By Gwen Rockwood, newspaper columnist, novelist, and mom of 3
I’m about to tell you something I’ve never told anyone, and it’s going to sound crazy. It’s weird and 100 percent true. Brace yourself because it’s about periods and prayer, but I’ll keep it as PG as possible. Here goes.
The summer after I turned 14, I was scheduled to go to a week-long Christian summer camp in another state where the average temperature was in the high 90s, and the most popular activity was swimming in the creek. But the week before camp started, my period started. It wasn’t the first period I’d endured, and that’s why I knew the timing would be disastrous.
I’d been having periods for about five months by then, and despite what I’d heard from friends in junior high, the period didn’t start and stop within a week. And it never showed up at regular intervals like other people’s well-mannered periods did. Mine was a reckless flash flood that showed up without warning and overstayed its welcome to the point of absurdity.
During that first year, it could last as long as two to three weeks. Even worse, this was no tame trickle. The intensity required frequent trips to the bathroom, and if I waited even five minutes too long, it could soak through my clothes and risk the kind of public humiliation that I was certain would kill me dead, right there on the bloody spot.
But what could I do? I was one week into it, and I knew it wouldn’t stop in time for camp. So I prayed, mostly because I had no other options. I prayed so very hard for a short period. And the day before I was scheduled to leave for camp, it stopped completely. I was stunned and unsure if I could trust it. I packed supplies in case it came roaring back, but it didn’t.
For one glorious week, I ran, swam, and got to be a carefree kid at camp instead of a young woman wrestling with a cranky uterus.
On the long ride home from camp, I thought maybe the period had stopped because my system was finally beginning to regulate into the more predictable cycle that medical pamphlets had promised me. But the next morning — back in the safety of my home — there it was again. It resumed and lasted for one more week. It had never happened like that before and has never happened like that since. It was my first brush with something that felt like a miracle — my own little parting of the Red Sea.
Like many kids who grew up going to church before or during the 70s and 80s, I knew how to pray but didn’t enjoy it. I was taught the rhyming “Now I lay me down to sleep” prayer, which traumatized several generations of kids because it included a request to take our souls if we died before breakfast. (Not kidding. You can Google it.) It didn’t make it easy to drift off to sleep afterward.
As I got older, I prayed by borrowing the formal phrases I heard church elders pray aloud on Sunday mornings. And I was always nervous about praying the “right way” because I didn’t want to tick Him off and get kicked out of the God club. For years, praying felt like an internal, repetitive performance that I hoped would please whoever was up there listening.
Looking back on it, I think my first real prayers were diary entries. Writing helped me be honest. It’s not like I was going to mail the thing to God, after all. So I’d write down all the difficult, scary, embarrassing, desperate things in my head without fear of judgment. The process made me feel lighter and more hopeful, just the way prayers often do.
I’m in my 50s now, and there have been times in my life when I’ve prayed a lot and other times when I haven’t prayed much. Like many people, I’ve had dark times when I’ve wondered if any of it is real. But the second I feel doubt, I remember that week when I was an overwhelmed 14-year-old girl who prayed for help and received it — an unexplained, weeklong pause from puberty.
To this day, I’m certain it was an answered prayer. Perhaps a higher power had been reading between the lines of my turbulent mind all along.
I’m still not as disciplined or as “good” at prayer as perhaps I should be. But I’m trying not to get too caught up in my head about it. In 2012, the writer Anne Lamott wrote a short book titled “Help, Thanks, Wow: The Three Essential Prayers,” and it reminds me that it’s okay to keep things simple. If God knows everything, as I believe He does, He already knows the details behind a plea for help.
Exactly how that help shows up is a different, more complicated thing. The way Anne put it in her book is this: “I try not to finagle God. Some days go better than others, especially during election years. I ask that God’s will be done, and I mostly sort of mean it.” (Me, too, Anne. Me, too.)
The prayers of “thanks” and “wow” deserve their own columns, so I’ll save those for later. In the meantime, here’s a tip from one imperfect prayer to another: No matter the situation, it’s always good and wholly appropriate to simply ask, “Help.”
He’ll take it from there.
Gwen Rockwood is a syndicated freelance columnist. Email her at gwenrockwood5@gmail.com. Her books are available on Amazon.