Menstruation

Menstruation

I was talking with an acquaintance earlier this year and I said to him “If menstruating was a job, the average twenty-five-year-old Lady should be a General manager somewhere”.

I take that back. I have been studying up on how to get board advisory roles and I think you will make the board if you know how to package a CV.

Girl, you have between twelve to fifteen years of experience in testing out sanitary towel brands, tampons, period cups, panty liners — the whole party! Do not get me started on older ladies because I cannot imagine it.

See, it is on this legal ground of my expertise that I submit to you reasons why menstruation should be loved. Oh, by the way, no menstrual cycle, no horny girl/ woman for you. So, you better smile if you are a man reading this.

As a girl of sixteen/seventeen, I was in the mood for some mischief and I decided to go buy my first pregnancy strip as I had never seen one and it was ₦50 only. I walked into the pharmacy opposite my school and asked the attendant for two pregnancy strips.

Then the fun began — I asked the young man to describe how I would use it and He almost choked (baby, that is what I came here for. Call me your boss). He had to go get the head pharmacist (another man) who began explaining — there was a look of pity and frustration in his voice yet he kept explaining while I stood there trying to hold my laughter.

All the while I was torturing these men, the other buyers were looking at me like “The poor girl has missed her period”.

I went straight to my friend’s place to give her the gist and I was toppling over from the prank but I never forgot the shock on their faces.

The stigma around menstruation flowing or ceasing is incredibly interesting when you are on the receiving end. Some look at you with pity till you feel like screaming because it is just blood and you know how to handle this better than they will ever remember their national anthem.

Now, I understand menstrual campaigns have focused on menstrual pain in an attempt to elicit empathy (as it should). Yet, I believe that we have gradually demonized the menstrual cycle such that women now spend more time trying to escape it when young and not preparing for menopause (that is another life) as they age.

Here is my list of how I enjoy menstruation

It is an accurate timekeeper: My dad got me my first menstrual calendar at about age twelve and the pamphlet came with details about safe days and all the shenanigans.

For years as an adult, I did not keep a physical or digital calendar (which I should have kept). But I got away with it because I started to hear my body tell me which week of the month we were living.

The menstrual cycle is that reliable. You can be mourning and your menstruation will tell you how it cannot flow well because you are too dehydrated. So, you will stand up and drink water by day two as you will be very thirsty.

Your period is an alarm clock. There is the week where you like work and start noticing dust inside the fence so you clean everywhere because you are massively irritated (that is usually a few days before the flow comes). Then there is that week where a man laughing feels like the AC stopped working. My personal favourite is ovulation week.

Each week has its benefits: the menstrual cycle is twenty-eight days on average and all those days count immensely if you want a quality life.

This technically means your year is divided into a series of twenty-eight days. So, here is how to utilize that.

Week One for some people is the week they are likely to still feel tired if the previous menstruation was tedious. It is not abnormal to sleep or cuddle this week because you are depleted and your hormonal high is declining from the build-up you had the last 10 -14 days.

Week Two is when you get energetic because your hormones have adjusted greatly. This is your fun week on most occasions — your tastebuds are back, and everything feels like nothing changed. This week is a great time to have level-headed conversations because you are more balanced emotionally and physically.

While you are busy playing around, your follicular phase has begun and is maturing into your ovulation phase — when the egg is moving to your uterus and preparing for fertilization.

Technically speaking, it is just about 48 hours. However, women have reported feeling horny randomly that week as well. I therefore refer to it as ovulation week.

The beauty of ovulation for me is not my urge to have sex but the awareness of the other party that I might want to have sex.

As an undergraduate, I passed a guy once and He said “I like your perfume”. I quietly smiled and walked away knowing I wore no perfume — all he perceived was hormonal. That is less likely to happen now as I am older and I have learned how to mask it plus, I biologically smell differently now than I did nine years ago.

Ladies, if you ever are in the mood to seduce anyone, ovulation week is your week — you are more playful, you like brighter colours, food tastes better and you laugh harder — find a perfume that imitates that season and ramp it up! Just know you could be pregnant in three weeks.

Week Four is where the uterine walls begin to shed since you wasted that precious egg after all the sexiness you were given for free the previous week. If you did not waste the egg, well a zygote is formed and we will find out the rest in a few weeks.

This is the week I rest from all my labours to prevent myself from having a stressful menstruation.

There could be a baby in there: there is a level of awe that just comes with knowing you could decide to have another human and then comes the reverential fear of being a great parent. So, every month, I get an internal message that reminds me to deal with my emotional baggage, trauma, etc because I am not about to mess up an innocent life.

I visited my friend at Lekki and she decided to get me snacks at her estate supermarket. As we got to the checkout, I saw these nice condoms (I cannot remember the product name but they had a nice design). So, I asked how much they were and the person said: they were more expensive than Gold Circle condoms. I just blurted out “How expensive is that compared to pregnancy?”

That is the kind of thing menstruation does to your mind — give you perspective.

Now, let me be serious and show you a TEDx Talk that encapsulates this