Periods, Fertility, and awareness of our bodies as a spiritual practice

Growing up, I always struggle with my menstrual cycle (meaning, I was one of the last girls in my class to start bleeding, around age 14, and my cycles remained inconsistent with regular missed periods until I was started on the birth control pill at age 17, to regulate my hormones and create a regular cycle.)

I ended up having a bad reaction to the pill, trying a variety of different ones, and eventually landing on the Nuva ring as a way to regulate my cycle.

When I went off the ring in my late 20s, my periods were still unstable. Now in my mid-30s, my menstrual cycle has never regulated and has remained a sort of mystery to me. I always knew that this irregularity would mean that I would struggle with fertility when the time came, but everyone reassured me of the power of modern medicine.

I have PCOS, Poly-Cystic Ovarian Syndrome, which was first diagnosed by my family doctor when I was 21 and graduated from my undergrad degree. I had stopped taking the birth control pills while in college (they made me emotional and I felt healthier and more functional without them) but my irregular and missing periods brought me back to my doctor’s office. She did an ultrisound and found I had a bunch of cysts. She told me I should be on the Nuva Ring as a form of treatment by regulating my hormones artificially, and that I should call her when I wanted help having a baby. She suggested I might need a surgery to remove the cysts, which would get in the way of implantation if I wanted to get pregnant.

It was not until over a decade later, when I was married and trying unsuccessfully to have a family, that I actually started to do the deeper work into understanding what PCOS is, what it means about my body, and what I can do to heal it.

As I’ve finally beginning to understand more about my body, I have been seeking medical treatment in a new way. On the one hand, I just desperately want to have a baby, so have been seeing a fertility specialist, using the most advanced medical interventions on the market. On the other hand, it’s clear to me that these fertility doctors are not looking after my health wholistically — they have one goal: “get this body to make a baby,” and while I really hope they can be successful with me…I also am under no impression that this treatment is healing my body. In fact, my body feels a bit more like a sacrifice.

So, at the same time, I am exploring what it could look like to actually care for my body, to heal her, so that maybe next time, I could get pregnant naturally, just by connecting with my husband at the right time. This, to me, feels deeply important. Finally, in my 30s, after menstruating for twenty years, and spending the past several years connecting more deeply with my cycle as a jewish ritual practice as well as going to fertility specialists….I understand in a new way how important it is to honor our bodies with knowledge.

I wrote all of this as an introduction to the purpose of this blog post, which is to share a link to this article in The Free Press, that talks more deeply about all these themes through the perspective of a woman who traveled to St Lous to see one of only 20 doctors in the US that seeks to heal infertility in women, instead of painfully overriding their bodies using IVF (a 10-billion dollar industry): https://www.thefp.com/p/what-i-went-through-to-meet-my-daughter-ivf-fertility

As I continue to explore what it means to be a Modern Rebbetzin, and up lift the ancient Torah of women’s rituals, I can’t help but wonder: is building up knowledge about women’s bodies, and sharing that knowledge with other women, for the purpose of health, mutual care and connection, actually part of the feminist project?

Maybe it is part of our work to reclaim reverence for our menstrual cycles, and to engage meaningfully with tracking them, and honoring them, as part of a modern, feminist practice of Judaism today.