Response
- Response
My elementary school was an Episcopal parochial school and church on the south side of Chicago. I was in the children's choir at St. Edmund's. The girls' choir robes and changing room was in the basement Ladies' Lounge. In a strange way, there was a kind of reverence attendant to the restroom. There were sofas and comfortable chairs down there. I imagined that churchwomen used the furniture on Sunday, in between services and church school sessions. The children were forbidden to use this furniture, having only the convenience of a locker, storage for the cassock and surplice used for weekly school mass. The Ladies' Lounge was a busy place. It was crowded with things integral to the life of faithful women and to women who needed rest.
It was in the St. Edmund's Ladies' Lounge that I learned about the metal dispensers on the wall. After a couple of years in school, having never seen anyone drop a nickel into the dispenser slot, I asked Sandra Bentley what the little boxes dispensed. "Kotex," she replied. "Those are big pads that ladies use when they have a period." "What," I queried, "is a period?" Sandra Bentley was taller and a bit more sophisticated than the rest of us. I just expected her to know more about the mysteries of the Ladies' Lounge in St. Edmund's Church. "Are you stupid?" she asked. "Ladies get their periods once a month. Those pads are to keep the blood from running down your legs and messing up your clothes."
I was shocked! "Can't be!" I argued. "This has never happened to me!"
"You," she retorted "are not a lady! But when you are one, in a few years, you will get your period just like everyone else. You have to! It is required if you are going to have a baby!"
"What in the world does getting a period have to do with having a baby?" I asked. "Not sure," Sandra responded. "But one of these days your mother will tell you all about it."
I stood in front of the sink in the Ladies' Lounge, staring at the wonder of the little metal box and thinking that I needed more information and less fear. [End Page 150] Would I bleed to death? Would it hurt? And just what was a Kotex anyway? I had never seen one in my life. Here, I thought, right in the church bathroom, was a place of mystery, calling up questions about my body and my life and my future. What on earth, I wondered, could all of this mean?
Since my third-grade introduction to menses, thanks to Sandra Bentley, in the school bathroom, I have always considered periods part of my sacred space. I first learned about them from a peer with great knowledge and no wisdom, whatsoever, in a place that I considered to be an extension of holy space. After all, the Ladies' Lounge was the place where I came each week to prepare for children's mass and the end of the school week. Periods can't be all bad, I reasoned. If they were, the church would not supply such items as Kotex for the ladies!
My initiation reminds us that the mysteries of fertility and reproduction and the wonder of our bodies are often all too secret. Emily Culpepper's Period Piece invites us to enter the sacred space of her inner body to see, remember, and affirm that women are vessels of new life, and, I must add, living, breathing organisms of constant renewal. The red blood that flows out of our bodies like a river every month is continuously replenished, giving women chance after chance, time after time the opportunity to start something new. Often that something new is a change of mind or prospect. Something new is a turning or transition. Something new is the employment of the womb for the nurture of a fetus, or it is the commitment to see through another month or year of months, a trial or challenge that forces the body to resist destruction, invasion, death. The flow from the inner body to...
