Beyond the whirly-gig clothes line and down a grassy slope two kauri stood like a pair of giants overlooking the bay. I knelt between them, clearing a circle, feeling for the damp dark earth that lay beneath fallen branches. Dirt gathered in little brown wedges between my skin and fingernails. Satisfied with the cleared space I slipped my undies off, folded the bloodied pad to the inside then lay them on the swing seat.
Soft sounds from an incoming tide drifted up from the beach below; a car whooshed in the distance, rounding a bend; a breeze slipped up the hill to where I hid. I squatted and a warm trickle of blood and urine hissed and pooled. I glanced down, satisfied that it was a soft red. Perhaps I felt a small clot, pressed it down and out. I stood up, smoothed my dress, put my underwear back on. A prayer fell from my lips as I scraped dirt and dry twigs back over my offering. I can’t remember the prayer, but it was an incantation of thanks to Mother Earth and it felt true, like it could belong to me, not like the Catholic ones that had always floated outside of my body.
My friend who had difficulty conceiving said she had been told by a Native American medicine woman to do all this—the bleeding into the earth, the prayer. She gave birth to her first baby a year later. It was the early nineties and the concept of cultural appropriation hadn’t entered my awareness: the ritual hadn’t come to me through my Celtic heritage but I was willing to follow the advice that had been passed on to me, one woman to another.
This was twenty-eight years ago when I thought I had my life figured out. I was thirty-two when we decided it was time to have the baby. Just like all the other things my husband Blu and I had pursued—travel, our own businesses, and now the lifestyle dream out in Cornwallis—we expected that simply because we were ready, a new life would take form in my belly. I had put in the hard yards of a few years of therapy, and although I couldn’t see it at the time, perhaps I simply felt OK enough to be a mother now. Ready at last. We were on holiday in Far North Queensland when we visited Granite Gorge in the Atherton Tablelands. No one else was around; it was as if we were the only humans in the landscape. It was a blistering hot day so we walked in the shadows, towers of granite dwarfing our pale bodies. Some rocks stood like prehistoric creatures, others, marooned whales. Birds warbled and shrieked, marking the air with their fluorescent sounds. Green pools of water shimmered in the heat. Filled with what felt like an instinctual knowing I turned to Blu and said it was time to call in our baby. We made love in a small valley. We skinny-dipped in a warm slow river. I imagined some kind of elemental kinship with this beautiful place, imagined unseen forces blessing us.
Back then I imagined lots of things. I imagined I would become pregnant straight away. But I was bleeding two weeks later, and then again, a month after that. There were thirteen more months like this. I tried all kinds of remedies, natural things—like lying with my feet up the wall after we’d had sex. Really?
I knew that compared to some friends with long-term fertility issues, a year of waiting to conceive was not that long but the disappointment tore at me. The doctor told me that fertility issues were common with someone who was almost an ‘elderly primigravida’. I consulted a naturopath, a herbalist; I talked to friends, and I prayed. I prayed to a pick ‘n mix of goddesses, some of them pagan forerunners of the Catholic Mary I’d been taught to believe in. Maybe I even prayed to St Jude who my mother said was the patron saint of hopeless causes. Was I a hopeless cause?
Me, the woman bleeding into the earth under those trees, this was not the person I had been primed to become. I was raised to be a good Catholic girl and that meant my body was something to be controlled, kept under wraps.
My mother was a devout Catholic and I grew up in Epsom, not far from my convent school, Our Lady of the Sacred Heart. The school was run by the Sisters of Mercy and it sat in a dip close to Manukau Road. In the wintertime, fog would settle itself in and around the dark evergreen trees that encircled the convent—the white sprawling villa where all the nuns lived.
In 1970, when I was eight, our first lay teacher, Miss Ayres arrived—with her cropped dark hair, boots and paisley dresses. Before that year, all the teaching was conducted by the nuns. Sister Theodore, named after the patron saint of soldiers, was the principal. Dressed in black serge from head to toe she would circle the playground like a bear clacking her teeth or growling warnings. I was curious about Sister Theodore’s body; in fact, I was curious about the bodies of all these women. Because I had never seen any of the nuns walk to the bathroom, I imagined that they wore iron underpants from which no urine could dribble. I didn’t know about periods yet, or chastity belts, but I knew that Sister Theodore was a Bride of Christ; she wore a crucifix on her shielded chest and a wedding band on her ring finger.
At this little convent school we were taught all about sin. Thanks to Eve satiating her appetite in the Garden of Eden we were all sinners. My soul had started off as good, aside from that stain of original sin, but baptism had washed me clean. My soul was to reside in my body until I died. This housing of the soul in my body was going to be problematic—my body was an unsafe place. My body could so easily become an occasion of sin.
*
My mother, had she known about my ritual under the kauri all those years ago, would have labelled it pagan, perhaps me a pagan too. That would make me a sinner. And my behaviour? Possibly debauched, probably revolting. My mother loved me, but she could only speak from the rigid place of her own conditioning. A typical Catholic woman of her era, she talked more about the importance of being a young lady than the importance of listening to your body or being true to yourself. Anything corporeal was skimmed over and right from the beginning, I learnt that menstruating was a furtive, secret affair.
I was twelve and in my last year at the convent school when our small class of eleven girls went on a trip to the Bay of Islands. I was packing my suitcase when my mother came into the bedroom; she was holding a small brown paper bag. She knelt on the floor next to me, opened the bag and pulled out a white elastic belt with shiny silver safety pins attached to the tabs, front and back. She had pinned the first menstrual pad in there for me. ‘In case you might need these.’ The carpet pricked at my knees; heat reddened my cheeks. The two of us had never discussed periods. I was so mortified I told her that I knew everything, which of course I didn’t. There was also a pair of white pants with plastic liners that rustled as she folded and slipped them back into the brown bag. Without any further discussion all of this was secreted in the back corner of my suitcase.
I was grateful I didn’t need all this paraphernalia on the school trip. It was a Friday afternoon ten months later when I discovered a thick shock of brackish blood that had spread like tar on my blue underpants. My parents were on holiday in Fiji so my sister and I were boarding at Saint Mary’s College in Ponsonby. I folded some toilet paper, placed it into my undies and then did a careful walk to the dormitory. I tucked myself away in the dark curtained cubicle, unwrapped the brown paper bag and tried to quiet the rustling of those plastic-lined pants.
I strategised my trips to the toilet, tried to slip in when other girls weren’t lined up staring into the long mirror that sat above the cracked porcelain basins—plucking their eyebrows, checking out a new ear piercing done in the dormitory the night before, maybe squeezing a pimple. I’d press the toilet door shut, slide the lock, sit and gaze at the grey-marbled lino, every now and then peeking between my legs at the drops of blood, watching dark clots plop into the pink water. When it was quiet—perhaps just the slow drip of a tap bouncing around the walls—I’d unhook the bloodied pad, maybe sniff it, fold it, wrap it in a sheath of toilet paper before secreting it in the pocket of my blue-checked uniform. My footsteps made sharp cold echoes as I walked to the end of the basins. There was a small metal incinerator box hanging on the wall. The trick was to open the little trap door, hold your breath, slip your bundle into it and then slide it to a close as quietly as you could. The bloodied offerings were combusted, turned to ash.
It felt like that period had been a long time coming. I bled for nine days and I don’t remember telling anyone except perhaps my best friend, maybe my sister. I would run my hand over the back of my dress after standing up from class, making sure there were no damp spots, no crimson flare.
I was in the third form, in a class of thirty females, plus the young nun with the blue-and-white habit—her uniform. I’ve figured it out now. Even if only two-thirds of us were menstruating that would equal around 100 days of bleeding a month: over 750 days per room in a school year. I remember the smell of Green Apple shampoo, the feel of my smooth newly shaved legs and my burgeoning breasts pressing against my dress; but I don’t remember any talk of bleeding or blood—unless it was Jesus’s blood. I never said ‘I’m bleeding’ or ‘I’m menstruating’ or even, ‘I have my period’. The euphemisms covered the taboo. Aunt Flo, Got a Visitor, That Time of the Month. ‘Sanitary products’—what is it that is so unclean?—were referred to as surfboards and plugs.
I think of my friends and classmates, of how rarely we spoke about this subterrestrial dance that was always happening—how our ovaries were surrendering their oocytes—their eggs, our uteri then reabsorbing them before casting out the plush lining, shedding blood and small pieces of flesh. Our miraculous bodies did all of this while we moved them from class to class, followed our timetables, one subject period to the next. Our thoughts or concerns about our physical needs stayed underground. We were powerhouses of creation and yet this bleeding was something to be ashamed of, it required hiding—pretence. I try and locate that knot of shame in my own body now. It’s much smaller, but definitely there, somewhere deep, entangled still.
*
Until we were in our later teens my siblings and I still had to go to church once a week at school and then every Sunday with my mother. At mass the priest would hold the cup heavenwards, follow it with his supplicant eyes, intone a prayer, consecrate the wine, transforming it into ‘the Blood of Christ’. This changing of bread and wine into body and blood is known as transubstantiation—the transformation of one form into another. I would be kneeling at this point, sometimes feeling a trickle of my own warm blood moving through me, seeping into a pad. No mention was ever made of Mary’s blood. Mary was Christ’s mother but there had been no sex involved; we were taught hers was an ‘Immaculate Conception’.
We ate the sacred body of Christ, drank his holy blood, but our female bodies were a different matter altogether. They were nothing to be revered, they were to be managed, covered up, kept discreet. I can’t pinpoint the time when I internalised the shame of being in a body that was capable of bleeding as it pleased, capable of pleasure. I suspect it was a slow insidious layering. Doctrine, taboos, looks, silences, all stacking one on top of the other, crystalising into tight little cul-de-sacs. My first period was in 1975. Almost five decades later many women are still rendered silent about their menstrual bleeding. In 2019, Stuff headlined an article: ‘Period shaming: Three in four Kiwi women say menstruating is stigmatised’. Brittany Keogh and Caroline Williams wrote that according to a 2018 survey, more than half of the respondents, aged between thirteen to seventeen, would rather fail a test than have any of their peers know they were menstruating. 90 percent of the participants said they tried to hide the fact that they were menstruating.
Libra, a menstrual product provider, say that they are trying to break taboos. In 2021, one of their ads showed washable period pants being wrung out in water, pink residue dripping. I track a few of the comments that were made about the ad on the Campaign Brief website. ‘Totally disgusting ad… degrading and embarrassing… I’m horrified and my husband is disgusted… the ad is offensive… gross… embarrassing… so revolving’.
I’m assuming that ‘the customer’ means ‘revolting’ here, but I laugh. Yes, in the end it is all about revolving. It’s about cycles, planets spinning, revolutions, returning—our wondrous bodies pulled around a force so much wilder and more majestic than any of us can possibly imagine. The Australian ad regulator dismissed the complaints, but the online vitriol continues, still twists around a broken centre.
*
I’d like to say that the bleeding under those trees marked a change so profound that I threw out the burden of guilt and shame, but it did not. Yet it was a moment of self-acceptance, power even. Something was being subverted. Other discoveries had come before this. In my late twenties I started to explore some body issues through therapy; I also went to weekend workshops and read spiritual feminist books like Women who Run with the Wolves and Goddesses in Everywoman. I took part in sacred rituals where we women sat on the floor in a circle, told our stories, sang together. At a retreat in Taupō I skinny-dipped in a warm river with my new friends. These were times when I discovered something new in myself, something that was deeply feminine and wasn’t rooted in shame. But my life has always been this see-saw, taking on a little more of the wild and true, then reverting back to shame and silence—transformation incomplete.
A few months ago, someone told me that she’d heard about a herbalist sitting in a women’s circle. When the group stood up for morning tea the herbalist’s dress was marked with a spread of menstrual blood. There was no flurry, no change of clothes, the herbalist continued to go about the day’s activities unchanged. My gut clutches when I hear this, my shame-knot stirs; I cringe, want to smother the story, as if even telling it here, approving of this bleeder’s stance—which I do—implicates me as somehow being unclean—perhaps not an occasion of sin but an occasion of offence.
*
Eleven months after that offering under the kauri, I laboured all through the night. My best friend from primary school was there, along with my husband, midwife and GP. My friend and I were both now thirty-four and she was making a mid-career shift, studying to become a midwife. The two of us had run this birthing scene before when we were about nine years old. We would park ourselves next to the hedge on her front lawn and act out a childbirth drama. One of us would be groaning with labour pains and the other one would be calling out ‘Push push!’ There was something primal about how we enacted that birthing, the corporeal sounds—a feeling that we were doing something forbidden as we tapped into the dominion of our future capabilities. My friend’s family was more liberal than mine, her mother ‘Continental’. There would have been more discussion around menstruating, sex and childbirth in their house and my friend probably schooled me up on the basics of birthing.
I had hoped for a home birth but progress was slow, so we transferred to Waitākere Hospital in the middle of the night and I birthed our beautiful son the next morning. His warm waxy body lay between my breasts when our midwife showed me his placenta. It sat in a white curved dish, bulging still, but redundancy fading its tree-of-life veins. It too was miraculous. Like my son, this organ was not of me, yet had come through me, part of a pulsing cosmic force that my body was inextricably bound to. The thick ropey umbilical cord, which my husband Blu had cut—tears streaming down his face—lay in a corner of the dish, curled like a pale little transient snake. We went home later that day and popped the plastic-bagged placenta into our freezer.
I’d heard about a friend of a friend who cooked up her baby’s placenta and ate it. Placentophagy. Apparently it tastes a bit like liver. Some mothers have this storehouse of minerals and vitamins encapsulated. The placenta is dehydrated, ground, and popped into a capsule. One placenta can yield about two hundred capsules.
In te reo Māori, whenua is the term for placenta. I knew it was a sacred tradition for Māori to bury their whenua and also common practice in many cultures around the globe. Although my mother or grandmothers hadn’t followed this ritual, a few of my friends had; it felt natural and right to do the same. When our son was two months old Blu dug a hole next to the giant kauri and as we said a prayer of thanks, the placenta made a soft thud into the dark—whenua to whenua. Blu shovelled in a little dirt and then I manoeuvred the spindly young kauri above it while he filled in the hole. Our son slept in a front-pack on my chest through it all. Two years later our daughter’s placenta was turned in alongside that young kauri and three years after that, her baby brother’s was buried there too.
Over the years my periods became heavier. I was prescribed iron pills, but by the time I was forty-five the flooding was so bad it was hard to manage. Here I was with three kids under eight and in perimenopause. I visited the doctors with painful regularity, lay face down on the table while the nurse injected an iron infusion into a buttock. Finally at an after-hours clinic in Queenstown I was prescribed tranexamic acid to inhibit the blood loss. It was a relief to feel like at last I had some control over the bleeding, but it was still erratic and at times frightening. The flooding became so bad that I sometimes had to wrangle two tampons into my vagina and stick a ‘super’ overnight pad—into my underwear. Some mornings I did all of this just so that I could make the short, round trip to school without blood spreading all over the car seat. At work, when I wasn’t wearing something with pockets, I would secrete little boxes of super tampons behind the toilet cistern; often I was worried I wouldn’t get to the bathroom in time. Eventually I met with a gynaecologist who told me that despite there being no diagnosis I could have a uterine ablation (where the lining of your uterus is seared to a crisp) and if that didn’t work, a hysterectomy. There was a stubbornness in me, perhaps a madness, a pretending that nothing much was going on down there. I didn’t even want an IUD. There was something shameful about bleeding to excess like this. Surely I could manage it myself. I became so anaemic I would be puffing climbing just a short flight of stairs, yet I continued to ignore the fact that my body was struggling.
When I was forty-seven, multiple pressures bore down on my husband and me. We were struggling: a business was failing; we had to sell our house; we had three kids in three different schools; elderly parents who were battling ill health. My mother said she knew what it was like and encouraged me to have a hysterectomy. She had hers at forty-four. She laughed and said Sister Theodore had told her to drink lots of stout to build herself up again after the surgery.
Despite the evidence, there was a stubbornness in me that wanted to run the show. I wanted to be different, to hold on to my uterus, be a friend to this terrifying and sacred hub of my femaleness. I wanted my periods to end as naturally as they had started. But in the end I succumbed, took care of myself and had a Mirena IUD inserted. The Mirena secreted progesterone into my body, the frenetic building of my endometrial lining came to an end; the bleeding petered out, then stopped. Not long afterwards blood tests showed that I was menopausal. I was grateful. But between pregnancies, and when the children were little, there were times when I embraced the blood. I soaked cloth pads in buckets of water and fed the liquid to my garden. I would do all this in the early hours of the morning while the rest of the household slept. I never did become liberated from the secrecy, the shame really, around the perfectly natural state of menstruation—my vagina a passageway for the flesh and blood my uterus needed to shed.
I try and reconcile these different women, my different selves over these years: the young shy woman, secreting pads in her pockets; the woman crouching behind the trees bleeding into the earth; the mother, keeping her pads and tampons tucked away in a cupboard and before anyone was awake, rinsing out bloody cloths into a bucket then fertilising her garden; the woman in her corporate black jacket, hiding tampons behind the toilet cistern; the almost-haemorrhaging woman, denying that anything untoward was going on.
In all of these women, that deep knot was keeping them in line. I have worked at unpicking that tangle of shame, lessening its hold on me. I cannot say that all that shame has been eradicated, residuals still circulate, sometimes make themselves known—want to stop me saying what is true, right here, right now, line by line in this essay—but something much more important has grown in me; an innate knowing, a trusting in truth, a trusting of my place within the mystery of the cosmos. It’s a Monday, about 9am and the road bulges with rush-hour traffic. I am standing kerbside waiting for the pedestrian crossing on Broadway in Newmarket. A new electric bus slides through, pauses. If I move my body forward just a little I could touch its monstrous side, the images, the words. I stare at the roaming billboard; it’s plastered with an ad for Libra menstrual products. Images are headlined with ‘WEAR BLEED WASH REPEAT—The new period ritual’. Even though I know some attitudes have changed—are changing—that deep knot registers a jolt in my fifty-nine year old body. I’m startled that these words and images are here, meandering like a recalcitrant teenager through Newmarket at peak hour. But within a beat I’m smiling. I am in awe that before I was born my little body contained somewhere between one and two million oocytes, and then, once I began menstruating month after month, barring my pregnancies, my faithful ovaries released these eggs, offered them up to the cosmos. I am grateful for the seeds that were germinated, took root, grew, held their ground. I am grateful to the whenua that has nourished me and for the whenua that has nourished my babies.
It was almost twenty-eight years ago when my husband and midwife friend stayed up with me that night as I laboured to bring our firstborn into the world. It was just after nine o’clock in the morning when my kind GP said she and my midwife thought a small snip would help. She held her scalpel and leaned in, but I told her to hold off, give me another minute.
Something in me flew to those kauri on the hill at home, the ones that I bled under, or perhaps they came to me. A primal tenacity took hold as I gathered greedy lung-fulls of air, bore down and pushed my beautiful son out and into the world.
Works cited
Green, Ricki. Libra Says ‘Wear. Bleed. Wash. Repeat. Repeat’ in New Underwear Campaign via Cummins & Partners. Campaign Brief, 21 June
Keogh, Brittany, and Williams, Caroline. Kiwi Women Say Menstruation is Stigmatised. Stuff, 19 August 2019
