Days 0553 & 0554

I know The Pill is meant to be this hugely liberating thing for women and I know it was back in the late 60s/early 70s but I hate the bloody thing.

I was hesitant to use it: I like the way my body tells me stuff as it waddles and bloats along its 28-32-day journey.

As much as it hurts sometimes, it’s terribly comforting to feel the *pop* of an egg making its way out those tubes like clockwork.

So, like I say, I avoided it. Besides, why should it be MY responsibility alone to make sure his tadpole didn’t cause trouble??

I resisted until I was 30 — pissing one or two people off along the way (which equals 50%-100% of males who were pissed off with me for that).

And then I tried it. It was hideous. I had a month of morning sickness followed by weight gain. Of course I didn’t gain weight in the places I would have liked and watched it glom onto the places I didn’t want it.

And my PMS was much worse. And it never worked — my bodily rhythms kept busting through until I had my period constantly apart from a one day break every once in a random while.

So I chucked them all out — those stupid foil packets — and thought: Fuck this.

I was long-married by then so it wasn’t like I was having sexual relations anyway really (I’m sounding bitter here, aren’t I)?

Then I had a kid.

And they added birth control pills to the veritable bonanza of drugs I was ingesting for the first two years of kid’s life until I finally chucked those out too. I hated taking them even more than the anti-psychotics that made me keep losing my car when I parked it in town (thank goodness for remote locking and flashing headlights).

Then I got rid of the blight on my life that was He Who Shall Not Be Named and entered a world I had never actually been part of: boyfriends and dating.

And the men were all (the two of them) like: ‘Oh, oops, I thought you would have taken care of that’ and ‘I just assumed you had — oh, jeez, sorry’ and ‘Is it safe?’ (that one made me laugh: like there was meant to be some coded word answer to that one — at least Halfman made me laugh albeit AT him that time) or the inelegant ‘Can I finish in there?’ (Halfman again, but that one didn’t make me laugh — it was more like finding a long and salubrious nose hair wafting from a loved one’s nostril at the apex of desire).

I do take responsibility for myself of course, I’ve found the ways that work for me. And I will not compromise them for someone else’s pleasure. At least I’ve stayed true to that one through all my other mistakes.