Lindsay King-Miller

Your period is a time for many things: comfort eating, getting into arguments for reasons you can't reconstruct…but it’s also a time to express yourself.

For queer parents like me, meanwhile — although I know that my whiteness and my class affords me a degree of protection from scrutiny and interference — the threat of being deemed an illegitimate parent also serves to silence any discussion of mixed feelings.

We’re always hardest on people who give into our own worst impulses, and I see my own shadow in those parents. I’m an over-sharer too.

I just tell my daughter the truth about my period: I have PMS, my back is killing me, and we’re going to eat a lot of chocolate.

I never want my child to doubt herself the way I do myself. I never want her to feel the anxieties that weigh me down, though I know she already senses it.