PMS and the Single Woman

I am about to start my period. Any minute now, in fact. I’ve only recently realized that I have an (odd) PMS symptom -- As soon as my hormones begin to spike, I start to nest.

Seriously. Nest.

Here’s the deal: I don’t clean. To be more precise, I like a clean environment, but I’m not good at cleaning, keeping things clean, or maintaining tidy habits. When it's all messy enough, I snap and begin binge-cleaning until my feet and lower back ache. I first began to notice that my cleaning binges have a regularity I’d never noticed approximately six months ago.

Every 4-5 weeks, the spirit of Maria the Housecleaner* invades my body, I wrap a bandanna around my head, crank up the Tejano music, and do battle with the ever-encroaching horde of dust, trash, clutter, dust bunnies, and soap scum that threatens to run me out of the apartment. My cleaning binges are usually followed by a bevy of decorating ideas that never come to fruition.

Now I know why.

One day I realized that I always seemed to have clean sheets in the linen closet when my period started and I suddenly had to change them. I wondered if it was my subconscious making me wash that extra set because it knew better than my conscious mind that I'd need them soon. I began paying attention. At first, I thought it might be a simple coincidence. I was bang-on with the sheet-washing, and I began noticing the cleaning routine. Again, maybe a coincidence, so I continued paying attention. Since my cycle fluctuates randomly, falling somewhere between 28 and 35 days, I’ve been able to nail this binge-cleaning phenomenon down with utter certainty.

I'm scheduled to start within the next 24 hours (most likely while I sleep tonight) . . . and I cleaned for the last two days. I spent half of today cleaning and organizing the lab at work. I’m looking forward to going home tonight and packing old clothes into vacuum-seal bags for storage.

I’m blogging about uncontrollable nesting.

The bright spot is that this won’t last much longer. My decorating ideas never come to fruition for the same reason that I eventually stop cleaning – My hormones finish their upward spike, and then begin to settle back down.

What kind of weirdness do your hormones bring? How have they affected your life?

~Riot.Jane

*Note: ”Maria the Housecleaner” is an old, inside-joke, and should not be misconstrued as racist/ethnocentric/derogatory.