My first menstrual cycle started when I was around 11 or 12 years old. At the time, I thought I was dying because we didn’t get a lot of reproductive health education back then. My mother dutifully helped explain that I wasn’t dying, but also that I’d have to deal with this monthly cycle until I was going through menopause. I definitely wasn’t thrilled by the prospect, but my mother forgot to mention one other time menstruating people can naturally go without a period: pregnancy.
My partner and I were blessed with a little baby girl this past year, and for 16 months, I was sans a menstrual cycle. Prior to this, I’ve run the gamut of period symptoms from intense cramping that left me laid up in bed with a heating pad for a day to fatigue that left me drained to absolutely nothing but the mild discomfort that usually accompanies a heavy shedding of the uterine lining. Just before becoming pregnant, my periods were shortening from my usual 28 days to 25 day cycles, but they were like clockwork. Day 1 was always heavy bleeding that usually required multiple trips to the bathroom with completely soaked pads and a night of worry that the extra-long overnighters wouldn’t contain it. Day 2 to 5 was medium bleeding, and then Day 6 to whenever it finished was light spotting until the next month came around.
I had quit using the pill 2 years before in an effort to get pregnant and it took a couple months for my regular period to start up again, but the bleeding cycle was pretty consistent between when I was on hormones and when I wasn’t. The only big change was that off-the-pill, my cramps returned and I would get some nasty ones every other month or so. So when I became pregnant and the bleeding and cramping stopped completely? It was a bright spot among all the strange and wild things that happen to your body when you’re incubating a tiny human. The only thing that I found ironic was that I had just bought a Costco-sized box of menstrual pads the week before we found out I was expecting, so they got chucked into the back of the closet to wait their turn.
For 16 months, I was menstruation free. Post-partum lochia aside, it was a freeing experience, not having to worry and track the days to make sure that I didn’t wear the wrong thing on the wrong day and end up with an evening of hand scrubbing stains away. No cramps, no fatigue (other than the never-ending parenting-related tiredness), and no feeling that I was birthing a jellyfish every time I sneezed wrong. It was honestly amazing. I knew it couldn’t last forever, but I had been told that so long as I was breastfeeding, my period was unlikely to return anytime soon.
Picture Credit: g_longacre86 & wuestenigel
Unfortunately, that isn’t exactly true. As I found out, postpartum, your menstrual cycle can return anywhere from as soon as 2 to 3 months after giving birth even if you’re breastfeeding. Prolactin, the hormone that helps your body produce milk, does hinder your ovulation cycle and stops your period from coming, but it doesn’t necessarily put a full stop to it and as soon as your levels drop, your period can return. Which is what I discovered when one day just about when my daughter turned 7 months, I was unusually irritated and snappish. Irritability had never been a symptom I experienced with my periods, but sure enough, my next visit to the bathroom confirmed it – my menstrual cycle was back.
I was disappointed to be sure and the irritation I felt at having to dig that Costco box out of the bottom of our closet was amplified by the hormones raging through me. I knew that the return of my cycle meant my milk production would drop even further, and that it could even change the taste of my milk and cause my baby to refuse to feed. Since I had stopped breastfeeding directly back when she was 5 months old due to all four of her front teeth coming in at once, I had turned to manual and electric pumping and bottle feeding. I started pumping twice as frequently, using cluster feed timing of 20 minutes on, 10 off, 10 on, and so on for an hour or more at a time to encourage more milk production as several mommy blogs had recommended. Thankfully, my daughter doesn’t seem to notice any taste difference, and my milk hasn’t stopped flowing, even if the amount has dropped.
Postpartum, my cycles are shorter between 5 and 7 days instead of 7 and 9. They’re also wildly unpredictable. Where my cycle used to be a clockwork 25 days, now between my first and second postpartum period there were 34 days. My usual cramping hasn’t shown up yet, but instead I have irritability for the first time in my life, my legs cramp, and my fatigue is worse than before. Irregular periods and symptoms are normal postpartum though, and something I wish someone had told me ahead of time. Everything I learned about this has come from intense hours of Google-fu and just winging it as best I can.
My best advice for anyone going through or looking ahead toward postpartum menstruation is to talk about it with your doctor or midwife, to family members if you’re able, to try and learn as much about it as you can. It caught me a little by surprise, but that doesn’t have to be everyone’s experience. Being aware that your period can come back in such a wildly variable timetable (as soon as 2 to 3 months after birth, usually closer to 6 or 8 months, or even for as long as you’re breastfeeding), can help you plan ahead and keep an eye out for the signs that your menstruation is ready to return. For me, it was a drop in milk production and irritability. For you, it could be a leg cramp or some stomach upset. While I’m sad to see my worry-free days of no-menstruation gone, I’m happy to know that my body has returned to normal again and that it’s ready for another baby should we decide to try again.
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