CHAPTER 30 - WOMAN

I know these days, that the right to give a kid hormones is a big conversation. It wasn’t 50 years ago. I was ambivalent about menstruation, but it bothered my parents that I hadn't started my period by age 16. During a break from Hyde, they took me to a world-renowned endocrinologist who x-rayed the bones in my wrist and warned them that I could become a giant. My mom would have hated that. I didn’t want to look horse-y, the way she described some women. The doctor gave me a shot to jump-start my lazy thalamus gland, stop my growth, and begin the tedium of menses. 

They all meant well. That this private biological function was in my parent's domain didn't rattle me, until it did. What if I could have grown into a great athlete?

On one hand, how privileged was I that this became a complaint? On the other, this new blood was a monthly reminder of their intrusive authority. How far did it reach? --into my very pants. And being capable of pregnancy meant my father would now have to be extra vigilant about my dating life. And why had he put his hands all over my uterus after France if he knew I wasn’t menstruating? I didn't know. I just knew experts were in charge here, not me.

 

The message to women --Your body is not your body --continued even as I read Our Bodies, Ourselves, put out by a collective of women in Boston, pictured on the cover. They looked funky and cool, challenging norms and 'sticking it to the men,' specifically the medical men who passed along insult and innuendo masquerading as health care, telling us what to do with a femaleness they couldn't understand. Words like 'hysterical' and 'frigid' come to mind.