Question from my son last night:

“What are your plans on Monday? Besides being stressed.”

He knows me very well. I leave the country to teach a summer abroad course in Oxford on Tuesday, so I will definitely be stressed. (I also have three healthcare appointments that day.)

But I want to take a moment to recognize what’s behind me before I look ahead.

Last summer, I taught four classes. And then I taught 16 classes during this school year (three were just two-units, but still).

I did six conferences.

I just finished one set of proofs on a book, and I’m about to start on another.

And this school year was hard. The fires threw ash into my already-weak lungs and chaos into my life.

I managed to get my purse stolen in Chicago during the first week of a calendar year I was hoping would be better. And then I herniated another disc in my back in February, resulting in a bunch of days when I couldn’t walk and quite a few medical procedures.

So I’m trying to be proud of myself for surviving it all.

That’s why, when I turned in the last of my grades yesterday, I decided to open my nicest bottle of wine.

It’s finals week, so I have a lot to grade. I leave to teach in the UK in less than a week. I’ve been swamped by my McFarland book proofs (there were four chapters with severe, page-number affecting mistakes).

And yesterday, the publisher of my other book just sent proofs that need to be reviewed asap.

Don’t tell me I can get it all done. I can. And will. I’m really good at working myself to death.

So, friends, I need you to tell me to take breaks, to still take time to do my yoga and PT exercises, to breathe.

My black cat, Thoth, thinks I’m his mother. He suckles my ear at night before he falls asleep. Once, Dante suggested I wear clip-on earrings to bed, to try to stop him.

A very frustrated Thoth went to the top of my ear and suckled, hard, almost like biting.

Sometimes, when I deny him my ears, he tries my nose or chin.

But that’s not what makes me a bad cat mom.

I don’t bathe him. And he really wants me to.

He sometimes hops up and hugs my face. In other words, he puts his arms around my face and presses himself against me for a moment, just like a hug.

Then he starts bathing my face. He’ll do a couple licks, and then he presses his face against my mouth.

That’s how cats teach each other about bathing.

I’m not going to lick my cat.

He hasn’t given up on me, but he must think I’m really stupid.

Or stubbornly untrainable.

Many years ago, I burned my childhood journals.

I used to journal all the time.

But when I was 19 and 20, I was in a bad relationship.

I knew he was jealous, which was I was familiar with, since my mother had always been in violently jealous relationships.

I told myself that at least my relationship wasn’t physically violent.

It’s a long story, and there were incredible mistakes on both sides leading up to this, but I was incredibly unhappy. And this relationship had been legalized, which made it harder to get out of.

At this point, I thought I couldn’t get out of it. I sometimes prayed that I would die or that he would, mostly the former because I didn’t want to be the kind of person who would pray for the latter.

It’s hard to hide that kind of unhappiness.

I came home one day to find that he’d been reading my journals. And he was yelling at me about them.

Why didn’t I love him the way I loved that guy I had a crush on when I was 14?

(The guy I had never really had a conversation with.)

I tried to explain how fourteen year old brains work.

And I also tried to explain that he shouldn’t read my journals (trying to explain back then, by the way, was yelling and crying).

He said he had every right to–that since we were married, we were one flesh.

I didn’t have the right to privacy.

I knew he believed that–that he would always feel justified in reading them, whenever he wanted. Every thought I had written down, every thought I might write on the blank pages would be used against me in his struggle to make me into what he thought I should be.

So I burned them.

And I stopped journaling.

It’s been over twenty years–I haven’t gotten back into the habit of regular journaling.

But I want to.

Here’s what we know: Access to contraception and comprehensive sex ed are what lowers abortion rates.

Banning it usually has the opposite effect, because those doing the banning also oppose contraception and comprehensive sex ed.

In general, the banners also oppose universal healthcare, funding education, raising the minimum wage, and women’s equality in the workplace.

In other words, what they’re doing will cause more unplanned pregnancies.

We will also have more:

*Women forced to be pregnant in a job market that will often lay them off for it
*Women forced to give birth in a country with the highest maternal mortality rate in the Western world
*Women thrown into poverty
*Children born into poverty
*Women with pregnancy/birth-related problems that will make them ineligible for insurance if they try to get it later
*Women who might be able to get healthcare for their child in some states, the same states who tell them they can’t have it (even though most would agree a household can’t survive when a parent is fighting chronic or potentially life-threatening illnesses)
*Women struggling to support their families with low wages, which have not caught up with inflation
*Women struggling to go to college and to send their child to college, considering tuition is over 1100% higher than it was in the 1970s
*Children struggling to stay alive in a school system where they might be murdered on any given day
*Women struggling to feed their child, as there are actually politicians who say children should be made to feel shame if they need free lunch
*Children struggling to learn in chronically underfunded education systems
*Women who will forever struggle to find firm financial footing, along with their children often trapped in a cycle of poverty
*Women struggling to pay for their child’s daycare (they have to work; they aren’t allowed to be on public assistance to stay home with their child (they will be made to feel guilty for not staying home with their child)), since daycare is sometimes more than a women will get paid

These women will be told that all of their problems are their fault for having a child.

(These same people will say that if poor women don’t have a cellphone, which employers count on them having, all of their money problems will disappear.)

Most women who get abortions are married women who already have children, who are doing what they have to keep their marriage together, to keep their existing children fed. They know the cost of a child in a struggling household. And we can’t tell them to be abstinent.

There is a three-step process to lowering abortion rates:

1. Give access to contraception

2. Provide comprehensive sex ed

3. Work to fix societal problems, so that women can choose to have that child in a world that won’t leave them and their children to starve

Hmmm . . . what’s behind that door?

Ummm . . . is that a chain?

WTF, UC Davis, why is there a weird closet with a bed and a chain in the ladies room?!?

I’ve spent a great deal of my life trying to avoid migraines in all their forms. A particularly nasty one I can get is a menstrual migraine, signalling the start of my period; it used to ruin 2-3 days of each month.

Once I had insurance (and thus a PCP), we tried a lot of different types of birth control pills, usually with a very low hormone dose to try to have the line between non-period hormone levels and period hormone levels be close (it’s the change in hormone levels that triggers the migraine).

And then a female pharmacist found a solution:

“Why do you keep changing your pills?”

“We’re trying to find one that won’t give me a menstrual migraine.”

“Then why don’t you just take your pills straight through and not have menses?”

And that worked. For years.

For many glorious years.

Several months ago, however, I started having menstrual migraines and some bleeding.

I thought it might be menopause, even though I’m young.

(Why not? My body breaks in all the other ways despite my youth.)

I made a note to bring it up to my PCP and decided to embrace it, if that’s what it was. Naturally, I embrace things by bringing them up to the cats all the time.

“Graymalkin! Stop scratching the couch! I have menopause!”

My PCP, though, said I was too young for menopause and that I probably had a uterine fibroid instead.

A vaginal ultrasound* showed a fibroid.

Mystery solved, I thought.

I was then referred to a gynecologist; I hadn’t had one because I make my poor PCP do the annual exams.

She said a) the fibroid wasn’t causing my migraines and b) I had to change my birth control pill because of my stroke risk.

I let her have her way with the pill change, but I told her I wanted one that would keep me migraine-free.

She said that wouldn’t be an issue, because she was sure I hadn’t been having menstrual migraines again anyway.

???

She said I was having regular migraines that happened to coincide with breakthrough bleeding.

“Except menstrual migraines feel different from regular ones,” I said.

I started the new pill several months ago. My boobs hurt now. All the time.

And once a month, I’ve had a menstrual migraine, followed by bleeding that lasts for several days.

Having established a pretty clear pattern, I emailed my gyno.

Don’t worry, everyone. She said I’m not having periods. I’m just having breakthrough bleeding at regular intervals and coincidental migraines.

“How do I stop the migraines and bleeding that so effectively mimics menstrual migraines and menstruation?”

She said I could try an implant, but that I would definitely have breakthrough-bleeding-that-is-totally-not-a-period.

So I’m waiting it out, hoping that my body will get used to this new medicine. Menstrual migraines used to be my most controlled pain.

I know menopause can be awful, but I look forward to a time when I can at least know for certain what’s going on.

*For those who don’t know, they have to stick an ultrasound wand in your pussy and take a look around; at one point, they have to do the shocker; since I had had this procedure before, I wasn’t surprised at the shocker, which pleased the poor technician who has to break the news to people all day long (and then put her finger in their unhappy asses).

This week, I got a small envelope in the mail. I opened it to find this.

Nothing happened.

So I flipped it over.

And now I’m very happy indeed.

My grandfather taught me about St. Urho’s Day many years ago.

Last year, I wrote about how I was spending my first St. Urho’s Day without him in the world.

Today, my nails are green and purple. I’ve made our cookies. I’ve opened my favorite wine, and I’m drinking it out of a wine glass he gave me.