The Rhythm That Is Mine

Last night I got my period. And honestly? I was so happy.

It had been one year and four months since my last one. I have a four-month-old baby, I'm fully breastfeeding including several times through the night, so I wasn't exactly expecting it back yet. But two weeks ago I started noticing the signs. I knew I was ovulating. Then last week I felt very luteal. I wanted to stay in, think, be quiet. And then last night, there it was.

I've been sitting with why it makes me so happy, and I think writing about it is my way of figuring that out.

Here's the thing about me: I genuinely love having a menstrual cycle. Not in a "I'm supposed to say this" way. I actually love it.

Part of it is the rhythm. I love that I change predictably and regularly throughout the month. I'm a very different person in my follicular phase than I am in my luteal phase, and both of those women are completely real and completely me.

Follicular Michelle wants to be out in the world. She wants to sweat, dance, be social, laugh easily, say yes to things, come up with fun stuff to do with her daughters. She has energy and she wants to use it. I love her.

Luteal Michelle wants none of that. She wants to stay home, eat croissants, drink herbal tea, read, watch something good on TV, and think about big ideas, consciousness, life and death, all of it. She doesn't want to perform or be "on." She just wants to exist. I love her too.

Without the cycle, I'm still both of those people. But I don't have a built-in structure that gives each of them room to show up. Having my period back means having that rhythm back. And that genuinely makes me happy.

There's something else though, and this one is a bit harder to explain.

When I have my period, my body feels completely mine.

I've been pregnant four times. I have two daughters, and I carry two losses. And I will say, honestly and without shame: I was never someone who loved being pregnant. I marveled at what my body could do. I still do, truly. But during pregnancy, something in me felt borrowed. Like I was on loan. Like the body I'd always lived in had been temporarily redirected for a purpose larger than myself. (The second trimester had its moments. But mostly, I waited to return to myself.)

Even through miscarriage, that same feeling of my body being caught up in something beyond my control, not quite mine to navigate.

But the cycle? That is between me and me alone. It is mine. It is proof of my own aliveness, independent of what I am producing or nurturing or growing. There is something almost sacred in that. Something that makes me feel (and I mean this literally) like a woman with powers. Like I know something. Like I am tapped into a rhythm that has been running in women's bodies since the beginning of human time.

Maybe that sounds dramatic. But I think some truths are dramatic, and we've just been taught to make them small.

I have no idea yet if this cycle will become regular, or when, or what shape it will take from here. My body is still deep in the work of sustaining another life, and it will find its own timing.

But last night, it found me anyway.

And I am so glad it did.

If you've ever felt this way — about your cycle, about the different versions of yourself that live in you, about your body feeling like yours or not quite yours — I'd love to hear from you. These are conversations I love having.