I came crashing out of sleep to my daughter yelling, "I have a nosebleed!" When we reached her bedroom, she was sitting up, catching the blood in her hands.
I took her into the bathroom, lights on in that the-lights-are-on-at-3:30-a.m. way, and started to clean her up. The blood was already dried in her fingernails and on her cheeks, smeared everywhere and still coming.
My girl was calm about it, but she didn't want the blood to drip. I finally resorted to shoving toilet paper up her nose, thinking of Vision Quest the entire time and wondering if the nosebleed was caused by her diet? Was it me? Did I let her down?
Then, I admit, I wondered if she had a brain hemorrage and realized I should severely limit my Lost viewing in the future.
Beloved pulled off her stained sheets and threw them toward the laundry. "We'll use Shout," he said.
"No," I replied automatically. "We need to rinse them in cold water right away."
I've seen bloody sheets before. And bloody undergarments. And bloody jeans. And once, through a very unfortunate oversight, bloody socks.
Because I'm a woman.
And egads, my girl will be one someday, too.
I took the sheets down to the kitchen sink and got the blood out. I couldn't stop thinking about one day explaining to my daughter as my mother had to me how to best remove blood, how to treat the cotton right away, how to rub the material together to ensure the ring around the outside of the blood stain came out, too. If you leave the ring, it's there forever.
Then I thought about someday explaining to this girl who stood there so calmly as a steady stream of red trickled from her nose that she would actually experience an even higher level of gore and pain on a monthly basis for at least twenty and possibly thirty years, a process that had left her mother needing endoscopy and cauterization for endometriosis and huge horse pills of Motrin for the pain at thirteen.
I decided then and there I would never tell her what childbirth really feels or looks like.
I have been shocked my whole life at the raw grisliness of womanhood. Pregnancy and childbirth took that shock to a whole new level. I'd never realized the new mothers I visited when they came home from the hospital were sitting there with ice packs in their panties or stitches in their privates, cooing and oohing as though they weren't still bleeding into a diaper-sized pad all the while.
So distracted was I while rinsing out the sheet by all these thoughts of blood -- past, present and future -- that by the time I got back upstairs the nosebleed was stopped and my daughter tucked back in her bed with Beloved on the floor next to her. I wasn't needed. I wandered back to my own bed but had a really hard time falling asleep, and when I finally did, I dreamt of blood.
