Menstrating while in quarantine? Not bad! I don’t normally track my life in terms of my menstrual cycle, meaning I don’t look back like, “ahh at this time of the month in March, I was…” But, at this time of the month, less a few days, in March I was closing out a comedy club on a Saturday night and feeling grand and irresponsible. I drank heavily on Coronavirus Friday and stayed up way too late. I participated in a public city bus, dive bar pub crawl on coronavirus Saturday, receiving the added bonus of the “shampoo effect,” whereby you get buzzed faster the next day after a night or drinking. Its how alcoholics wash their hair. I was eating heavy club food all weekend and staying up way later than I needed to. Of coarse it also felt irresponsible because things were just ramping up. Toilet paper was already in short supply and the karaoke place I was working at had closed that Friday. Boise’s Mayor had yet to shut down all restaurants and bars in the city and Idaho’s Governor was a week and a half away from the stay at home order still. I was cramping like a my uterus was being jumped, bleeding like I was shot in the genitals and exhausted, like… I had been hit by the bus I had been brown bagging it on. None of this is good self-care anytime of the month but during this time, with a waning, mid-thirties reproductive system in revolt, my body took the treatment as a full betrayal. By the late set on Saturday, I was sober, empty of energy and no amount of liquor or food or any substance was was going to help me through it. All I had was an orange flavored Lacrioux I had gotten from a bench, which I opened on stage and luckily it was terrible and my reaction got a good laugh. The set went fine, really well actually even at times, considering. As soon as I got up there, I forgot that I had forgotten a tampon and was bleeding into the full-length pad with wings one of the servers had snagged for me. I forgot that I had just dropped a full diva cup on the bathroom floor after an emergency public removal because it just wasn’t working and just felt thankful that no one was in the stall next to me. Maybe it was the adrenaline or maybe it was just having that dirty little secret, that nasty self-knowledge that got me through. Killing while dying feels, just so right.
But quarantine menstrating? While hosting a lover? Stellar! A non-issue, really. All the time I need to sleep, eat, bathe and cry? He made chocolate cake unprompted. I am loved and my uterus knows it. ‘Nough said.
Here is an issue and this is something I have thought about before but never wrote out and so forgot. It had come back in full pandemic light. I believe that our culture’s concept of help is flawed. In this country there are those who need help and those who are in the position to help. Help assumes the position of us and them. It is yet another binary, black and white, separatist box. The have’s and the have nots. It puts help into the hands of the haves and it puts those without access to resources into the position of making the decision to accept or reject help.
“Well, yeah, of coarse, how else would it work, right?” No. If we had a thriving middle class, we would be helping each other. Instead we have a shrinking middle class, who is trying to help a growing lower class and an upper class who makes a big show of their help, aka philanthropy. The disparity in this country has been made abundantly clear by the lack of social safety net during this time; that is undisputed, even by republicans.
Why does it feel unacceptable to accept help and also give it? Or more likely to be someone who gives help and then turns around and accepts it. It sounds kind of… off. But why? Accepting help means putting aside your pride, putting you or your loved ones needs first and it gives the helper the gratification that comes with giving. The irony in help , is that the cost lied completely on the person being helped. How many people who help are willing to be helped? If someone has received your help and offers help back to you, you have an obligation to accept it, otherwise it is a breach of an agreement, at least in the society I imagine. To not accept help when you have been able to help, sends a message that says, “I don’t need help, you need help,” or “I am the helper and you are the helped.” It robs both parties of their dignity and of the experience of reciprocity and respect. Help in our culture is not a respectful endeavor. Just look at the service industry.
Voicebox, the karaoke place I worked at, modeled their product and style of service after the Japanese. In that country it is considered in an honor to serve and it is with benevolent respect and real appreciation that people receive that service. It starts somewhere and while many of our guests were drunk idiots, many more were truly grateful for the whole-hearted service of my co-workers provided. Its another layer of irony, another box- there are the served and there are the servers. Servers and retail clerks were the first people out of work and now that millions of people are out of work, we finally can all stop pretending that we weren’t buying into a system that keeps people, especially people in service, in the margins. It’s like the curtain was peeled back and there was Oz himself, Mitch McConnel, signing the CARES Act and laughing maniacally. Now those of us who were barely making it, are going to be earning more on unemployment than if we were working! That is, if the office can handle all of our claims; that is if our system can deliver. But why this now? Why the sudden recognition? So we could all feed our fat faces and feel good about ourselves when we leave a good tip, or get a good tip, but know that we are just drinking and eating ourselves to early deaths?
I digress. Maybe the kind of reciprocity I seek is a bit short sighted. I am looking at it through personal experience, through my own lens. There is a family who is connected to the Boise comedy scene and when this all started they offered to help make meals for service people out of work. I have accepted the help, and have connected other people to their service. I’ve delivered food to people from work and from the comedy scene. I offered the family to help cook, because I have plenty of time and actually love to do it and it gives me comfort, but they said they didn’t need it and no one who I delivered to has even checked in to see how I am even, or if I could use some food delivered. Is it me or is it some unspoken rule that if you have been helped by someone you can’t help them back? Why does the lack of direct reciprocation feel like the severing of a limb in a relationship?
Maybe this is part of my scrambled relational expectations. Help might look like you send it out there and it comes back around in different forms, more fluid, not so relationally driven. Maybe help, doesn’t belong in relationship at all and thats not what you are doing when you make your partner chocolate cake while they are shedding their uterus lining. Maybe that person you helped goes on to help someone else, maybe not. But you are helped and they are helped and there is a greater reciprocity. But maybe if you help someone and you let them help you back, or if you are helped and you offer help back, from there, you can build.