Stirring the Pot (5 page)

For example, texting with a friend about what might happen on the next episode of
Downton Abbey
engages my brain to think about European history (what real-life event
will
they tackle next?) and the nuances of television character development. Talking about the last
SpongeBob
episode … not so much.

Looking at photos of my friend’s crazy night out in Vegas is nothing if not entertaining. Hearing stories about the kite at school that was painted red … not so much.

Taking online tours of five-star vacation villas? Okay, I’ll admit that this is a slight waste of time, because building a pillow fort in the living room will be
another fun way to think about real estate. But seriously, don’t deny me this little pleasure. Isn’t there a way I can do both in the same afternoon?

Of course, the irony is that just about the only thing that can get me to stop surfing, chatting, posting, or Skyping and pay attention to other humans is some good old-fashioned human connection. I need a real, live poke.

And the truly ironic thing is that the best poker in the world is the kid I am studiously ignoring with my online addictions. It’s true, and he now knows it: if Evan crawls up on my lap or tugs on my sleeve and wants to snuggle, I’m putty in his hands pretty much instantly. If he bats his eyelashes on my cheek like a butterfly, rubs my nose like an Eskimo, or gives me a traditional peck, I’m all his. Let’s go build that fort in the living room and roll some Play-Doh snakes. My 4G connection can wait!

Do all McCarthys get the same lame jokes made at their expense at cocktail parties or is it just me? When I am introduced to people of a certain age (as in anyone older than me), it almost never fails that they chuckle about the possibility of me being related to Joseph McCarthy, the Communist-hating American senator who died in 1957. As though old Joe and I are the only Irish American Catholic dropouts (him from junior high, temporarily, and me from college, permanently) on the planet?

To all those aging jokesters and to anyone my age or younger who knows or cares what Joseph McCarthy did with his time on earth, I’d like to try to wash his image from your mind and replace his brand of McCarthyism with my own. To start, let me try to change what you see and hear when someone says “the Red Scare.” Male reader discretion advised …

Like most teenage girls, I found my mother endlessly embarrassing. I’m not too proud to admit now
that she was mostly doing nothing wrong and really didn’t deserve my eye rolling and bitchy attitude. But there was one area of her life that she found embarrassing, too; neither of us could get over the mortification! It was this: she couldn’t get a handle on her periods. On several occasions I had to go into the house to get her a towel so she could get out of the car without scaring the neighborhood.

She once even had a bleed-out in church! She held our family back from filing out of the pews until everyone else had left the building, and then she dashed out the side door with someone’s sweater tied around her waist. Afterward, I tried to keep track of her periods, not so that I could be helpful to her but so that I could plan to stay the hell away from her at that time of the month! Couldn’t she just wear a frigging diaper when she had her period?

“Just wait until you’ve had kids and this happens to you,” she said wisely (and patiently and kindly—my mom really is the greatest). I wasn’t having any of it—I was a very careful period planner and knew that I would always have a good handle on them and always be prepared. I was sure that I was
not
going to be anything like my mother in that regard.

Of course, the apple (smashed cherry, perhaps?) never falls far from the tree, does it? My gynecologist
tells me it doesn’t happen to everyone, but clearly we McCarthy women are doubly cursed. It’s not that I lose track of when I’m getting them or that they are irregular (yet), but my periods became Carrie-at-the-prom heavy after I had Evan. (Google that movie and watch the blood drip down the walls!) I wish a red blotch on my skirt at church was the worst of my accidents.

To date, here are a few examples of my syndrome in action:

During its Charlie Sheen years, I guest-starred on
Two and a Half Men
. I had several scenes with Charlie. No winging it allowed—I had to be funny and zany and sexy but all on cue, and I had to do it in front of a live studio audience. But on the day in question, my dam broke mid-scene.

I had thought ahead, I swear I had. I was plugged up good with tampons, plus I was wearing a nighttime-strength maxi pad. But nothing ever happens quickly or totally on schedule when you’re shooting for TV (or movies), and I’d just been up on that stage too long. I knew when my defenses had been breached. If anything
like this has happened to you, you know the feeling. You know you’ve started to color outside the lines. You know you have to get to the bathroom to refortify, but you also know that any movement to get
to
the bathroom could be disastrous.

Until the take was over, my only option was to cross my legs and clench as hard as I could. And though I should have been focusing on my next line, I couldn’t concentrate on anything but what my excuse would be if blood spattered on the floor. I figured I could try to blame it on Charlie and claim he must have had a bloody nose. Given his lifestyle at the time, it was conceivable that people would believe me (Charlie himself might even have been easily fooled).

Fortunately, I didn’t have to lie about Charlie’s drug-weakened nasal passages—the director said “cut” and I asked for a five-minute break to use the facilities.

I obviously needed to get off the stage quickly, but I couldn’t take big steps and I couldn’t risk letting the studio audience see my ass; I had no idea what kind of red splotch would be blooming there. My only option was to shuffle offstage while continuing to face forward. Kind of like the characters on
South Park
. Shuffle, shuffle, shuffle stage left, and I was out of there.

Once I was safely in the bathroom I could assess the damage. As I’d thought, I was a mess. There was
no going back out there with the same pants on—they would need to be tossed. I stuck my head out the bathroom door and called for reinforcements: “Hello? Any female on the set, please, any female?” A young woman from the wardrobe department materialized, and I let her in. She went white when she saw the carnage. Sweet, naive, pre-motherhood girl that she was, she asked me if I’d just had a miscarriage.

Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned … I
seriously
considered lying and telling her that she’d found me out. The sympathy would have been helpful at that point. But for once I wasn’t quick enough on my feet. I couldn’t tell that lie. I had to admit that I was just a gusher and couldn’t control my body for more than about twenty- or thirty-minute increments at this time of the month. I imagined she was making a mental note to never get older as she left to search for a replacement pair of pants.

A few minutes later I was ready to go: I had the whole feminine products aisle tucked right where it all should go—a super-duper-duper tampon and, this time, two pads. I walked bowlegged back to the set and got on with the work of the day, asking for “pee breaks” as often as I could.

Okay, I told a white lie about never being surprised by my period. Sometimes I’m blindsided just like everyone else.

Recently I was blindsided while buckled groggily into seat 3A of an American Airlines flight. I was heading back home after being in a different time zone (which I’m going to blame for my miscalculation about what day it was). We had to wait on the runway for two hours—two hours of not getting up and moving around the cabin, and two hours of increasingly odd and uncomfortable cramping.

By the time we were cleared for takeoff and the seat belt sign was off, I was pretty sure I was in trouble
down there
. I got up as fast as I could and crammed myself into one of those outrageously small and oddly lit coffins they call restrooms. I’d had the presence of mind to bring my purse with me, but my heart sank when I realized that all my emergency absorbent supplies were packed away in the bag that I’d checked. What the fuck is wrong with me? An emergency stash like that must be kept on you at all times! I know, I know.

Of course I wasn’t the first nor will I be the last woman forced to do the only thing there is to do in
that desperate and disgusting situation: I made a homemade maxi pad by wrapping half a roll of toilet paper around my hand and shoving the “pad” into place in my underwear.

Now, if multiple tampons and maxi pads don’t even work for me on these heavy flow days, I don’t know why I ever thought that half a roll of one-ply would do the trick. (And is it even one-ply? Tracing paper would be a better description!) But what choice did I really have? I would just have to return to the bathroom every twenty to thirty minutes and keep spinning out my homemades. I washed my hands and returned to my seat to bleed—I mean sweat—it out.

Over the course of the long flight I managed to stem the tide of the Red Sea by keeping myself awake and re-creating the pad at regular intervals. When we neared our destination, however, the captain asked us to stay in our seats for the remaining forty minutes of our descent. I didn’t panic. I just focused on not sneezing, coughing, or breathing until we’d touched down and I could visit the bathroom one more time before heading out to get my luggage.

Forty minutes passed, then forty-five, then fifty. I needed to get up. I needed to get fresh TP. But we were nowhere near touchdown! The captain came back on and said something like, “As you’ve probably noticed,
we have been circling due to weather and it doesn’t look like we’re going to be able to land anytime soon. So we are going to change course and land at the nearest airfield to refuel. We’ll attend to all of this as quickly as possible and get back in the air and back on our way as soon as possible. I’ll keep you updated on our progress.” All I really heard was, “You’re screwed.”

Did you happen to see the look on Will and Jada Pinkett Smith’s faces during Miley Cyrus’s twerking performance at the Video Music Awards? They were right there in the front row and were clearly more than a little horrified. That’s more or less the face I made.

I caught the eye of one of the flight attendants, who was safely buckled into her own rear-facing seat a couple of feet from me. I pointed at my crotch and mouthed, “I’m bleeding and I don’t have anything!”

The look on her face told me that she felt my pain. The look on the other flight attendant’s face was a little less understanding. Embarrassed is more like it.
He
looked kind of in shock and then down at his hands. His female counterpart whispered that I should just go into the bathroom anyway and stay there while she hunted around for a tampon. That’s the power of the sisterhood right there!

After a few minutes, my newfound friend and fairy godmother knocked on the door. Sitting on the toilet seat, I opened the door enough for her to both hand
me a tampon and see the
Nightmare on Elm Street
damage to my undercarriage. I had bled through the jeans that were now around my ankles, and there was no disguising it. Her eyes widened, but—diplomatically, expertly, and helpfully—she held up a finger as if to say “Just a minute” and disappeared back around the door. I heard some whispering, and then a few moments later she knocked again and handed me the male flight attendant’s jacket! “He said you can keep it. He’s a fan.”

My hero and savior had unbuckled and made himself scarce by the time I came out of the bathroom, and he and I didn’t make eye contact again for the rest of the flight. But when I was leaving the plane at long last, he was the one at the door wishing passengers a good day and thanking us all for our patience. I wanted to kiss his sweet face and thank him for his kindness but instead just patted the jacket that was now tied around my waist and whispered that
I
was
his
biggest fan.

I am not a golfer, but I’ll do anything to raise money for a good cause, even if the businessmen and politicians who have paid $10,000 to take that nice walk on
the pretty green grass with you really just want to see you bend over in your Daisy Dukes. When you’re wearing short-shorts and you have your period, however, some of those big spenders probably want their money back. Especially when you steal their golf cart on the third tee in order to get your uterus back to the safety of the clubhouse locker room and you never come back to the links. Sorry, fellas!

After each of these Red Scares I have called my mother to commiserate, to apologize for my insensitivity when she was going through this physical passage, and to let her laugh at me until she cries. She tells me that there are still more surprises to come in terms of the way I might experience menopause. I know some women don’t enjoy going through that particular “change of life” and others think we only get sexier with age (Suzanne Somers, I’m talking to you!). And I know that in ten years I’ll be ready to write another book all about the crazy ways it will have affected me. But right now I’m hemorrhaging, so I can honestly say that I look forward to a vagina as dry as the Sahara Desert.

“Please flip the mattress. When you actually get lucky with a guy, it’s pretty obvious you sleep alone most of the time because he is rolling into the mattress dent you have created.”

“Please buy me more than one outfit. You have one set of sheets, yet you own two thousand pairs of shoes.”

“When you leave the house, the dog dry-humps me. Get him fixed or get rid of him.”

“I can’t make myself, so do me a favor and get me dressed before you leave for work. What if
you
had to spend the day with your pants down? Wait … never mind.”