Yoga for Your Lady Time – and an Ode to My Last

Welp, this is it. My very last visit from Aunt Flo, my last trip to the Red Sea.

Most women don’t know when it will be. I always figured that I would peter out in menopause in a blaze of awful, irregular glory, like my mother and grandmother and on and on back to Eve.

But fate has transpired such that I am scheduled for a hysterectomy in a few weeks. So now, this week, is it. I’m going through my usual pains and the typical gross with the knowledge that it will not happen again.

In a way, this is awesome. I mean, who enjoys it? It has been a monthly albatross around my neck ever since it barged into my life when I was 13. A life that involves controlling my bodily fluids pretty well has got to be a better one, right? But it’s also a good-bye to something core to womanhood. Womynhood. Sisterhood. Motherhood. It’s what we all share, a suffering we endure. A passed pad in the bathroom. A knowing wink to a friend. An open secret, a bond. Who are we without it?

At the same time, it’s good-bye to a key part of me. My uterus and I have been through some sh*t together. Those first years and learning how we’d manage this monthly torture. Then babies – three of them. Wonderful, beautiful, strong and tremendous kids who called it home then wriggled right out of there in a process so heinous it must be immediately repressed. (How else do you end up with more than one?)

Then, finally, recent years, where thickness and cysts have caused pain so great that it could not continue, at least not with my having the energy I like to give to life.

Soon, this uterus, this bizarre giver of agony and miracles, will be so much flotsam and jetsom in the universe. In a way that’s NBD. I mean, we lose finger nail clippings and hair and eye lases and skin cells all the time. For that matter, we contain a host of bacteria that isn’t “us.” The notion of boundaries between us and the world is fairly arbitrary, probably.

That said, I identify pretty strongly with the old gal. I always knew I wanted to be a mom, and I was so lucky to have this dream come true. She made that happen. But now we part ways, and I am going to figure out who I am without this part of myself – without my uterus, without little toddlers to consume my every moment. It’s a new era. I’m hoping I emerge as a new me, with a bit less of me, but still hopefully whole.

So so long, uterus, and thanks for all the eggs.

Here’s one last “treating period pain” yoga pose for you – the Shoelace pose with a side bend. Stack your legs and bend to the side. Take it to stretch things out and distract yourself and remember even in this state you can still be you.