Katy Vs. Her Ovaries - Did I get had by Aunt Flow?

 I started my period in the wee morning hours of a slumber party in 1996. I was almost twelve-years-old and celebrating the end of a school year and a friend moving away. I wasn’t the first. I guess I was aware that the same fate would befall me as it had some of my friends. Nonetheless, I was embarrassed and upset. I remember refusing to utter a word to the throng of tween girls strewn throughout an empty living room piled high with sleeping bags and pillows. Remembering this milestone years later, the paradox of a slumber party and menstruation strikes me as an accurate portrayal of growing up.
         After a few hours of careful analysis, I finally accepted that I must share this occurrence with at least one person in this world. My mom would hand me a Maxi pad and ask a few uncomfortable questions about the occurrence and then we moved on. Silent partners in the world of women. Sometime later, after the initial shock wore off, my period became public knowledge amongst my sleeping bag friends. My mom eventually assured me that periods were not the end of the world (granted, all of this conversation occurred in hushed voices) and that I should actually be grateful for this dreaded monthly happening, for a period would allow me to fulfill what my mother still touts as her proudest accomplishment: having children.
        My friends and I were notably less sold on the power of a period. We spent years sharing tampons and stories about the trials and tribulations of growing up female. Some of us cursed more than just the inconvenience of a period, angered by the sacred possibility of pregnancy in our hormone-driven world of adolescence. I always respected reproduction far more than most of my friends. My seemingly regular cycles bolstered my mother’s “be grateful” approach to menstruation. I always trusted that the agony endured would one day be worth it when I was thirty and married and a mother.
        I haven’t had a period in eight months now. Lupron fulfilled its promise of “shutting down my system” as the doctors communicated to me. I feel like I have caught a glimpse of life on the other side of womanhood, a snapshot of menopausal Katy, complete with bone pain, hot flashes, and unwarranted tears. Even after Lupron is technically out of your system, a person does not immediately go back to a normal reproductive being. There is a window of time before a patient starts producing hormones and eventually has a period. This is what got me thinking about periods and puberty. This flip-flop between a healthy twenty-something-year-old to medically-induced menopause and now to waiting and wondering when (if?) these busted ovaries will ever start functioning again. I am becoming a woman. Again.
       After I was diagnosed with endometriosis, I started wondering when the disease started setting up shop inside of me. Were the cells of my uterus attacking their reproductive friends since that fateful summer night in 1996? Is the moment that I walked through the door to being a child-bearing woman also the exact moment that my body started fighting against itself? Did I endure the “be grateful” advice from my mother for nothing? If I had ever had uncommitted, unprotected, premarital sex with anyone, could I have even become pregnant? Or was all of this a sham? Have I been unable to have children for as long as I thought I could? Did I get had by Aunt Flow?
       I used to believe that people get what they deserve. Call it karma or blessings or whatever you will, I used to think that things work out the way they should. The longer I exist with the ever-present infertility cloud hanging above me (and my husband) I wonder if maybe all of this is a lot more of a crap shoot than I’d like to believe. I worry that those years of periods were nothing more than annoying.