Five Quarts_ A Personal and Natural History of Blood - Bill Hayes [30]
To a degree, I think, Mom was dead on. Shannon did get in her own way. My parents took her several times to see Dr. Porter, who could find nothing wrong. The biological process that my mom and other sisters quietly managed remained a dramatic monthly struggle for Shannon. It was as though she had never moved beyond the frightful experience of her first period. My sympathy over the preceding year had settled into bewilderment. By this point in my boyhood, I well understood the notion of calluses. Why couldn’t my sister toughen up?
If Shannon’s tears didn’t announce her time of the month, her wardrobe did. Immediately after getting home from school, she’d bag her body in the same oversized, pale yellow “granny dress,” which she wore like a flag of defeat. In an odd coincidence, girls of the Spokane Indian tribe had historically worn their oldest dresses during menses, though the similarities probably ended there. Shannon retreated to her bed with a heating pad and bottle of aspirin, propping against pillows and taking up her embroidery. She was a Victorian spinster, prim and pitiful. I suspect her discomfort was symptomatic, too, of deeper anxieties about self-image and sexuality, which surfaced with the menstrual bloating and swollen breasts. She was a pretty girl, just over five feet tall, with flawless skin and a beautiful smile, but even on good days she carried herself as if boxed in by her body, hunched over, head down, arms strapping her bosom. I’m sure it didn’t help that the older sisters teased Shannon about her plumpness, nicknaming her Circle. In a house with so many women, she felt isolated, and for the week of her period she withdrew from the family. I was scared for her but also a little scared of her.
Shannon’s impending hysterectomy last fall revived family discussion of her history. “Why do you think it was always such an ordeal for Shannon?” I asked my older sister Maggie, whose own twelve-year-old daughter had just sailed through her first period, excited by this grown-up development. “She fought it,” Maggie said simply. “She always fought it.”
Shannon had a different answer. “It was that house. I internalized the tensions in the house,” she told me. And added, as if in evidence, “They got better once I left for college.” She also admitted to having been relentlessly naÏve in adolescence. Though connected only by phone line, it was as if she and I were back in the yellow bathroom, her hand in mine. She repeated the same thoughts that had spun through her mind thirty years earlier: “It’s supposed to be so natural, but you think, Why is blood coming out of me every month? Something inside must be injured or wounded. I mean, two tampons and a pad? Isn’t it dangerous to lose all that blood?”
Another theory surfaced after her successful surgery. The surgeon informed Shannon that her uterus had been tilted at an unusual angle, and this pressure on her spinal nerves, added to a growing body and menstrual swelling, could explain what had exacerbated her monthly pain. “Now they tell me!” she exclaimed, laughing. “What timing! God, if only I’d known thirty years ago . . .”
I later wondered, would it have made a difference? Rather than consolation, the news might have simply added to her feelings of defectiveness, that yet another part of her was out of whack. But I’m glad not to have to recast the past for, buried beneath her childhood insecurities and extra weight, something truly remarkable was blooming: faith. Shannon, who had long been in open conflict with her physical body, began quietly and confidently embracing her spirituality. She was the only one of my sisters who attended Mass as frequently as Dad and me.
I had become an altar boy in third grade and served for five years. Every other month I was assigned to serve for a week at St. Augustine’s 6 A.M. daily Mass, in addition to regular