Blue Period

A trip to the Friendly Neighborhood Birth Center

The birth center waiting room, pregnant with possibility…

I don’t have cancer! But that is why I went to my Friendly Neighborhood Birth Center earlier this week. After well over a year in menopause—no periods but plenty of hot flashes—I got my period. Or something like a Xerox of a period, faded and grey, but complete with cramps and bloating. A spectral trifecta.

Fun fact: I started ovulating again soon after I started that new side hustle as a bartender. It was the first time in, well, years that I’d been steeped ovaries deep in a social pool filled with fertile, pretty, partying people. And my hunch is—however loopy—that my reproductive system chugged back to life, thinking, hey, we’re not done here yet! Get to work girls!

I pictured a single egg, freckled and bespectacled, tucked into an alcove in my left ovary, snuggled up with a book—one from the Little House series perhaps. She hadn’t gotten the memo that the party was over. But now she’s forever gone. Swirled into some septic pipe or other, braids trailing in her wake. Goodbye little Emily! I loved you!

The blood shocked me. A quick Google told me I had a ten percent chance of having uterine cancer, so after a brief morbid fantasy of all the attention and praise I would garner for being a cancerous heroine, I called the Birth Center to have everything checked out. I would need an endometrial biopsy.

I arrived right on time, or about five minutes after my scheduled appointment. After some confusion about the fact that I’d been double-booked and had indeed prepaid for my appointment through the patient portal, I sat and waited another twenty minutes but no matter. I had my free New York Times games to play. It’s the last bastion of family time—our group text chat where we share our scores. Well that sounded pitiful. Surely it’s better than that at the Miller homestead.

When I finally got called into the exam room, Thomasina* was waiting for me, spiky of hair, pierced of nose, bulky of sweater. She deeply apologized for the wait. I smiled and swatted her sorries away, shocked once again that I was being apologized to, by a medical professional, for having to wait. It was astounding.

She sat in front of her computer screen to take down my information.

“So, you’re here for your annual?”

“Not at all,” I explained.

She wondered who was working reception when I made my appointment. I couldn’t remember her name but knew she was black. In an instant I realized I’d become racist. If she were indeed black, was she a diversity hire? Was affirmative action at work, disintegrating quality of care and racial relations in one fell swoop? How effective!

Thomasina pulled me from my dark reverie. “What are your pronouns?” she asked, with a straight face.

The pronoun question! At a birth center. Priceless. Here I was with my tell-tale uterus and other assorted female anatomy. Here I sat, all 54 years of me, performing all the accoutrements of woman-ness: long wavy hair, lip gloss, mascara, skinny jeans, Uggs, fistfuls of golden rings. How would I handle it? Would I avoid confrontation and state “she/her?” Would I bounce the question back at Thomasina? “Well what do you think my pronouns are?” Would I launch into a gender-critical lecture? “Pronouns weren’t asked for until five minutes ago, dear. Pronouns are a religion connected to the wider arena of woke-ism, which is a post-modern-Marxist mash-up designed to undermine society, reality, biology and sheer common sense. Once you lower yourself to believing the lie of gender identity, they’ve got you. Soon the boot-sole of tyranny will be poised above your brainwashed face. And then you’ll know, sweet baby angel. Then you’ll know their takeover was by design the whole time.” Not that I knew exactly who “they” were. There were so many of them—some unwitting shills, some American corporate tycoons, some, surely members of the CCP…

But I didn’t say any of that. Instead, quite curtly I said, “I don’t do pronouns.” Then I waited for a counter-attack—a woke-soaked lecture on “kindness”…

Instead Thomasina typed a few strokes on her keyboard, and we proceeded like nothing monumental had just occurred.

When she asked what life changes may have taken place to inspire my bleeding I told her my potentially preposterous theory of working in a bar with a bunch of fecund folx folks. She enthusiastically agreed, mentioning the obvious culprit—pheromones—and added, “Plus, you’re smokin!”

“Sorry, what was that? Smoking?” I laughed and thought, hot damn. I showed my TERF card and still the spritely alphabet soldier complimented me, however irrelevantly and inappropriately. It’d be quite a different story if a man praised my looks before inserting a speculum into my vagina.

Regardless, I thought, wait till the hubby hears about this! Will he high-five me? Or roll his eyes, thinking, ugh, this again? As it turns out, we made light of both Thomasina’s inane, insane pronoun question and my unabashed glee, not only at being called “smoking,” but also of my predictable readiness to repeat the story, as we joked I would, again and again.

Soon I was left alone to lose the jeans in favor of a cotton drape.

I glanced around the room and, discovering a veritable treasure chest of woke bounty, grabbed my phone and snapped some pics for you, Dear Reader. Zoom in if you can. Then I hopped on the exam table, no one the wiser, and smoothed the faded sheet across my lap.

Afterward, wiping the goo from my crotch and pulling on my jeans, I walked back to my car. On my drive home I thought about the other woman who’d been in the waiting room with me, clearly Muslim, draped head to toe in black, only her eyes visible. Her husband had chaperoned her to the birth center. I’d seen them in the parking lot, and on my way out of the exam room, passed him in the hallway. In stark contrast to his chattel wife, he was outfitted casually in sweatpants, a hoodie and baseball hat. Would Thomasina think that this woman was living her best life? Expressing her truth? Would they share a pro-Palestine wink? Would she ask for her pronouns?

This world would prove my bigotry after all, I thought. Funny how life works sometimes. So many layers of “progress” to peel, like the scrapings of a uterus that could only ever belong to a woman, no matter where it resided.

🧅