Eruptions of the Heart: beautifully redeemed pms

I don’t really know how I compare with other women, but I do know my PMS is always noticed and felt by David.  When he first encountered it during our dating and engaged days, my hormone-inspired emotional energy wiped the life out of him.  When I was pregnant with our first child my entire first trimester was like severe PMS which he suffered through bravely, then was rewarded with an extremely even-keeled wife for both second and third trimesters.

I’ll be honest here.  Throughout our relationship, his journey into manhood has often taken the forefront to my journey into womanhood.  I have always been okay with that, as I had journeyed significantly in the years before our relationship, and of course interspersed throughout.  And who am I kidding?  Pregnancy and birth and motherhood as been in the limelight THREE times now, and David has more than done his share of stepping aside and letting me be in the limelight.

But this year is different.  I’m stepping up into a new level of womanhood slowly but surely and I am loving it.  I guess it is finally my time.  A dream I had around the new year where I wore this simple, comfortable, but also flashy and beautiful red dress kind of captures where I am being taken.

A significant part of this journey has been redeeming my PMS.  The ugly things I managed to keep hidden in my heart regarding issues in our relationship during dating/ engaged days were released with vengeance within the first few years of marriage.  They threatened my husband, and  sometimes scared the heck out of me.  And over the years, I slowly took in the lie either believed by David or at the very least implied by him unintentionally: the emotions of my PMS were an unwelcome interruption to our otherwise peaceful life.

Over the last couple of years, as I grew more secure in who I am, I started realizing this is a lie.  I stepped up and told him no, actually my PMS was a time when VALID but difficult to handle emotions I can repress easily the rest of the month can’t hide anymore, but milder forms of those same emotions are going on all month, and this means WE have issues to DEAL WITH, not _I_ have emotions that are so strong they do not count.  He slowly took this in, and it’s been good for our marriage.

But I wasn’t satisfied.  There was something deeper I couldn’t get my finger on and from time to time, I was troubled by it.  And then, just a couple of months ago, I REMEMBERED.  I remembered crying over a troubled friend and praying for her desperately one random afternoon in high school, then noticing my period started the next day.  I remembered being so overwhelmed with thankfulness one afternoon in college that I stopped by a prayer room on campus as I biked by and ended up weeping for sexually broken women everywhere, especially women just like me who were prone to look for love in all the wrong places.  And then my period started the next day.

Then I realized that the battles of our life had been SO overwhelming, the issues in our marriage and each of our characters SO unresolved (we have a great marriage, but far from a perfect one!), and my immature emotional response to try to live in denial or cover-up for my husband (who rarely seemed ready to deal with issues that were crippling me) was SO strong, that by the time PMS struck, all it could be was a volcano of hidden emotions erupted.

But as I’ve learned to view our issues rightly, as I’ve walked the walk again that my husband is not my enemy but we are fellow warriors on the SAME side of a greater battle, and as I’ve walked in greater freedom than I’ve ever known before of knowing who I am and WHOSE I am, my PMS is being beautifully redeemed into what I believe it was designed for.

It’s an opportunity for intense emotion to be released on behalf of others, the oppressed, the victims of injustice, my own children, my husband, even myself.  Christians call this intercession, literally, standing in the gap for someone who needs help in their journey towards our Maker.  It’s an opportunity to cry out truth over lives deceived by lies.  It’s a time to reclaim lives to be all they were meant to be.  It’s a battle cry of a strong warrior ready to lay her life down for those she loves most.

It’s beautiful, it’s powerful, it’s fiery intense, and it’s pretty dang awesome.

photo by Petur Gauti