‘The Girl on the Pill’ by Ellen Brickley

It’s possible that I hold a record in the town where I grew up. I’m not sure, though, because the nature of the record makes it a lot harder to verify than, say, setting a county-best sprinting time in the Community Games.

I may have been the youngest person in town to have been prescribed the contraceptive pill.

Until I was seventeen, being The Girl on the Pill was the thing about me that, when I told you, flagged the transition from acquaintance to friend. It was my fact.

Because in the nineties, being on the pill at thirteen in an Irish small town was quite a big fact about a person.

I still get some social kudos for the fact I started the puberty dance at the age of nine. In third class, I was bringing sanitary towels to school and seeking special permission to use the only toilet cubicle with a sanitary bin, reserved for girls in sixth class (denied. I snuck in anyway). In fourth class, I missed a week of school because of cramps and was brought to a gynaecologist, who prescribed painkillers but said she could do nothing until my periods had been established for two years. I went home and drew a calendar in my notebook, marking the days until I could go back. I was fortunate – my parents could pay a gynaecologist.

During those two years in which I was ineligible for help, there was the incident with the Surprise Period, of which we do not speak. A teacher drove me to our neighbour’s house because neither of my parents could be reached by phone. I sat on a towel all afternoon in my neighbour’s pristine front room, making small talk with the family matriarch and waiting for my mother’s car to pull up and relieve me of the worst embarrassment of my life. I’m still grateful to the classmate I haven’t seen in twenty years, who wiped the blood off my seat when I stood up, before anyone else could see. She was smarter than I could recognise at the time, and even today I wait for news that she has quietly and brilliantly taken over the world.

One of the girls in my year was known for her fascination with all things puberty, and she cornered me on my return to school to ask me about my ‘heavy flow.’ I swear you haven’t lived until you’ve been accosted by a fellow eleven-year-old and had that question posed. I have no idea what I said – I hope it was entertaining for someone.

The following years were peaceful, gynaecologically speaking, until anaemia hit during the summer that I was thirteen. I use the word ‘hit’ with due consideration, because it knocked me on my back for a month. I remember the four days of heavy bleeding, three over a long weekend when no doctors were available, my mother hammering on the bath with a tooth mug to summon my father when I fainted while sitting on the loo, my squeamishness about blood disappearing forever. I remember noticing that my feet, resting on a pillow, were the precise colour of the pillowcase because my veins had retreated so far under my skin.

I remember things that I can’t type, even in a draft that’s only for me to read.

And I remember the local GP, smiling and lifting my feet to raise my blood pressure, prescribing what I needed and telling my parents to keep upping the dose until the bleeding stopped. ‘You could be in Great Ormonde Street,’ she said to me, ‘and they couldn’t do anything more for you than we can do here. At least here you have your books and your mum and dad.’

I was still young enough that she said Great Ormonde Street.

*

When I could walk again, a month later (Living Room Relay – couch to chair to chair to windowsill to couch – was my training regimen, first crawling, then walking), the same doctor prescribed me the contraceptive pill to make sure that this never happened again.

That was nineteen years ago. I am considering throwing a party to celebrate the big two-oh next year. At my age the chance to celebrate something being twenty feels too good to pass up.

I have been on the pill for so long that I forget for years at a time that it is the reason why I can leave the house. I have the pill to thank for my degree, my driving licence, my job. I realise as I type this that I don’t know the names of the scientists who developed it. When I’m done here, Wikipedia beckons.

But I didn’t know then what impact a small white tablet would have on my life. It was 1997, the newspapers were full of pictures of Princess Diana on a boat, and my uterus was newly under the control of a drug company. My embarrassment was no longer from ‘heavy flows’, but from my mother calling ‘Did you take your contraceptive pill?’ across the breakfast table in a Glasgow hotel (I was only on one form of medication – pill would have done). About to start my second year of secondary school, my brain was gradually catching up to what my body embarked upon four years earlier – being a teenager badly.

*

As I am someone who writes essays about things that come out of my vagina, you shouldn’t be too shocked to learn that I wasn’t popular at school. I was fortunate that the friends I did have were unjudgmental about my contraceptively enhanced self – if they felt anything at all, I suspect it was mild curiosity.

But just as everyone around me was engaged in Becoming a Woman, I was taking drugs to suppress what I saw as the most biologically womanly thing about myself. While I enjoyed being conscious and ambulatory, I also felt like I was at odds with my body. That it was letting the side down. Instead of helping me Become a Woman, it was forcing me to accelerate to old age.

My classmates weren’t excited about periods – small-town kids can be jaded about anything that falls across their field of vision – but it was part of how we played at adults, how we tried on our new identities for size. Complaining of cramps, nudging each other during biology and sex ed, making jokes that the Graafian follicle has a lot to answer for, clutching our stomachs and groaning.

I won’t dwell on the religion class where we discussed the cosmic relationship between our twenty-eight day menstrual cycles and the moon and the tide. Let’s just say that my little white pills seemed to be in danger of reversing some global natural phenomena and making everyone with an upcoming beach holiday mad at me.

I had no idea what kind of woman I could become, without this marker of my femininity to lay down.

*

I didn’t understand then that it was possible to be a woman without menstruating, or even having the organs to do so (I wouldn’t learn about trans women until the following year). I just knew that everyone else was embracing a brave new world of bras and tampons while I was running in the other direction, because in my uterus there were dragons. There may still be dragons; I haven’t looked in a long time. It’s dark.

Until I was fifteen, I wore giant flannel shirts in various checked patterns, usually over polo-necked sweaters, and jeans. It took me years to understand that I was trying to swamp a body that had tried to swamp me. I was rejecting the womanhood that had announced itself in pain and weakness – my heroes were all men, and would be, until I discovered Dorothy Parker.

I didn’t understand that I could be a woman without necessarily being feminine, beautiful, or unblemished.

I didn’t understand that there is no true definition of any of those words.

*

I didn’t know that one day, being The Girl on the Pill wouldn’t feel emblematic of my failure as a woman. It would become first a litmus-test for new friends, then one of the points on which my life story pivoted and later rested, and finally a footnote that only comes up over long chats into the night, peppered with jokes. ‘When I was that age I’d been menstruating for X years!’ is my favourite rebuttal when someone’s youth is blamed for an indiscretion, because X is always a bigger number than anyone expects.

Very few good stories start with the sentence ‘When I was a teenager, nothing bad happened.’

*

The only person who remembers this with me is my mother. (My father passed away in 2005, and in spite of the fact that he carried me around the house for weeks and loaded the washing machine with blood-soaked pyjama bottoms without complaint during that summer, we didn’t have the kind of relationship that involved discussing ... well, most things. We’re Irish – we’re there, silently, when it matters.) I’ve lost one parent, and the legacy of that experience is that the other one’s death always feels like it’s pending. When my mother is gone, no one will be left to bear witness.

And when my mother and I remember that summer, we mostly laugh. My feet turning the same colour as the bedclothes. The looks on faces in that Glasgow hotel. The innumerable small hilarities that happen while in crisis, the words that become shorthand for mild hysteria. My near-phobia of the tartan pyjamas I was wearing when it all started, the dog trying to sit on me when I crawled from sofa to armchair to practice for when I felt able to walk, the comically terrible timing that caused my mother’s back to go out the weekend I was most ill. We laugh until we’re sore when we think of it.

*

When I look at photos of myself from that summer, my lips are invisible. There was nothing left in me, and I hadn’t the heart or the guts to paint on lips as the world told me I might. Medicine gave me back my lips and left me free to forget, over the years, that I had ever been The Girl on the Pill. I have been a great many girls since then, and I’ve even managed to be a couple of kinds of woman. I’m happiest that I’m the kind that can laugh, eventually, after she bleeds.

From issue #5: autumn/winter 2017

About the Author
Ellen Brickley is an essayist and novelist living in Dublin. She is working on an essay collection which has been supported by the Arts Council, and also writes fiction for young adults.