The callous attitude of many leaves me drained! Already, Menstruation is seen as a leaking bucket of slimy waste, haggard women fighting off the heavy-handed flow conspicuous in its arrival and caterwauled in its affection. What more? The idea of paid leave during Menstruation is now being muddled in the discursive culture of equality and stoicism.

What has menstruation to do with the turpitudes and eccentricities to make a woman look like a mighty tree weathering storms or foresting terpsichorean paces on a single branch? Isn’t she free to act cynical with the hagridden impulses or shout a loud cry by the enormous pain fighting a tenebrous battle in the abdomen? But the strait laced palavers are quick to churn their own butter on which perfidiously slips a woman’s moral strength to entertain the natural proclivity.

Look at her during the tale of periods? Hiding the ignominy of the profound red curry that has just lost a silent  discord with existence, and all the moral dilettante can do is create a hedgerow of ‘do’s’ and ‘don’ts’. Coming back to the paid menstrual leave conundrum, it’s a heuristic need to empower women and must be made a mandate. The question of equality and prejudice is not valid here.

How a woman’s body works is different from a man’s body. The differences are many and we need to be sensitive towards it. The idea of equality generates from shared experiences and fundamentals. Menstruation is a no de rigueur for a man, hence what’s the undeniable lethargy we are talking about? Menstruation is natural and a raison d’etre for existential proposition. But, it’s not all gay and gaiety; the five days of menstrual flow are debilitating and frequently act as an impediment to carry out the most normal activities. It carries its own challenges and is therefore distinct in its pain and hagridden impulses.

So, why do we see menstrual leave as an ill-disposed trajectory to the ‘empowerment battle’? Let’s first get our heads straight over its anatomy; it only happens to women and surrendering to it should not amount to incarceration. I ask,

• Why the period pain suffers in the corrugated lapses of impropriety? Are we still thinking of equality at workplace when the invertebrate pain is incommunicado with the men around.
• The looking back & forth for a blood spot is a ‘trust’ issue; are we ready to make it obvious, or women all along will skirt their hands around the knees in ambiguity to release the embedded fear.

It’s so easy for the political task bearers to humm …on taking pills and getting over the concomitant nuisances as if the bird of prey must hide along the bushes to be not caught by the draconian maneuvers. But does the generosity of the flow fail to ebb? We, women, tied up in tyranny to behave normally eventually suffer with problems like scanty flow, irregular periods, dysmenorrhea or no periods at all. Menstruation becomes an antagonist and we suffer in remorse.

All this initiates the importance of ‘period leave’. Many would question how a period leave can do good? Ask a woman—the flow is not just the blood but the imperfection of emotions that dilute the body into disharmony; acknowledging the anthropomorphism in its entire dimension rather than purging the entire process in animadversion is the tune of the time.  

Whats going out is the adamancy to stick to life. We often fail to understand that the ‘flow’ is a mystery, self-indulgent in the vagaries of human body, and how in the process we learn selflessness to accept the disapprovals of life. Is it so easy to negate all this and just label periods as ‘natural’.  Let the woman be conscious of her strength to create a carapsse and then also have the heart to see it break down into painful animism.

This is what makes her empowered; the derring do capacity to reproduce in the ephemeral transition of pain & pas de deux! A leave thereby should be a natural healer.