A Fool's Confessions
First Periods, Pregnancy Pranks, and Dispelling Unwanted Curses
My first period came when I was eleven years old, on April Fools’ Day, sometime in the afternoon. The year was 1999. I got off the school bus, feeling like shit, and walked up the long driveway and into the house. I likely said something like “hey, Mom,” on my way to the bathroom where, suddenly, there it was: the cotton-caught smear of bloody bronze. It gleamed, rust-ruby, up at me. And on the day before spring break. Damn.
I yelled to my mom, who laughed incredulously and without hesitation, assuming I, along with my itchy A-cups and thickening army of peachy pubes, had been scheming all day: “What’s up? Did you get your period or something?”
“Umm!” I shouted, equal parts frantic at the absence of ceremony and bummed at realizing such a once-in-a-lifetime-level April Fools’ joke was now, for me, pretty much an impossibility.
When my brother and I were kids, our dad told us stories of his greatest April Fools’ Day tricks. He and his siblings swapped the salt in the shaker and the sugar in the bowl. “Salt in your coffee!” we’d sneer. “And sugar on your eggs!” When that lost its shine, he and our uncles mixed firecrackers into their father’s tobacco, of course in an amount he would use a word like “innocuous” to describe. In middle school, he and some friends jammed a potato into a detested teacher’s exhaust pipe, watched as it shot out like a cannon, and ran, laughing, away from the scene. As far as jokes are concerned, the man can hang.
Still, I don’t know what possessed me to, exactly five years later, tell my father I was pregnant as a prank.
I came home at the usual time on April Fools’ Day 2004 to find my dad in the rhythm of his usual evening treadmill run, the basement echoing with the sound of his footfall punctuated by blustery exhales.
With my heart pounding probably as much as his, my mind zipped between potential holes in my plan. He knew that I had since middle school been on hormonal birth control to help with acne and my period. He also surely noticed how I was the kind of kid who pored over what’s-happening-to-my-body books, and he helped proofread my impassioned editorials for the school newspaper against abstinence-only sex education programs. He’s no fool, and knew I wasn’t, either. So how could unplanned pregnancy have befallen his safe-sex-obsessed, BC-pilled honors student? I had to shoot for nothing less than Oscar-worthy.
“Dad?” I puttered. Foot fall, foot fall, ex-hale. Rub your eyes, cover your face. “I have something I gotta tell you.” Tears, tears, c’mon tears. I’d had at least one opportunity to practice this skill for a police officer when pulled over for speeding, not to mention while navigating what had become a possessive and controlling relationship with my boyfriend J—, a fellow sophomore I’d been dating for a little over a year and would continue to see for one more.
My dad slowed his pace—ex-hale, foot fall, foot, fall—and hopped off the treadmill. “What’s up, honey?” he asked, concern conveyed through his just-caught breath, freckled arms opening into a hug. My family is one of open conversations and freely-given affection, even if the men aren’t always as likely to initiate these connective moments.
Between sobs into his sweat-slick bare chest, I delivered the line: “I… I’m pregnant,” then kept my tale about a missed period and pharmacy pregnancy test spinning for maybe a minute.
My dad told me, after he recovered from the mental whiplash, that when I fell into his sweaty embrace, he bought the entire story. “I’d been running for forty minutes; I was absolutely disgusting. You seemed to really need a hug.”
I don’t remember him ever being mad at me about this. I remember my mom and brother thinking it was all a little unhinged. Of course he believed me, because why would anyone find that amusing?
A few months later, my mom discovered J— and I were having sex when I carelessly left an email from him on the printer. Some time after that, my dad took J— and I out for lunch with the intention of talking to us about it. As he’s an extremely realistic person, and knew his daughter was genuinely invested in practicing the safest sex possible, he probably had no plan to actually dissuade us. When relayed to my mom that the subject never came up at all, however, he defended his choice to not mention anything with “It’s just that we were having such a nice meal.” And it was. A nice meal.
I have always felt secure that I am deeply loved by my father, this sweet, avoidant man. I wonder today if he wasn’t angry at me for my extreme April Fools’ Day “joke” because he was, in that moment, able to intuit that all I was really trying to do was get his attention.
I was always a “good kid,” and probably wanted to ensure I would still be lovable even if I wasn’t good. Maybe that’s a part of why I became a Whore: it’s a bit of a litmus test, one that ensures I am really, truly, unconditionally loved. In spite of not being perfect.
A while back, I described a version of this philosophy to the man I love. I tried to explain that—while, yes, caring for one’s appearance is important for self-esteem, and while being beautiful for one another feels like a mutual gift to our sexual chemistry—I do not and will never strive for My Personal Best aesthetic. Not only does the fleeting, addictive endeavor take too much time and too much money, but, in the event of 10/10 hotness being achieved (ignore the subjective nature of this, reader, it’s beside the point), it becomes harder to discern who actually cares and who just wants to fuck you.
Excessive personal beautification is similar to excessive wealth. Some rich folks surely wonder if their pals would evaporate if Champagne on The Yacht ever became bottles of high life in a rented studio. Thus, I told my lover, the pursuit of physical perfection is pointless at best and dangerous at worst, when so many jokers, tricksters, and liars try to play pretty people for fools.
As to my high school boyfriend, police officers, and my father on this day 22 years ago, I have lied to men, and deployed false tears in an effort to disarm them. I could recount times when the salt of my tears corroded, if only just enough, the resolve of men who would have hurt me, or hurt me more severely. Of course every sob, no matter how put-on, came from some place of valid pain, but for a dozen-plus years I used the act of performative crying in my romantic relationships as a shield against harm or—I admit it—sometimes against accountability.
Though this never felt like I was quite lying, I also knew I wasn’t being totally truthful.
I studied creative nonfiction for seven years. I have talked exhaustively with other CNF writers about The Truth vs. the truth. When we think about lying, we must consider artifice. We must remember the subtle difference between a secret and a surprise. A performance is a good lie, one that has its place. Sex work clients, for example—like movie-goers—purchase lies in an honest transaction, and of course I will always fake-cry for a fascist-cop.
But never again will I perform anguish for a lover for the purpose of invoking his sympathies—I am only interested in those which correspond accurately to my exact points of pain, not to their caricatures or substitutions.
Within an hour of meeting him, I told the man I love about being a Whore. Honesty felt safe. However, he does not appreciate this fact about me. This, and other things, have been silent irritants in an otherwise idyllic scheme, co-created yet under-serving, litmus results ignored in lieu of instinct.
Last weekend, I told him that I require the respect of his truth. His avoidance, so predictably and disturbingly like my father’s, is too born of sweetness, but, I reminded him, I do not want to be treated as if I am too delicate. From rewatching the film The Favourite the week prior, Lady Marlborough’s voice echoed, telling the Queen, “I will not lie! That is love!”
Three nights ago, I laid in the arms of this man I love, my favorite-ever lover. As always, in bed, we were never not-touching. Still, I barely slept. My body shuddered as it does with pleasure beneath his hands, though with the suppression of the truest cries I’ve ever shown this not-just-any man, whose sleep I did not want to disturb, but from whom I desire not a single omission. He woke up. He held me. We cried and kissed and made love. He made me another cup of chamomile tea.
I knew from the hour I met him that I could love him, would love him, then later knew, with more and more certainty, how I wanted him to be the one who, finally, makes me the mother I so desire to be. I cried, as he did, because he does not want this and I do, and because I finally told him I love him, and because he said he loves me, too.
I should be starting my period today. I can feel it, its independent weight, its vacant potential. It’s happened a few times over the last 27 years, that my body decides to release our blood on April Fools’ Day. A little anniversary. In the past, I would make note of it with a small smile, an inward wink. Today, it feels grim. Every month, it gets worse. Psychically heavier. Still, I tell the blood I love it, and invite it to keep arriving for years to come.
Today, I cannot believe I ever uttered the words “I am pregnant” flippantly, as a trick, a prank, a joke. Those words feel sacred, now, and the superstitious part of me, small as it is, wonders if perhaps I’m being punished, and the words of this confession will finally dispel the unwanted curse. The suspicious part of me wants the answer he gave me to be a lie—he’s kidding himself. The hopeful part waits for the blood to keep coming, remembers the vitamins, chokes down plates of scrambled eggs and really only drinks coffee when and because he makes it.
The hopeful part still believes we’ll never recover from our blissful foolishness.
This got way more personal/sad than I expected it to, and I am grateful for a place to share some of these complicated feelings!
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