Aunt Flo (A Post for My Sisters)

(Men who continue to read this post do so at their own peril…but also for possible edification. Those who are squeamish should read this instead.)

Aunt Flo. Riding the Cotton Pony. That Time of the Month. Being with Moses (parting the “Red Sea.” Har-dee-har-har). The Curse.

Ha! How many times have I referred to my period as The Curse? “Being with Moses” has wrought havoc in my life from as far back as I can recall. Some fond memories (and current realities):

(Men who continue to read this post do so at their own peril…but also for possible edification. Those who are squeamish should read this instead.)

Aunt Flo. Riding the Cotton Pony. That Time of the Month. Being with Moses (parting the “Red Sea.” Har-dee-har-har). The Curse.

Ha! How many times have I referred to my period as The Curse? “Being with Moses” has wrought havoc in my life from as far back as I can recall. Some fond memories (and current realities):

• Not going swimming because I was, ehem, unprepared
• That not-so-fresh feeling
• Planning my wedding–and honeymoon–around my cycle
• Forever contemplating thin or thick, wings or wingless, scented or unscented, plastic or cardboard or nothing
• Figuring out how much money I’d save over a lifetime if feminine products were free
• Having the urge to cry while watching Lightning McQueen lose the Piston cup for honor’s sake. Then, moments later, restraining myself from verbally ripping my husband a new one for squeezing the toothpaste tube so that the toothpaste was marooned at the far end of the opening. Again.
• Disappointment because my period came, because I was hoping to be pregnant, but wasn’t. Again.

Yeah, that’s why menstruation’s called The Curse. The hormones alter us. The seeming weakness of emotional sharpness and physical fatigue embarrasses us. The physiology can be jarring, limiting, and at the very least, messy. It slows us down, or reminds us of the hope of fertility that dangles before us, waiting to be fulfilled. We cannot separate ourselves from it without serious pharmaceutical intervention–or menopause–and that has its own set of side-effects.

Then there are those Levitical laws (especially in Leviticus 15:19-27) regarding being unclean during menstruation. It seems so demeaning to be cut off from holy places and even common places because of something not only beyond our control, but endemic to our femininity. It seems so unholy to be able to sit on something and render it unclean.

(Then I wondered if God wasn’t doing us women a favor; every month to be in the world of women–because everybody probably got theirs at the same time–allowing our fathers and uncles and sons and husbands to carry on without us, giving them an opportunity to appreciate what we do, and giving all of us a break.)

Menstruation’s also referred to as The Curse because of inaccurate theology. Do you know that neither Adam nor Eve were cursed by God? Even as He pronounced judgment for their disobedience and inability to ‘fess up to it, He never cursed them. The only cursed things in Genesis 3 were the serpent (Genesis 3:14) and the ground (Genesis 3:17). Child bearing? Hard. Marriage? Could be rocky. Tilling the unrelenting soil? Not a game. But God never cursed the man and woman.

God is a poet and an artist, and He paints a picture of creation and redemption with an earthy palette of dust and rain, trees and blood. He sees the death of Abel (the Bible’s first murder victim and the world’s first death) in Genesis 4, and Abel’s blood cries out from the ground. God takes great pain–before the Law was written–to tell Noah not to eat the flesh of any animal with its life-blood still in it. Then there’s Passover; the visual foreshadowing of the coming of Jesus and the demonstration of God’s deliverance in the sacrifice of a spotless lamb and blood smeared on the door.

The blood is the sacred symbol of life.

Just a thought (NOT dogma, y’all): what if Aunt Flo can be seen as our monthly reminder of Blessing? Salvation, after all, came through Christ’s blood. (And the Savior, after all, came through the womb.) And not even uncleanness can separate us from Him. His life, His death, His resurrection, and His compassion has made we who are willing, clean. When we touch Him, He makes us holy (the testimony of the woman from Mark 5:25-34 shouts an “amen!”).

There’s a word that God used in Genesis 2:18 to describe His cure for Adam’s alone-ness; He said he would make an ezer for Adam. Many versions of the Bible translate this word as “helper.” This word ezer, used over 20 times in the Old Testament, refers elsewhere to saving, rescuing and delivering, and is often used to describe God himself. 

I wonder if God, while inspiring Moses as he wrote Genesis, was playfully poetic by choosing such a word to describe the first woman, knowing the toughness it would take to be Adam’s co-laborer in subduing the earth, and the mystery and labor that would unfold in “being fruitful and multiplying” (can you imagine what the first pregnancy and birth was like for Eve?), and finally, knowing that in the fullness of time, Mary would deliver our Deliverer. 

Perhaps women embody the Good News in a wholly unique and kinda mysterious physiological way. The shedding of blood for life, not death. To be able to shed blood, yet not die. Not that we in ourselves are invincible (yeah, right!), but that our bodies as part of the Imago Dei bring glory to the Lord. The Bible is pretty silent on whether the Fall brought on Aunt Flo (although I’m sure it brought on PMS). But what if Aunt Flo was also meant to serve as a metaphor?