Well dang it. She’s here.  I haven’t had to suffer her visit in nearly three years, but she’s back. Aunt Flo.

Yeah, that’s right.

I went there.

Because this is the kind of bold insight that separates this blog from many others. An almost journalistic approach to shed light on things often unspoken. Boldly going where no other blog has gone before.  Also, alienating some of the readership.

Three years. It has been so long because I was pregnant, then nursing, then unexpectedly pregnant, and now nursing again with this unwelcome guest. I had nearly forgotten just how wretched this time of womanly affirmation can be.  I have a million things to do this week and I am a weepy, snarly, face-stuffing, chocolate seeking, bloated, cramping, needy M-E-S-S.

My favorite cupcake shop was closed yesterday and we had no easily accessible chocolate in this house, which just made me meaner.  We did have some mini-ice cream sandwiches and I also had just enough desperation and hormones to unwrap half a dozen of them and extract the chocolate wafers from the pointless vanilla ice cream. As a member of the lactose intolerant club (sidebar: I’m nursing and lactose intolerant. Is that irony…?) I am not an ice cream eater, so the frugal-non-wasteful part of my brain warred with my crazy, give-me-chocolate-now parts so I compromised by saving the ice cream in a bowl for the lactose consuming humans in this house.  The logical part of my brain is bathing in three years worth of pent up PMS overflow and unable to process and commit to rational thought.  Don’t worry, I did throw the ice cream out because I realized a week from now I would no longer be able to remember my compelling(tearfully hormonal) argument explaining the logic behind the random bowl of rectangle shaped vanilla ice cream lumps chilling (<—see what I did there?) in the freezer.

I did warn my husband before he came home just how teensy weensy um, unpleasant I might possibly be. Within minutes of the man coming home I had laughed, cried, and flared my nostrils in anger.  He is a firefighter and has been in some precarious situations, but he may have chosen some of those dangers over the minefield of interacting with a PMS-ing wife. His response to my irrational behavior?  “Maybe you should get pregnant again, and just keep… getting… pregnant…..?” His voice started trailing off as he watched with trepidation while his joke sank in, causing my nostrils to flare again, then making me chuckle, then provoking tears once more.

As he sweetly hugged me and silently wished for a beer, I envisioned our T.V. show on TLC.

It was not pretty.