless cassette tapes of myself hosting some sort of talk show. I never listened to the tapes because I always always always hated the sound of my own voice.
• I have vague memories of dirty knees, spider webs, Christmas lights, and kittens. Also countless hours digging holes in the back yard or on the playground and searching patches of clover for one with four leaves.

• I sprained my ankle on my tenth birthday when I jumped off this Hamburgler on a playground at McDonald’s that you climbed up into like a hamburger jail mouth thing. My parents regaled me with stories of the day I was born to help keep my mind off how bad my ankle hurt that night.
• Mom and Dad used to wake me on Saturday mornings by “sneaking” into my room on their hands and knees, but I always heard them coming because they couldn’t stop giggling.
• I kissed a boy for the first time in the back yard of a house in Memphis after we jumped on a trampoline and drank orange-tangerine Mystic Waters until we almost threw up. It felt rushed and close. I said, “Orange-Tangerine,” when it was over. That was pretty much it.
• I took piano lessons, sculpting classes, art classes, and drama classes because my parents were pretty intent on making me into a complete and interesting human being.
• I got my period!
• I played the flute, and I loved it. You might say, she was my first great love. In those moments I spent alone in a soundproof practice room, I learned how to be honest and open, how to think and how to feel, how to sit with myself. Then, I got scared that I would stop impressing people, and the more frightened I got, the less I wanted to play my flute, until I stopped altogether (but only after more than ten years).

  

  Prom '98

• I discovered the Theater, my second love. I’m not 100% sure who, my mother or father, gave me my keen distaste for dishonesty, but the only real gift you need to be able to enjoy theatre is the ability to look life in the face and not back down from what you see. We back down from life in a lot of ways, take the easy way out, wonder what that ache is, even though we know. I felt like I could be myself in the theatre crowd. And then, for some reason, probably anxiety, I felt like an outsider, but that was much later.
• I graduated from High School.

Roll Tide

I'm going to start off with an apology. I've tricked you into reading this post. You think you're about to read a blog about Alabama football, but you're not. OH no. This is not going to be about that.

http://bit.ly/1XQC4vT

I don't know if it was just Judy Blume, or if it was just me and Judy Blume, or if it was every damn girl in America or the world, but there was a mysticism behind the menstrual cycle when I was growing up that is hard to describe outside the context of a pre-teen novel about a clumsy girl who thinks she can increase the size of her boobs by flapping her arms around and chanting "I must, I must, I must increase my bust." And until we get it, heck, even after we get it, we paradoxically look forward to the changing of the tides just as much as we dread them.

I had already read Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret by the time we were invited to the "mother-daughter" night in fifth grade (1990?) where they showed a movie about some girls camping in their back yard and getting their periods. Maybe just one of them got it, but the mom made uterine shaped pancakes to help ease the minds of the confused pre-teens while daddy ran to the store for sanitary napkins. For SANITARY NAPKINS.

They gave us each an Always pad wrapped in a purple wrapper with pink writing on it. I treasured that pad, kept it close to my heart and probably lit a candle and prayed to the goddesses that I didn't recognize yet to please send me the knowledge that only came with the shedding of the uterine lining. I loved it until the day I started my period and wore it to the roller skating rink.

This also happened in 1992. 

It was the glorious summer of 1992. Kurt Cobain was still alive, Terminator 2: Judgement Day was on HBO and my best friend had HBO...and a pool. Marky Mark and the Funky Bunch covered the Velvet Underground. Amy Grant, former Christian pop artist and former idol of six year old me, had broken into the pop scene....remember? Come on?! Amy Grant you guys. Remember?

And roller skating was still awesome. A bunch of kids jamming themselves into a dimly lit room with carpet from the 1970s, donning roller skates with mold in them...from the 1970s...and flinging themselves around curves to Color Me Badd and Guns N' Roses, what's not to love? It was acceptable to laugh at a boy who called himself "BJ," and to respond with "I don't have a name" when asked in those dark corners of that round room.

But for me, wearing that stupid Always pad from 5th grade was a sentence I liken only to death. After one day at the rink, I entreated my mother, "there HAS to be a better way." There was no way I was going to be able to create the roller skating opus I had been preparing to Bonnie Tyler's "Total Eclipse of the Heart" wearing a damn diaper. So I met tampons, and tampons met me, and the rest is history.

Back then it wasn't something that was talked about that much (unless you were a girl, but we're all in the same Coven so that's no surprise), and it seems like that is changing. It was considered uncouth and improper. It still is really, and I'm sure more than one of you is going to have a hissy fit and stop reading my blog because of this, and that's fine.

Someone asked a friend of mine for a feminine hygiene product for her daughter a few years ago. My friend offered her a tampon and the woman said, "Oh no. She's a virgin," with whispered emphasis on the "virgin." My friend is polite, so she said nothing, but I probably would have said, without blinking, "Oh, that's fine, this is a tampon, not a penis."

Did you know that it was ILLEGAL to talk to young women about their bodies at the beginning of the twentieth century? Margaret Sanger, founder of planned parenthood, went to jail for publishing a pamphlet she called "The Woman Rebel" that outlined the menstrual cycle for young women, explained what it was. She was breaking the law to teach women about their own bodies, and she had to break to the law. She HAD to.

I think about what I know now about my menstrual cycle, how much information about hormone cycles and management is available for free via the internet. I can literally take control of my life by understanding and respecting my body and its processes. I no longer have to be a prisoner to the changing of the tides, none of us do, and none of us were, secretly...respectfully.

I met a young girl from Mexico during my first few months here in Chicago. She was gorgeous and delighted to be alive. I remember talking to her at a bar one day where she would sit because the bartender was the man she was going to be dating in the coming months. We were chatting about our periods and he overheard and remarked, "ew," to which she responded, "If blood came out of your penis once a month, you would NEVER stop talking about it," and that was the end of that...because she was right.

Yes, it's a long way to the bottom there, dear. 

If men bled from their genitals once a month, we would never hear the end of it. Luckily for them, they actually go through a full hormone cycle every twenty-four hours. The same drawn out, gnashing of teeth, death to the infidels hormone cycle women go through every 21-29 days. I bet most of ya didn't know that. We don't call it a hormone cycle with them, though. The levels of testosterone and estrogen in their bodies just fluctuates throughout the day, rather than the estrogen slow climb up the roller coaster and then terrifying free fall to the bottom.

The best part about understanding your body? The more you know, the less room you have to feel ashamed. Remember when having a period was a shameful thing? Remember? Anyone read the bible? Anyone?

Well, maybe it's just me. I'm not ashamed of my period. I respect it like the beast it is. She's the animal part of me, the part unaffected by emotions. The part that gets all fluttery when a guy who actually works out and watches what he eats jogs by and I get a wiff of that glorious...man...

I'm sorry. What I'm trying to say is, I no longer ask, "Are you there God? It's me, Margaret," in reference to my monthlies. Instead I just say, "Hey, sorry I kicked the door in whilst screaming about losing my keys, my period's about a week away. I'll pay for it. Love you!"

But the best advice I've seen is from Margaret Sanger in the first volume of her pamphlet, "The Woman Rebel":

A Woman's Duty: To look the whole world in the face with a go-to-hell look in the eyes; to have an ideal; to speak and act in defiance of convention.

Roll Tide.