Fat Enough To Menstruate
May is Period Awareness Month - Vol. III
By guest writer Amanda Parrish Morgan
Editors Note: May is Period Awareness Month! Yes, getting your period can be a drag, but it’s an important function of the female body. It’s something that we all deal with, but aren’t supposed to talk about, even though it happens on a frequent, and regular basis. Every girl and woman experiences their period differently, with it impacting their daily lives from sports to culture, religion, and social environments. The hormones related to menstruation and menopause impact women’s health in ways that are still not fully understood, and millions of girls and women do not have access to period products for the same reason: it’s rude to talk about your period. To bring awareness and de-stigmatize the period, The Earthly Kitchen is bringing you a collection of true stories every Friday for the month of May from guest writers. Be sure you’re subscribed to receive newsletters right to your inbox and share with your menstruating friends!
I was an awkward, chubby middle school kid in a town where sleek hair and clear skin were universal. I’m sure there were some girls eagerly awaiting their periods like Judy Bloom’s Margaret Simon, but I did not know them. In middle school, my friends eagerly awaited travel soccer rosters and dreaded the day when they might weigh more than 100 pounds (I already did, something I’d never have revealed but thought about nearly every minute of the day).
I could not have, statistically speaking, been among the first girls to get her period when one spring afternoon in seventh grade I found blood in my underwear, but I told only my mom. When, I started running cross country in ninth grade, I lost forty pounds but—to my quiet shame—not my period. Even then, at fourteen and fifteen, many of my teammates had not yet started to menstruate and many who had once gotten their periods no longer did, long training runs and lunches of uncooked rolled oats and apple slices adding up to an end to that.
Now, articles in running magazines emphasize that the healthiest runners, those with the professional longevity of NCAA champions and Olympians are able to train without missing their periods. In the years since I was a high school and then a college athlete, a whole vocabulary has grown up around the relationship between menstruation and exercise. What was called the “female athlete triad” (anorexia, osteoporosis and amenorrhea) has evolved to “RED-S”: relative energy deficiency syndrome.
Still, I’m skeptical that the culture of period shame has been eliminated among young runners, or even among the serious, but decidedly adult runners. Even after college, the years in which I ran too much and ate too little to menstruate provided a kind affirmation, if one I knew to keep to myself, of my work ethic. Long before I’d have wanted to be pregnant, it was always with some disappointment that I noted the start of my period. Not pregnant, sure, but still fat enough to menstruate. Not as disciplined, as lean, as marked by stoic deprivation as the girls who never stashed tampons in the bottom of their school-issued duffle bags.
I’m 41 now and my period has become irregular again and there’s no longer any pretending that this is indicative of my extreme fitness, my readiness to run 25 laps around an outdoor track faster than I ever have before or the likeliness that my ribs will show beneath my sports bra, and it’s also not indicative of a month I’ll wait for a positive pregnancy test. It’s just because I’m getting older and will soon, if I haven’t already, be unable to have any more children.
This new significance is not marked by shame the way menstruation was for so many years—decades, if I’m being honest—in the past. It’s also no longer fraught with the evolving anxiety or hope tied to pregnancy, but instead a stark reminder of something both much more simple and more fundamental. The unavoidable fact that my body—or some part of my body’s system—is slowly becoming unable to do something I once took for granted or even resented. I am mortal. Time is passing.
It’s tempting to seek a lessons-learned narrative about all this. Perhaps, to tell myself that I should have been in awe of my fertility in all those years, that I should not have hated my body for doing what I’d eventually want it to do. To rage at a sports culture that, at least in the time and place when I was transforming myself from a chubby, awkward middle-schooler to a devoted college athlete, viewed the hormonal reality of ovarian function as shameful. But it’s not that straightforward: I don’t want to excoriate myself for the desire to defy my body’s biology anymore than I would condemn myself now for wishing—if I could—to stop time from passing, to lay out decades more in which I might reasonably both win a 5k and have a baby, centuries more in which I might call my parents for advice and share a roof with my own two children.
Amanda Parrish Morgan is the author of STROLLER (Bloomsbury, Oct 2022), which The New Yorker named one of the best books of 2022. Some of Amanda’s writing has appeared in The Atlantic, Wired, The Rumpus, LitHub, Guernica, The Millions, n+1, The American Scholar, The Washington Post and elsewhere. She lives in Connecticut with her husband and two children where she teaches at Fairfield University, The University of Chicago’s Graham School, and the Westport Writers’ Workshop. She writes How We Spend Our Days on Substack.
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