Moss

a small fragment from the memoir I am wrtiing about overcoming PTSD and trauma

Moss

Yesterday, I attended a workshop for a Guatemalan woman writer, and she asked us to reflect on the theme of our first menstruation. We were invited to write our feelings around the topic on a piece of paper and bury them in a small planter.

Many times, I have told the story of my first experience with this theme, but yesterday I had a revelation.

I started menstruating at age 12, on Day 2 of a 5-day backpacking trip in the Adirondack Mountains with my father. You are taught as a backpacker that “every ounce counts.” Your meals are measured, food is weighed, your underwear is scrutinized, you use the same soap for washing your hair and your socks, Toilet paper at home was already rationed by my father, who had an obsessive compulsion to control our bodies and actions.

I was well-versed enough to understand what was going on. They had given us pamphlets and kind of let us figure these things out for ourselves. When I saw the blood, I panicked at first, and then quickly controlled my feelings. Instinctively, I did not want to tell my father. I was sharing a tent with him, and wanted that bit of privacy.

I had no rags, limited toilet paper, and, most importantly, no pads. I had a spare pair of hiking socks. And, I was in the woods. We were surrounded by moss Lots of moss. Dry, scratchy moss. Moss is very absorbent. I spent three days with a sock stuffed with moss shoved in my underwear, while summiting 4000´mounains and cooking freeze dried meals over a fire and filtering water. My father was none the wiser.

There was a reason I, and not my mother, was on these hiking trips. I was uncomfortably “Daddy’s Little Girl.” I was the little adult, perfect in every way. From Age 7 on, I was my father’s surrogate emotional spouse. He humiliated my mother while proudly showing off my achievements like a trophy. He wanted me to hike, I hiked, He wanted me to draw, I leaned to draw. He wanted me to stop writing, I stopped writing. He left my mother at home and took me on dinner dates. When we did go out, my mother and I were mistaken for sisters, not mother and daughter. As their marriage deteriorated, my mother was often forced to leave the house to spend the night with her sisters or mother. On those nights, when I was not sleeping outside on the property in a tent, I was brought in to sleep with him.

As I approached puberty, something shifted, and I did not understand what it was. For one thing, I became less accommodated. I started talking and fighting back. I started developing healthy emotionally intimate relationships with other people- especially, my friends Carrie and Chris. My father searched my backpack for the notes we wrote to each other. I was already a very prolific letter writer. He would corner me, saying things I found completely bizarre and inscrutable. “You are closer to your friends than you are to me, and I don’t  like that.” He started beating me more often, He mocked my male friends. He monitored my budding chest. He used me as both his confidante and his weapon against my mother. He held up my achievements to shame her perceived deficiencies when I was younger. Then, as I got older, he started turning on me, too; making me feel like I could never measure up to the different types of perfection that were demanded of me.  He demanded physical and intellectual performance, and a cult-like moral discipline. Emotions, empathy, and collective values were mocked. Bleeding out my vagina was not in the picture for a perfect girl. Nor was individuation. Nor was connecting to my peers. I was his, and his alone. I never understood how my achievements could be held up in public while my personal self was shamed in private.

Now, approaching 50, I am still menstruating monthly. With my poverty situation, I often cannot afford pads or supplies. I still can get very creative about how I trap the flow, especially since I have exceptionally heavy periods that leave me depleted for iron and energy. Every time I have to wear a pad or other time longer than its healthy lifespan, and the tender skin in that region starts to chafe, I flash back and think, “well, f**k, at least I am not wearing a pad made of Adirondack pincushion moss. I will go buy a coke at McDonalds to raid the one ply TP dispenser when I need to. I use towels, absorbent pads, adult diapers, two tampons- but never again, moss.

I remember begging my mother not to tell my father I had started menstruating. The thought of him knowing gave me a full-blown panic attack. I remember the day she told him, when he cornered her and asked why she was using so many more pads than usual. Yes, she was monitored to that degree. My father was MAGA before MAGA was a thing. She looked at him and said, “there are two people using them now.” I understand now why she had to say it that way, but I felt vulnerable and betrayed in some way. And, incredibly dirty, shameful. From the very start, I also inherited my mother’s family uterus, with endometriosis, adenomyosis, and a flow three times as heavy as a regular person. I started wearing a lot of black and also sweatshirts to wrap around my waist because I so often bled through my pads and pants. To this day, I fear wearing white. I see women in tampon commercials frolicking on beaches in white, and I cringe.

Working with that writer yesterday, I finally understood the source of my shame and fear. There is a lot I have blocked out, and I am unsure how far into physicality the emotional incest I experienced, went. It is a rabbit hole I never wanted to explore. It came as clear as daylight- I was afraid that if he knew I had started menstruating, he would see me as a woman and desire me sexually instead of “just” emotionally.

In my 30s, I made moss gardens to honor that scared little girl.