Mayim Rabim

It's Day Five, and I'm gushing.

Although I'm pretty confident it's going to take more serious medical intervention, I've tried not to become resigned to missing my ovulation date, not to throw out my hefsek tahara on Day 5 as hopeless, or worse, not even to attempt one. I do one this morning, in case I don't have time later. It looks faintly pink to me, but I set it aside to dry, then bring it over to the rabbi's house. Often he says something is fine when I think it's no good. Especially when the color is as light as this. I put on black underwear for the rest of the day; I'll change to white tonight after dark.

Later in the day I try to ignore the sensation of wetness, knowing that I often feel a little discharge at various times of the month, knowing that a small spot or two is still fine. But this isn't a momentary sensation. It persists longer than a spot should take to dry, though I am still not thinking it could be a real flow. Finally I can't stand the suspense any longer and go to look.

Bright red. It has soaked through my underwear, my slip, even making a small damp spot on the back of my (fortunately dark brown) skirt. My body is taunting me. Pointing at me and my fragile hopes, and laughing.

I flash on the second night of Pesach: I am sitting at the seder miserable in the knowledge that I'm not pregnant again, that I'm bleeding this very minute, and I stumble across this verse -

'I shall pass over you and see you wallowing in your blood, and I say to you, 'In your blood shall you live,' and I say to you, 'In your blood shall you live.' "

Reading the familiar words in this new juxtaposition, I think not of circumcision or the Passover lamb, or even the Holocaust, but of my own blood. Suddenly I think maybe I'm experiencing a paradigm shift: I hear the message of the blood leaving my body each month as death, as a call for mourning. But in Judaism blood is life. We do not consume the blood of any animal, for the blood is its life. Life. Why am I grieving so? Am I meant to be comforted?

But it all comes to the same, for I'm losing the gift of life, life is leaving my body, and the revelation I'm after swirls out of reach and is gone, carried away on the powerful current of blood.