Why I’ve come to celebrate my monthly cycle

“I’m PMSing.” I might as well say it. For everyone fortunate enough to encounter me during this precarious time of month already knows it. The snappish irritability, the unprovoked crying, the inexplicable mood swings—premenstrual syndrome is part of my cycle I’ve never been able to hide.

“We always have fights around the same time of month,” my boyfriend observed just before my last period. One of his silly, harmless jokes had escalated into an hour-long discussion that had threatened to end our relationship. And days earlier, my eyes had stung with tears over one minor reprimand from my boss. I’d pounded the steering wheel and blared the horn over a roadway incident that on any other evening would have elicited a mere tap on my brakes. I’d scowled at a grocery store clerk whose line required a longer than 30-second wait.

When I secretly question, What about her, Lord? I'm inappropriately nosy.

“Mom, that’s not fair! Yesterday you gave Emily more money for the book fair than you just gave me!”

I remember this scene as though it just happened: In a mad dash to get my elementary school-aged daughters prepared for school one morning, I quickly surveyed their backpacks and homework folders and school lunches to make sure all was at ready. Check! Then I remembered it was Sarah’s day to attend her school’s annual book fair. So I scrounged around in my purse, dug out my wallet, and handed her several bills for making purchases. But somehow, Sarah, my eldest, knew how much I’d given Emily the previous day for her grade’s visit to the book fair—several dollars more than I’d handed Sarah.

How I’ve made peace with my weepiness

I admit I’m a weepy woman. I’ve been known to cry not just at friends’ divorces, relatives’ miscarriages, and my grandma’s funeral, but also at airport reunions, Hallmark Hall of Fame made-for-TV movies, breakup ballads, and long-distance telephone carrier commercials.

I used to feel sheepish about my weepiness. When I’d laugh so hard tears streamed down my face, friends would stare, confused, and ask, “Why are you crying?” The first time I cried in front of one college boyfriend, he looked at me as if I had three heads and oh-so-helpfully asked, “What am I supposed to do now?” A former roommate would quietly escape the room whenever my phone conversations included tears.

All these experiences left me feeling a bit like an overemotional freak. So I donned my daily coats of waterproof mascara, kept my secret stash of Kleenex at the ready, and tried my best to hide my tearfulness from the world.

Too often I take glimpses of God’s grandeur for granted.

It started with a startlingly large black spot.

I was restraining 80 pounds of enthusiastic puppy from bounding through an open door when I saw it: a dark, sinister object floating in my left eye. I blinked, stood up, and rubbed my eye in the hope I’d oust an errant eyelash invading my vision. But rising and sinking, twirling and spinning hypnotically in its sea of ocular fluid, the amoeba-like invader remained.