By the Flame's new parenting columnist Andy Lawrence
Almost seven years ago, I began tracking my cycle. At the beginning I was unaware of how little I knew about my body and its monthly cycle. I used a commonly available app, noting my signs and symptoms throughout the month. I began to notice the patterns of each phase: how my mood and body changed in response to my hormone fluctuations. I was amazed to see that my headaches were, in fact, cyclical. Or that with fascinating accuracy, my premenstrual phase became a time of craving social isolation and being awash with insecurity. And I learned quickly when my body was loudly communicating that it was time to make a baby.
Over nearly two years, I learned how to communicate with my body. I noticed the buoyancy and social ease when I was leading up to ovulation, and the fatigue and irritability that accompanied the drop in oestrogen after ovulation. Then I fell pregnant and the next time I got my period was six months postpartum. After the immensity of birth — the awe I felt at my body creating and growing and birthing and feeding this little baby — I welcomed my bleed with excitement tinged with a grain of grief. Something about having just birthed my baby made me connect to my cycle as something sacred, the source of these tiny humans, each month another ephemerous soul.
Three and a half years and another baby later, my connection to my cycle deepens with every bleed and has become the compass for how I live my day-to-day life. Now that I have two daughters, my passion for learning the power of women’s cycles has grown fierce. I continue to learn how to work with my cycle and I am consciously working on shedding layers of menstrual shame.
Menstrual shame is an inherent part of our culture and is quiet and insidious in nature. It is part of the patriarchal furniture. Researchers developing menstrual products only began using real blood for testing in 2023. That’s last year, people! The legacy of our mothers and their mothers is an inauguration into womanhood doused in silent shame. That silence extends into our language with the avoidance of words like period and menstruation, replaced instead with feminine hygiene, as if a bodily function that half the population experiences, and that is central to the existence of the human species, is somehow unhygienic.
That shame seeps into us through the blue liquid used to mimic blood in period ads, as if showing menstrual blood, or even red-coloured liquid is somehow explicit content. It’s rife in the advertising industry with commercials showing young girls cheerleading while bleeding instead of glorifying the rest that our bodies actually need at that time. The message is clear: pretend your period doesn’t exist. Take painkillers and carry on. This kind of suppression creates a disconnect from our bodies that disempowers us. And if I've learned anything from the last seven years of healing inner and outer wounds, it’s that my connection to my body is the pillar from which all self-care and consequently my sanity stems.
Right now, my premenstrual brain fog and rampant insecurity is telling me to delete this whole article. I am slower, more self-critical than in other phases, with internal dialogue whispering nasty messages designed to keep me safe by keeping me small. But because I am acutely aware of what phase of my cycle I am occupying right now, another part of me, a wiser part, zooms out and takes stock of the insecurity and self-criticism with a compassionate sigh. "Ah yes, I am about to bleed and so here you are. Thank you for trying to keep me safe, but you’re not needed."
I don’t see the inner critic as separate from menstrual shame. The two are enmeshed.
The inner critic makes me perfectionistic, a strategy to avoid external criticism, a method of staying safe by staying hidden, just like our culture expects menstruation to be. I don’t know about anyone else, but I’m tired of hiding. It takes so much energy. So I will drink my herbal tea, roll my shoulders and keep writing, using my voice in the hopes that others might begin to shed a layer or two of shame. And you better believe that this afternoon I’ll be slinking to the couch to eat chocolate and binge Netflix before my children come home from daycare.
Side note: how else would you spend the afternoon? This incessant rain lashing Wollongong has my chickens up to their gussets in dirt soup and my backyard turned into an unsavoury water feature. All this to say that when we listen to the wisdom of our bodies, whether it is telling us to rest or to telling us to push, that is when we stand in our power.
About the writer
Andy Lawrence is a doula servicing the Illawarra and globally online. Having trained as a research scientist with a PhD in entomology, the birth of her two daughters catalysed a career shift toward supporting women and their families as they traverse the transition to parenthood. She runs women's circles locally to build community connection among women and her doula work centres on guiding women home to themselves and their own wisdom. She works with women who are feeling the need for support beyond that from their partner and are ready to create their village. She believes that supported mothers equals secure families and healthier communities.
