In which I hate my period, and the best part about marriage is having to share everything. Plus: grandmas are always right.

(Yesterday I was bitching to BoSe that the worst part of being married is having to share everything: cigarettes, food, cash. The bed. It’s a pain in the ass. But then…)

It’s a damn good thing I’m not a 12-year-old girl, or I’d be dead of embarassment.

In my old age I’m now systematically living through all of those nightmare period horrors you think about when you’re 12 (for my male readers: the fear of being caught bleeding is probably roughly equivalent to being called up to the board sporting a huge boner). For instance, a couple of years ago I bled through onto someone’s couch. During a fucking football game, surrounded by dudes. Yay.

And just last night I bled all over the hotel sheets and mattress. When I woke up this morning I enjoyed roughly 4.2 seconds of drowsy morning comfort, and then I realized I was basically lying in a puddle of blood and I became instantly, horribly, fully awake.

I jumped up, arranged the bedding artfully to hide the giant red splotch, and took myself to the bathroom to deal with my own cleanliness issues. I stripped and showered, and Bread came in.

“What are you doing!” I snapped. God damn it, can’t I have any fucking privacy? EVER?

“Using the bathroom,” he replied, frowning at me.

I twitched the shower curtain closed and completed my rinse. Okay, he’s gotta pee. I’m in the shower. He’s hardly trying to invade my fucking space. In a more reasonable voice, I asked, “You want to use the shower?”

“Yeah, in a minute,” he replied.

“I gotta get out now,” I said.

“Okay,” he said.

I suppose I could have waited 45 more seconds so he could finish up and get in, but I was in a hurry to clean the huge stain off the hotel’s white mattress. I turned the water off and hopped out.

I explained to Bread why I was freaking. “I bled all over everywhere last night,” I told him as I was dressing. “Myself, my clothes, the bedding, the mattress. I bleed like a stuck pig.”

“I’m sorry,” he said. Then: “You’re wearing frog underwear.”

I looked down. Yup. White panties with green frogs all over them. “One can’t take this bleeding-to-death shit seriously,” I told him.

Then I picked up my jammies from the floor, getting ready to leave the bathroom, and the bundle fell open. I sighed and showed Bread the giant stain all over my flannel pants.

“Damn, baby,” he said. “I’m sorry you have to go through all this.”

And there you have it: I showed a boy the blood all over my jammies – the quintessence of embarassment, yeah? – and he not only didn’t make fun of me, he made me feel better.

In other news, I got some detergent and kleenex and a small glass of water, sat down on the mattress, and I did the blot-with-soap-and-then-with-cold-water cleaning thing your grandma taught you about. And it totally worked! Grandmas are geniuses. Thank God I had a container of laundry detergent with me because I don’t know if shampoo would have worked as well.

The moral: I hate my fucking period. And I have every one of these symptoms.