by Amy Bobeda
“I think decision making is more of a character trait than a learned skill,” Krystal says on the phone as I make my bed. “I remember you!” a small voice bleats into the phone. “I remember you when you lived in your mother’s stomach,” I say to Trystan, named after Iseult’s lover. “It’s 106 degrees,” he tells me, “You cannot call that ‘too warm,’ you can only call it hot.” Discernment, a character trait of 10-year-olds.
I imagine that when Little Red is sent to her grandmother’s house, over the river and through the woods, she’s Trystan’s age or a year older. Individual menarche can vary based on loads of factors: genetics, food scarcity, hormones, the amount of fat in a diet. Today, on an old episode of The Bold Type a journalist interviews a non-profit that distributes menstrual cups to the homeless. A brilliant plan flawed in the execution of reality: for a cup to work safely one must have consistent access to sanitation. The article results in the journalist losing her job. Her old boss refuses to take her back. “It’s time to fail on your own, Jane,” the middle-aged magazine exec says. “I think it should be dark until fall,” Trystan tells me. “How do you feel about glow in the dark pool parties?” I ask. “Wouldn’t it be cold?” his mother echoes into the phone.
Some scholars believe the wolf is not a wolf at all but just another way we’ve come to identify Grandma—the post-menopausal woman. Just yesterday the Times reported Study Shows the Staggering Cost of Menopause for Women in the Work Force. On the Society for Menstrual Research Forum, post-menopausal women say, “They’re only getting one side of a story—only symptomatic folks are reporting.” When Jane is fired, she says, “They’re only getting one side of the story—what the company does means well for menstrual equity. When mistakes were made, they corrected.” Menopause, the Times estimates costs the US $1.8 billion in lost working time per year. The Times reports The US Could Run out of Money by June 1st. The Society for Menstrual Research reports: many menopausal women have been dangerously over medicated.
I think of Grandma and Little Red each time the Brothers Grimm rewrite a fairytale to keep a mother pure and good and make a step mother a symbol of misery. What if a step-mother is over-medicated? “Well, we haven’t found a solution for capitalism yet,” Krystal says when we talk about standardize testing for third graders, “Why would we have a solution for this?” I imagine Little Red in the forest where it is dark, where her grandmother feeds her a bit of flesh, where she mistakes her grandmother for a wolf because she’s never heard of menopause. Because her grandmother is over-medicated. Because everyone she’s met is a step-mother who is either starving from famine and plague or is over-medicated for perimenopause. “I remember when you lived in your mother’s stomach,” Grandma tells Little Red. “I remember when she lived in mine.” Little Red sees Grandma’s teeth for the first time and understands longing.
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Amy Bobeda runs the writing center at Naropa University where she teaches pedagogy and process-based art. Her books include What Bird Are You? and Red Memory among other projects. She’s currently working with fairytales and public policy, specifically reproductive rights and censorship.
Image: Harry Clarke (Page 24 illustration from Fairy tales of Charles Perrault [1922]). In the public domain.
Image description: Little Red stands in the forest, talking to the wolf and holding a basket and umbrella. The trees are long and thin.
Psaltery & Lyre 