I've still got it

Every woman knows how it feels:

Your stomach feels full
Your ankles swell
Your breasts balloon in size and hurt when touched
Your back aches
Your skin breaks out
Your hair becomes greasy
You get hot flushes
You feel faint or nauseous
And between your legs the interior decorators are beginning to get busy, stripping away (without steaming the wallpaper first)
Plus of course the mood swings, that mean you are crying at a fucking Andrex advert one minute, and telling the man in front of you in the queue in Sainsburys to "fucking hurry up" the next.

I am of course talking about PMT - the prepatory period (pun not intended) for the actual Period (of which you may add to the above, excruciating endless pain for hours on end, combined with heavy bleeding).

But I digress. PMT. It's enough to make a woman feel down - and I do. I feel like shit, I look like shit and I know it. The water retension alone makes me feel like a beached whale, let alone all the other crap on top of that. And just to rub it in, I am the horniest that I could ever be when I have PMT. Like nature's way of saying "Fuck you. Too bad that you feel driven mad by your hormones and want, no, need to fuck. You look like shit so you ain't gonna get any." And I can't help but feel that men know when women have PMT (not just because of the mood swings) and find it a turn off, so that certainly doesn't leave me feeling confident about how I look.

So, you know, I just give in, do my best to put up with it, accept things as they are and carry on, looking forward to shoving in my gob the daily maximum amount of 1200mg of Ibruprofen, 3000mg of Paracetamol and 30mg of Codeine that I shall ingest in the days to come.

But then, sometimes something happens which puts a smile on your face and makes you feel womanly and sexy and not beached-whaley and today that happened twice. The first: walking past an internet cafe, a cute unshaven blond guy, mid 30's stared and smiled. I had to look around me, to check he wasn't looking at someone else. Me? The whale? I looked back, he smiled again. I carried on walking, looked back once more, he leaned his head out, smiled again. Wow. Maybe he was too far away to see my whaleness?

The next guy certainly wasn't: he came out of this bar he was working in, stood next to me, and said hello. He was cute, unshaven blond and mid 30's (hmm, a trend?) and had a wonderful smile too. But how could he not see my PMT? I was whaling it up right next to him. He must have known. And if so, why was he chatting me up? There must be something wrong with him surely? But it didn't stop him talking to me or me promising him to pop into the bar soon and say hello, so whatever it was, I forgot about being a whale and instead felt like a butterfly: light, happy, flirty and sexy. And knowing what lies ahead (pain, pain and more pain), having moments like that, reminding me that I am still attractive - even with PMT - makes it all seem like a breeze.