Bloody Anxiety!

I almost missed the opportunity to remind my best friend that to get back to my house she should drive straight onto the highway.  The low ding of her blinker didn’t register as incorrect immediately because I was too busy debating whether or not to tell my husband the story…and we were a little high.  My brain jumbled the panic for driving in the opposite direction and its current conversation and I just blurted “WHERE ARE YOU GOING?!” Had I been sober I would’ve perhaps said “Hey, silly my house is straight!” or “Hey, is there something we need to go do before we go to my house?”  Instead I sounded like a raging ungrateful jerk – she was, after all, carting me around.  We had sold my car to afford the move back home and coloring at my best friend’s house was the only activity that got me out of my pajamas (and into yoga pants) and off of my couch (and onto hers).  “Oh dang good lookin’ out B!  I was on autopilot!”  We laugh at her response loud and hard before she flips off her blinker and accelerates toward the highway. 

Anxiety is a funny little devil.  Most of the time I don’t realize I’m feeling it until later when I repeat my thoughts aloud to my mother, and she says something like “Oh my Gawd Brittany you worry about everything!” in her thick Boston accent.  She’s one-hundred-percent Italian, and SHE worries about everything.  I recently tried to explain my anxiety to her like this.  We were on our way to see Cinderella at a theater in downtown Hartford.  I purchased the expensive tickets for us for Christmas; it was the only gift I bought and I couldn’t afford them so they went on the credit card.  The Broadway cast was performing and it was “our” play, so I deemed the event worthy of going further into debt.  We had left the house twenty minutes later than we had planned so my heart was pounding.  Every word my mom said on the drive made me jump.  I counted the minutes to myself as they appeared to turn faster on the car stereo while my mom kept saying “Brittany calm down we’re gonna make it there’s no traffic. YOU didn’t get out of MY showa ‘til 11:20.  You need to calm down.”  I wasn’t actually saying any words but I’ve been told I have a miserable skill of wearing all of my emotions clearly on my face, without trying.  When we pulled up my mom weaved in and out of people in the busy parking lot and decided at least three times half-way into a space that it was too small, only to back out and have a brief confrontation with another vehicle vying for the same space, and move on.  I wonder now if that wouldn’t really be a big deal to most people, but it was taking all of my energy to not yell as I dug one hand of nails into the door handle and the other grasped my purse tightly across my chest.  I decided it was time to share my inner monologue with my mom, who was now sitting calmly putting on her lipstick. 

“There’s twenty minutes to the show Brittany!  Jeez calm down it’s not like it starts in two minutes.” 

“Ok, well, you can be calm, but here’s what’s going through MY head right now: what if we get stuck in the crosswalk and too many cars come and we can’t get in on time?  What if we have to stand behind the closed doors hearing the crowd cheer inside and we can’t go in until the end of a number?  The first song is my favorite song, what if I miss it?  What if we have to use the restroom before we sit down?  What if somebody is sitting in our seats and we have to get someone to help us sort it out?  What if there’s a huge lady sitting in the seat next to me and I have to ask her to please stand up so I can get by?” 

My mom just laughs at me.  When we’re safely in our seats after using the restroom with fifteen minutes until curtain, my mom whispers “See, there wasn’t a huge lady to get ova to your seat” and I realize how ridiculous those thoughts must be.  They’re thoughts that happen nonetheless.  Not much I can do about it, although everyone tries to tell me otherwise.

 So I’m sitting in my best friend’s jeep feeling awful about how I snapped about the direction she was driving in, which I’m sure she didn’t take as snapping and already forgot about. These questions are rolling around in my brain as I’m deciding whether or not to share our story from the day.  I tell Victor everything.  He’s my husband, so my assumption was that meant he gets to know every detail of everything for as along as we both shall live.  He often reminds me that he doesn’t need to know how my poop looked or every time I farted.  I once had a youth pastor who said he and his wife had never farted in front of each other and I thought their marriage must have sucked – there must have been something wrong with them.  My family shared everything; growing up with three brothers leaves little room for grace surrounding bodily functions.  I had been making an effort recently to walk a fine line in the things I shared with Victor.  But this story was too good.  It wouldn’t gross him out, would it?  Or was it a sacred moment of sisterhood that I should cherish?  Would she carry it to her grave, or tell her husband later?  Was it even worth telling? 

Men don’t like to hear about periods.  I guarantee you could walk up to ten men on any street in any city and ask them their thoughts on periods and the answers would be a mix of “it’s natural, but gross” and “I don’t need to know nothin’ about that.”  My period has been particularly mean recently.  I’ve been feeling like a 14 year old again – like it’s all a brand new, awful experience except this time it is not an announcement of womanhood but a cause for concern in my 27-year-old childless body.  Last month I bled through three layers onto our bed sheets.  Victor just took them off and brought them upstairs and my mom threw them in the laundry while I cried in the bathroom.  He told me it was not a big deal, but I hated that I had no control over it and that it hurt so bad.  So today, in the middle of coloring, I ran to the bathroom, used a sparse amount of toilet paper, and then nothing.  The toilet wouldn’t flush. 

“Uh, hey, um, please don’t go in there, but, I can’t flush the toilet, what do I do?”  She told me the toilet was old, to just hold down the handle.  I tried twice more while she stood in the doorway; coming closer and saying “B just let me do it the toilet’s old I’ll just plunge it real quick!”  No, no, no, no.  I was mortified.  The blood was bright and red and heavy and other than on sheets, no one but my mother had ever seen it.  Periods are a weird, awful secret young women are taught to keep, reminded not to tell anyone, especially not boys.  Until we become teenagers and realize we’re all on the same cycle and we can binge watch TV and eat ice cream and cry together.  But even with the bonding of feelings and cramps, there are no visuals.  We don’t sit around going “Wanna see my tampon?” because that is gross and unnecessary and why would you do that?  As all of this is exploding like land mines I’m walking over in my brain she manages to push past me to the open toilet bearing my shame.  She holds down the handle a moment longer than I had and it’s gone.  I run into the kitchen and wash my hands and try not to cry, apologizing profusely to a friend who has literally held my hair back while I vomited, seen me naked, and gone to the bathroom in front of me.  She reiterates that she gets her period once a month too, and she has it right now, and she cleaned public bathrooms for a living, and “Shut up! Stop apologizing! I love you!”  in three identical yells.  Finally we laugh.  We resume our coloring.  We watch an episode of “New Girl.”  She drives me home.

I texted her to apologize (again) a few moments ago.  She replies that she forgot already, and can we go to BJs together later?  The anxious nature I carry within me will probably not let me forget for a long while yet.  Last night I had a dream that all of my friends were lining up to see what I had left in a toilet, and in the dream I woke up covered in blood.  I think about not sharing the story either because it’s gross and no one cares about periods, or because people will just laugh at how anxious and stupid I am about everything.  Then again maybe it’s not so stupid.  Maybe I’m not the only one whose best friend had to rescue from an ancient toilet mishap.  And maybe my anxiety is totally not stupid – it keeps me kind, apologetic, and in most situations I’ve covered every angle and am ready for almost anything.  Or maybe I shouldn’t apologize for any of it at all.  Maybe it’s perfectly reasonable that I worry about missing a musical because someone may be blocking my seat and it could take ten minutes to get by them, or that my girlfriend won’t be able to look at me the same after she has seen my blood in her toilet.  I suppose it doesn’t matter; whether it is reasonable or not to most, these worries will be ever present, so I will choose to let them feel reasonable.  They will not make me crazy, paranoid, or “a mess” as my mother often puts it in her kindest tone.  They’ll just be there when I try to sleep, or read, or flush a toilet, or give my friend correct directions, and it’ll all be fine.