Surfing the crimson wave

Wednesday, 15 January 2003

Something about turning over and finding that my beloved's knee had wandered too far towards my side of the bed made me surface, but it wasn't the knee that woke me, it was the cramp. Pain most undelicious, that feeling that my insides are disintegrating, and I can almost taste the blood at the back of my mouth. (Nonsense, of course, to describe something so ordinary in such dramatic terms, but so little on this earth has the power to wake me up that it's rather striking when it happens this way.)

So I drifted in and out for a while, trying to drag sleep back around me, but it wouldn't come. I was dimly thinking that I wouldn't have to look at the clock if I could work out what time of year the pain was at - if it was a July pain, it'd be the middle of the night ... but no, that was dream, wasn't it? I knew that once I looked at the clock I'd be lost. I'd have to get up, at least to get some painkillers (I don't take painkillers if I can avoid it, but period cramps make for a dazzling exception to that rule).

Eventually I capitulated and looked, and it was nearly seven o'clock, so I got up, cursing and wincing my way to the Feminax. (Scary stuff on the box about the side-effects, by the way: "you may experience constipation, have a dry mouth, blurred vision or tremors and palpitations [or] drowsiness". Frank of them - but then, their target market is presumably, like me, willing to risk rather a lot of unpleasantness as long as this bloody PAIN goes away.)

I think this morning is only the second time I've been woken by cramp. The other time was last cycle - which was worse, because it was 4:00 in the morning. I hope I'm not going to make a habit of it. I need my sleep.

I wasn't one of those children who talked freely and openly about bodily matters with her mother. Most of what I learned about being female I read in books. (Apart from the strange little TV programme about human reproduction, which I watched in my sister's minder's house at the age of about seven - fat pink cartoon figures and arrows showing where everything went. I can still hear the voiceover's Scottish accent - "the boy puts his penis into the girl's vagina," he said blandly, and it took me years to work out that there was anything else involved - movement, for instance.)

I more or less skipped a whole chunk, though. I had no older sisters, I never read magazines and I wasn't a peer-group sort of child, so I had no sources of basic, practical information. When my brother was gestating I devoured my mother's pregnancy magazines, and when my parents reorganised their bookshelves I found and read Our Bodies, Ourselves and Everywoman (revelatory they were, too). By then I had picked up cultural signals to the effect that this wasn't standard reading for a ten-year-old, so I hid the books and never talked about what I'd learned.

In one way I was well prepared when I began to bleed for the first time. I had the theory thoroughly sussed. "Ah, the onset of menarche," my professorish mind no doubt said to itself. "It is now possible for me to become pregnant," I wrote in my diary. But I had no clue what to do about it - and asking my mother was a daunting prospect. I remember putting it off for at least a day and a half, until it became clear that my attempts to substitute tissues for those mysterious items, the nature of which I had vaguely guessed at, would prove futile. Eventually I said, "I think I've started a period," and my mother, eyeing the sanguine evidence, replied "It looks like it, doesn't it?".

And it was fine, of course. So often, these insuperable barriers turn out to be of my own making. Still, if I ever have daughters, I'm thinking a "theory and practice of menstruation" session or two wouldn't go amiss.

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