Hi. It's me again. The reluctant queen. The apologetic spoiled brat. This time I want to invite you into the story of how I learned to kill the apocalypse in spite of the efforts of dear Vimala, my beloved mother and teacher. To begin, I need to describe my menarche. But there's a problem. I had so many menarches. Which one shall I tell you about? The false alarms? The dress rehearsals? The harrowing rituals in which my well-meaning moms did just about everything but punch me in the groin to induce my tardy first flow?

Maybe I should tell you about the first time Vimala tenderly manipulated me into guzzling two large cups of noxious tea brewed from pennyroyal and false unicorn root. Didn't cure the problem as advertised, but stirred up a riotous night-dream straight out of the medieval tapestry starring a unicorn with its paws in the lap of the sensuous virgin. And that was mildly consoling to Vimala, who has always been a sucker for any of my portentous sleeptime artifacts from which she can wrangle prophetic interpretations.

In case you have not yet sniffed out what the bloody hell I'm talking about, I'll spell it out. My menarche was late. Not just a little. It was so late that some feared it might never start at all. And this was most disturbing to the members of the ancient order which prided itself on preserving the sacred menstrual mysteries through the dark ages of the phallocracy. How could their girl messiah embody and illustrate those mysteries if she herself didn't menstruate?

It's what I've always referred to as my Third Shining Flaw. A worthy companion for the ugly birthmark and heart trouble I was born with.

From an early age, of course, I had been thoroughly saturated with the logistics as well as the mythology of the menstrual cycle. Beginning with my first crayon drawings of the magical rainbow womb, no teaching imprinted me more deeply than the meaning of the moment that the ovum and its nest die. As they slough themselves free of the womb, I'd learned, they give a signal to the pituitary gland to secrete the hormone that begins the ripening of a new follicle in the ovary. This was the primal mystery of our order, a core symbol of how thoroughly the forces of life and death are interwoven.

"She's a late bloomer," the Pomegranate Grail's muckamucks clucked to themselves when their storied princess reached her fourteenth birthday without so much as a clot of the moon-flow. This despite the inconvenient fact that my breasts were growing exuberantly; my pubic and underarm hair were already thick thatches.

There was a thing like a wave of cramps in the month before my fifteenth birthday. Something that might be construed as an announcement of being on the verge of tiptoeing up to my menarche. And preparations were duly made. My seven mommies wove garlands of roses and peonies. They consecrated (for -- what? -- the fifth time?) my all-natural linen menstrual pads -- made out of flax, don't you know, as in matriarchal days of yore. And then there was the unbelievably corny poetry, which I couldn't help but swoon over despite myself, it having been so thoughtfully chosen by my preternaturally loving mommies: "You're about to take a trip to the moon in a boat powered by fireworks and wild swans...."

I'm sure my guardians had often whispered the word amenorrhea in worried discussions before I ever heard it, but the first time it hit my ears was a cold December day when I was closer to my sixteenth birthday than my fifteenth. In retrospect I know how awful a curse word that was; how rudely it threatened to refute the visions on which my mission hinged. That there might be something amiss with the menstrual potential of a messiah whose mission it was to restore the menstrual mysteries?! Impossible! Unthinkable! Downright heretical! To even ruminate on the possibility veered dangerously close to an admission that either, one, they'd fingered the wrong person for the job of serving as their holy one, or two, restoring the menstrual mysteries would not proceed in the way they'd always imagined.

At least amenorrhea was a concrete, physical problem, though. It might possibly be due to causes that didn't have to do with divine disfavor. In that sense my moms were rooting for it.

Unfortunately, the facts were not in their favor. Primary amenorrhea--failure to ever begin menstruating--occurs most often in young ballet dancers or gymnasts who're used to torturing their bodies with strenuous physical exercise. And while I was in good shape -- danced a lot, walked all over creation, played softball -- I was no Olympic-bound superfreak.

There's another cross-section of teenage girls whose ovaries don't produce estrogen in the proper way to goad the uterine lining to thicken and shed: the anorexics. But I was no ninety-pound weakling patterning myself after the concentration camp imitators stalking the fashion runways of Paris. I never bought into that skinny-is-prettier bunk. And the food my moms made was too tasty to avoid, anyway.

Vimala took me to three different gynecologists. Were my ovaries producing normal amounts of estrogen? Not exactly. Did I have polycystic ovaries? No. Was there any disorder that might be suppressing ovulation? Well, ovulation did seem to be absent, but not because of any discernible cause.

At least not any cause that mere doctors could discover.

Just goes to show you how supernaturally strong my own willpower is when I give it an assignment.

Did I just say what you thought I said?

Yup.

The reason I didn't menstruate when I was supposed to, even though it placed in jeopardy all the credibility I commanded as the prophesied messiah of the Pomegranate Grail, was because I didn't want to menstruate. I didn't want to give my beloveds what they desired from me -- just as I had promised myself shortly after my sixth birthday on the occasion of my coronation. "I will never be the queen you want," I'd silently vowed. "I will never be the queen you want unless you give me back myself."

And they had not given me back myself. As the years went by, they'd stolen more and more of me for use in constructing their perfect little idol. I was not a person, but a projection screen onto which they cast bigger-than-life prophecies and breathtaking visions, many of which had been dreamed up long before I was born.

I forgive them, by the way. How could they have done anything different? They are and have always been passionate and idealistic women who live their lives in service to the good, the true, the beautiful, and the just. In their eyes, I was the magical agent by which they would supercharge their struggle to restore the divine feminine to its proper glory -- and literally save the world from the doomsday machine of the berserk cosmodemonic phallus.

My mothers' cause was a sublime one. How could I not love and admire and forgive them for giving me a central role in carrying it out?

More than that. I also loved my mothers because they were so good to me. They gave me all of themselves, with alacrity and grace, as if being my mother was the service through which they honed their devotion to Goddess. They were expansively indulgent when the moment required, or compassionately stern, or cleverly motivational. I swear I understood the profundity of their gift to me. I knew that few children in the history of the world had been privileged to bask in the artful concentration of seven intelligent adults.

But back then I also hated my beautiful mothers at least ten percent of the time. Sometimes it was my lessons in ancient Greek and Sumerian that provoked my enmity. Other times it was when I had to not just study and analyze, but for Goddess' sake memorize endless top-secret ultra-sacred texts written in stuffy, obscure prose. And then there was the huge task of learning the difference between the true science and true philosophy and true herstory that Big Bad Daddy Culture had suppressed and the twisted patriarchal versions of all those subjects.

And that was the easy part. Far more oppressive was having to think and behave in a manner my mothers deemed proper for an avatar who was born to embody and teach the new matriarchal covenant. It wasn't that I disliked being molded into a strong, decisive, articulate, prayerful, athletic supergirl. I actually became quite proud of that, especially after I turned eight and my mothers began to let me meet girls from outside our community. I couldn't believe what fuzzy-wuzzy sissies they all were.

What I hated, though, was this. My loving mommies were shaping me into a strong, decisive, articulate, prayerful, athletic supergirl not primarily because it would make me happy and free. The real reason, the only reason that mattered, was to ensure that I would be of maximum use to the Cause. In other words, I wasn't here to live my own life. I was a cog. A mechanism. An object. I had come to Earth to serve as a living symbol in some grand design I didn't have any hand in formulating. And I didn't have any choice in the matter.

It seemed like such a drastic sentence. And so unloving, so inhumane. What was I supposed to do with the part of me that just wanted to look at things, not think about them; the part of me that liked to run and jump and climb and dance not because it was good for me but because it was fun; the part of me that couldn't bear to see my friends gazing at me with a mix of awe and envy and fear, but only wanted to be their fallible equal?

But there was another unspeakable torture I was forced to endure. Excuse me if I raise my voice as I name it. EVERYONE WAS ALWAYS SO GODDAMN SACRED AND SERIOUS AND POLITE! SO TERMINALLY LITERAL AND SINCERE AND REASONABLE! SO FILLED TO OVERFLOWING WITH SMARMY INTEGRITY AND PORTENTOUS PURPOSEFULNESS AND HIGH-MINDED NICENESS! It's a miracle to me that I even discovered what playful irony was, let alone disputatious spunk or wild-spirited edginess or the messy but fertile chaos that renews the heart. Thank Goddess my imagination was sufficiently robust to glean the existence of these states through the books I read.

And at least those states weren't forbidden. They may not have officially existed in the Pomegranate Grail pantheon of permissible states of mind, but I managed to covertly carve out a space in my psyche for them to thrive.

On the other hand, there was a host of darker, more unruly emotions that were almost completely proscribed. Rage and frustration and grief and fear had only one justifiable target: the crimes of the patriarchy. If I fell victim to them at any other time, say in reaction to Cecily's silly overprotectiveness or Vimala's elusiveness about my early life, I was expected to transmute them on the spot. "You have felt that way, at least, until now," was the ritualistic response my mothers made to me whenever I was less than my shining avatarish self -- implying that from that moment on I must concentrate on overcoming the conditions that had led me to near-defeat.

"I just can't stop thinking about how Isis died," I remember saying to Vimala one October night, referring to my cat that had been ripped apart by a raccoon. And my mother said, "You have felt that way, at least, until now, my dear. Beginning at this moment, you know beyond any doubt that Isis' time in this world was done and she has gone to a better place."

How else could I respond to this oppression? My life of rebellious humor-crime began one April Fool's Day when I put salt in the sugar bowl in the homes of every one of my mothers. On Beltane, a month later, I slipped into the temple to offer a smelly incense made from burning an old shoe. Next I began a tradition of gleefully celebrating Vimala's unbirthday, bestowing on her several no-gifts, beautifully wrapped packages with nothing inside.

Soon my pranks grew more subtle. I remember studying an ancient Sumerian poem with Vimala one summer afternoon. (The School for One that I attended didn't have summer vacations.)

"I, Inanna, will preserve for you," I read, dramatically declaiming my English translation of the words the goddess Inanna speaks to her husband Dumuzi. "I will watch over your scrotum."

"Now that's an interesting translation," Vimala said neutrally, as if I had just made a thoughtful if creative attempt at scholarly accuracy. "But I think the better translation is I will watch over your house of life.' Not scrotum."

As so often happened, my dear mother and teacher had simply missed, or possibly ignored, my wry point. Which was LET'S TURN THIS SUCKER UPSIDE-DOWN AND INSIDE-OUT LOOKING FOR SOME MISCHIEF TO SATISFY THE LAUGHING SOUL.

But at least I'd entertained myself. At least I'd fed the strong, decisive, articulate, prayerful, athletic part of me that never ever wanted to take anything, no matter how dear, at face value.

I do have to say that there was one of my seven mothers who was receptive to my jokes. Dear Sibyl always winked or wrinkled her nose affectionately or gave me some tiny sign that yes praise Goddess she had duly noted my slash at dignity and propriety. And that's what I wanted most. Not necessarily even to be praised for my pranks, or to be pranked back. But simply to be duly noted. To be seen and understood as something besides a little automaton of the Goddess.

Kiss, kiss, Sibyl my love. You saw me.

It wasn't enough, though, I'm afraid.

Most of the real, raw me -- the me that wasn't a sacred living symbol -- more and more sought refuge in a place I called Melted Popsicle Land. To get there, I had to ditch my omnipresent mothers with some ingenious ploy and slink off to my favorite place in the woods. It was within the husk of a thick-girthed redwood tree whose insides had been incinerated by lightning. There was even a "door" just my size that the lightning and its subsequent fire had carved.

Once ensconced in my temple of solitude, I ceremoniously unwrapped the red silk where I kept my two special popsicle sticks. The flat slabs of wood, whose light brown color were mostly stained blue, were among my most precious possessions. I'd obtained them illicitly at a park in Santa Cruz during the one time in my early life when I'd managed to circumvent my mothers' strict dietary guidelines.

To begin my shamanic journey inside the hollow redwood, I cupped the tiny wands in my hands and blew on them for good luck. Next I touched them to the blotch on my forehead and the cross-shaped scar on my chest. Rapidly in the beginning, then with ever-decreasing speed, I rubbed my magic-makers together, instructing my body to relax ever more deeply. Adapting techniques from the meditation practices my mothers taught me, I compelled my inner eye to focus on a single image -- not the bucrania or yoni mandala as my mothers might have me do, but rather on a heaven-blue popsicle melting in my hot mouth. Likewise, I applied the disciplined breathing exercise I'd learned from my mothers: pranayama they called it. Within minutes, without fail, I swooned and watched a new world drop over me like a falling net of gossamer light.

The passage I conjured thereby was like slipping from the waking state directly into a lucid dream, bypassing deep sleep and not losing my conscious awareness. I was no longer in the woods near the Sanctuary but in a streaming kaleidoscope of fantastic scenes -- volcanoes made of mashed potatoes spewing warm chocolate rain down on fields of golden clover where fairies and I went on treasure hunts ... ladders made of diamond that stretched from the bottom of a peppermint tea river to cloud houses where friendly sphinxes carved medicine dolls out of magic black radishes ... talking eagles building me schoolrooms out of my ancestors' bones and teaching me how to ask trees questions....

In Melted Popsicle Land, I felt the total opposite of loneliness. Everything was alive, and everything wanted to play with me. Bees and ferns and rocks let me tune into their ever-singing thoughts. I could taste the sky and wake up the wind with a wish from my heart. The sun and moon themselves were creatures that loved me, and I loved them. I made many friends, from a magic dung beetle I called Khephra to a tall oak tree named Fortify to my beloved companion Rumbler, about whom I will speak more in a minute.

There was another amazing secret about Melted Popsicle Land: It was a giant magic television. What exactly did I mean by that? I barely knew what a real television was; my mothers had made it verboten on the grounds of the Pomegranate Grail. (It was a dangerous tool of patriarchal propaganda.) And aside from a few sets I had spied a couple of times in the window of a Santa Cruz store, I knew about the taboo objects only from my mothers' parsimonious descriptions.

Thus Melted Popsicle Land was free to be the kind of magic television invented by my imagination. According to this source, it was a terrarium the size of the woods. Its boundaries were formed by a circular force field that was invisible and impermeable to anyone not living in Melted Popsicle Land. Everything that happened inside was the television show. There was a broadcast tower arching over the staging area (though like the boundaries it could not be seen by outsiders), and this beamed out transmissions that only angels, fairies, spirits, and other magical creatures could receive.

I was the television storyteller who reported the action, who perhaps made the action occur by describing it aloud. My narrative was relaxed but nonstop. I barely kept up with the images and voices that streamed in and through and around me.

Sometimes my "stories" consisted of incantatory jumbles that were little more than spells:

Creep, creep, creep goes the girl. Gnaw, gnaw, gnaw. When no one was looking, when no one missed her, her teeth grew all the way in, all the way down, snuggly and iron-strong like the fangs of the wolfie wolf. Now she bites through the sweet jail of the mothers who hid her away. Chomps through the bones of the fathers who hurt her mothers so bad they had to build her a sweet jail. Goodbye, goodbye. To all, to all. She's off to school, her very own school. She's nobody's fool. She's cooler than cool. Begone, dead songs, begone.

Other times I "saw" and described real fairy tales with complicated plots and colorful characters. One of my favorite recurring adventures was a variation on the Rapunzel myth. It often began something like this.

Once upon a time, a wicked old warlock, king of the bad daddies, took his beautiful young son, Rumbler, and locked him away in the top of a tall tower with no doors or stairs. The boy was forced to live there with no other visitor besides his cruel father, who came now and then to bring him meager food and drink. Whenever the warlock arrived, he would stand below the single window high on the wall and shout up: "Rumbler, Rumbler, let down your hair."

I loved all my friends in Melted Popsicle Land, but Rumbler was my greatest delight. At times he was a co-creator, helping me decide where to go next and even telling part of the tales. More than that, I was convinced he was somehow indispensable to the ongoing adventure itself. The first time I met him was also the breakthrough moment I discovered the trick of gliding over into the fantastic realm I called Melted Popsicle Land.

It happened not long after my coronation ceremony at age six. Three of my mothers had taken me to a public park in Santa Cruz. While they were occupied setting out the food for our lunch, I sneaked away to spy on a strange family at a nearby picnic table. One of the three boys of the tribe saw me staring and offered me a blue popsicle. Up until that moment, I had never tasted ice cream in my life. (Pomegranate Grail's Commandment #137: The avatar must not be polluted with refined sugar.) To avoid having Vimala and company snatch my treat away, I immediately ran and hid under a picnic table as far away from them as possible.

I squatted there with my head against my knees, rocking gently and shivering with pleasure as I engorged my pure joy. It was the most strangely delicious thing I had ever tasted. The sweetness of an unfamiliar fruit exploded again and again on my front teeth and tongue and the roof of my mouth. Incredibly, its alarming hardness molted thick syrup. The shocking iciness provoked a hot, ambrosial spasm in my solar plexus. The treat was the same color as the sky, and I had an absurd flash that this was how the sky tastes high above the earth. The flavor of heaven.

Gradually I became aware that I was not alone. As the sweetness disappeared inside me I felt the presence of another body materializing -- not exactly next to me; not exactly inside me; but both at the same time. It was as if there were two of us occupying a space that was big enough for just one.

"Who are you?" I beamed in the direction of this somebody. In response, I filled up with a feeling that was mine but not mine; it also belonged to a him. And this him was the same size as me, the same texture, the same bones and hair and heart -- the same everything. I didn't exactly hear but sensed a voice that was like mine but lower in pitch. "It's me -- Rumbler," my companion telepathized brightly. "Remember?"

I was licking the last sweet blue gobs of popsicle with both of our tongues as I tried to remember.

"We were together in the warm floating dark," he said. "Remember?"

A relaxing image rose from my heart, bobbing upwards. A memory? I was a small bird-fish suspended in gooey, salty juice. A fleshy cord emerged from my belly, rooted at its opposite end in a soft, gently throbbing wall. He was there with me, too: "Rumbler." A cord coming out of his gut lodged in the wall near mine.

"Rub the sticks together," I heard him say there in my cave under the picnic table. I obeyed. With him moving my right hand and me my left, I slowly swished the two popsicle sticks back and forth against each other at a right angle. After a few moments (or was it long minutes?), I heard myself talking aloud, seeing in my mind's eye and then murmuring aloud a story about clouds with happy pumpkin faces spitting out burning chairs which flew through a lemony sky and birthed giant flakes of snow shaped like hands. When I laughed with joy at this unwilled explosion of pictures, I felt his laugh inside mine.

It was the first, primitive outburst of a spectacle that would later evolve into a many-splendored institution. The biggest leap in its growth came a few days later, when I discovered my private power spot in the redwood husk. Ultimately I lived the stories, didn't just behold them; I traveled to strange astral tableaux, didn't just describe them. But one aspect of the ritual never changed: Stroking the popsicle sticks together was always the way I slipped over the threshold.

A couple of years later, when my mothers belatedly told me the uncensored story of my birth, I developed a theory that Rumbler was somehow related to or maybe even the same as the twin who had not survived the journey out of our mother's womb. By then, that historical fact was irrelevant. He and I were best friends, not brother and sister.

I had many other allies and companions inside Melted Popsicle Land: Firenze the Musical Sasquatch, Peekaboo the Hide-and-Seek Salamander, Snapdragon Dragonfly the Firefly who could spell out riddles with her blinking light, Jujubee the Angel Ghost Clown who brought me healthy candy, Itchy Crunchy the Beautiful Empress of the Trolls, G'Fretzus and G'Freckles the twin ticklers who always taught me new tricks about how to dream while I was awake, Sphinxie Spanky the Good Troublemaker, Jelly Kelly the Funny Bunny who showed me how to change my size and shape in the twinkle of an eye, and many others.

But Rumbler was my most special friend, and the one with whom I exchanged the most surprises. Sometimes, it's true, I couldn't actually see him. He was a kind of ghost who shared my body, a shadow whose spicy, aerated, mercurial texture moved around inside me. Other times, though, he lived quite distinctly outside of me, a vividly separate creature. Not exactly my twin: a little shorter than me, a little younger in spirit, a less furrowed brow and shorter hair. But his face, I thought, looked much like mine would if I were a boy, and his loping walk and strong, expressive hands were my doubles.

As I think back to those days now, I'm remembering the times he played the game "I Love You Honey, But I Just Can't Make You Laugh." It would start whenever he thought I was taking myself too seriously. He'd suddenly appear hanging upside-down from a cactus-cloud or riding backwards on a fairy elephant, and with a totally straight face except for maybe a saccharinely sympathetic eyebrow he'd say, "I love you honey, but I just can't make you laugh." And I would of course immediately collapse in an implosion of guffaws.

I probably would have left the Earth at an early age without Rumbler and my home-away-from-home on the other side of the veil. My heart would have broken to death, or my subconscious mind would have invoked a disease like leukemia or muscular dystrophy to relieve me of my suffering. Melted Popsicle Land was a life-saver.

Not enough of a life-saver to allow me to forgive my mothers their sins against me, however. As I grew older, I became a rageaholic. Not that I ever showed it. How could I? I had no right. I had no excuse. I was showered with more blessings than any child in the history of the world. A multitude of spacious and beautiful homes in the country. All the toys and gadgets and books and companionship I could possibly want. Not just two doting parents, but seven, each of whom was -- I think this even now -- a highly accomplished, intensely expressive soul who would have been intriguing to me even if she weren't my mother.

And sweet Mary Magdalen, how strong and capable my moms were making me. How confident and radiant. I mastered algebra before my eleventh birthday and was sufficiently knowledgeable to discourse at length on quantum physics, English literature, and the shamanic tradition by age twelve. I could enact the entire ritual of the Eleusinian Mysteries, playing all the roles, and I knew both the intricate theory of the music of the spheres and the story of how Pythagoras had ripped it off from our ancient order. It's true I didn't know squat about the pantheon of Disney characters or the current Top 40 hit songs -- pop culture was at least ignored and at most forbidden at the Pomegranate Grail -- but I could compose duets for the violin, write complex and entertaining short stories, and perform forty yoga asanas with impeccable grace. Most precocious of all, I could meditate up a storm. My talent for concentration was heroic, my ability to induce alpha- and theta-state trance was legendary, and I had on numerous occasions provided incontrovertible proof of my power to read minds and perform psychokinetic tricks. Maybe someday you'd like to see me make the little bronze fox in the moon lodge spin around without touching it.

These last skills were handy in helping me execute the perfect punishment on my loving oppressors.

I remember the moment my brilliant plan first hatched. It was on the summer solstice shortly after my eleventh birthday. My seven mothers had convened the kind of Big Deal get-together they liked to do every six weeks, on each of the cross-quarter holidays of the year (solstices and equinoxes and the power points in between). Check-Ins, they called them. This was where they all assembled in one place with me, usually in the ritual room in my tower, to give me pep talks, evaluate my progress (sometimes with surreptitious tests), and gently pound into me reminders of the big picture I was supposed to be mastering.

The number-one topic on the agenda that day was the glorious and happy event that awaited me in the not-too-distant future: my menarche. It was not as if I hadn't heard the facts about the peach flower flow before. But this presentation was special. My mothers were uniformly adorned in miles of red silk gowns I had never seen before. Big scarlet circles graced their cheeks in apparent violation of the unspoken prejudice in our community against make-up. Their smell was unfamiliar, almost alien: what I would now describe as musky and sulfurous.

Vimala spoke in hushed tones of the mysterious transformations that would soon begin to work their magic inside my body. Sibyl regaled me with old myths and folktales about the origin of the marvelous gift that the female of the species had been blessed with. Artemisia told me of the deep awakening to holy gnosis she'd had on the day when she herself had crossed the threshold from girlhood to womanhood.

Not too many months later I discovered the other side of the menstrual story -- how the phallocrats had always called our gift a "curse"--but on this occasion, the guardians of the Santa Cruz chapter of the Pomegranate Grail waxed with unqualified rapture about the joys and privileges I would soon know.

Fascinated as I was by their song and dance, I could not suppress my congenital urge to find some rib to tickle, some sacred cow to tip. As always, I was two minds working simultaneously. One felt reverent gratitude for the soul-stirring show my mothers were putting on for me. The other was desperate for a laugh in the midst of all the sickeningly calm and poised solemnity.

Finally my searchlight imagination landed on a ripe spot: the complaint I'd been nursing forever and for which I'd never found a satisfying outlet. All those years I'd harbored my protest against the way I'd been carved into an idol, and all those years I'd never managed to retaliate with any act that matched, in its ability to inflict poetic justice, the unfairness of the wrongs I'd suffered. My little rebellious pranks--even the time I set fire to a dogshit-filled paper bag on Artemisia's porch, rang her bell, and ran away--were harmless, really, and usually ignored anyway.

And -- who knows, maybe because I am an avatar after all, with a backlog of smarts and integrity built up over many incarnations, including one as Mary Fucking Magdalen -- I never even considered carrying out any revenge that would stunt my own growth. Refusing to master algebra or Greek or temple dancing, in other words, was not an option. I may have wished from time to time that I could spend more time playing in the garden and less studying the esoteric myths of Persephone, but more often than not I was quite pleased to be in my classroom. I was hungry for knowledge and powers. I was driven by a fierce and almost impersonal ambition to be excellent at everything I did.

But now, finally, here on the summer solstice, I found a way to mess with my mothers' perfect program without hurting myself. As Cecily extolled the part that the metaphor of menstruation would play in the redemption of the planet, I decided, in a bolt of lucidity, that I simply would not menstruate. Would never even start. Would rejoice secretly in my heart as I watched my mothers' faces grow long and sad. Best of all, would pretend I was an innocent victim of the Goddess' inexplicable stroke of fate.

It's not completely honest to say I conjured up this revolution all by myself. Rumbler was there with me, spurring me on. That was a big surprise. Though I had had adventures with him in dreams, until that time he'd never shown up anywhere else outside the confines of Melted Popsicle Land. In fact, I'd become accustomed to believing that he was not able to contact me when I was in my mothers' realm. Their vibes were too thick and protective for him to penetrate. Or something.

Yet there he was, and right when I needed him, too. My heart was two hearts. I felt twice as strong as usual, twice as smart and brave. It wasn't like he gave me the idea to refuse menstruation; it was my own. But I think if he hadn't been there, I might have downplayed or ignored the brainstorm. He gave me the spark to act on it.

My (our?) plan was full-grown from the moment it bloomed. I would simply extend the power I had already developed to modify the autonomic functions of my body. For more than four years, my mothers had been teaching me to regulate my breath, slow my heart beat, and relax my nervous system. I'd done lots of biofeedback and could slip into the alpha state virtually on command. I'd practiced a technique which supposedly sped up the healing of my various childhood cuts and bruises, and my mothers were convinced that I'd become adept at it beyond their wildest expectations. In the past fifteen months, they'd even begun to teach me alchemical secrets they said had never been revealed to anyone under the age of forty in the history of their ancient order. Like for instance: how to digest my food so as to extract the potable gold that most people excrete in their shit. I won't gross you out with the laboratory details of how my doting mothers determined that I was succeeding at this magical task.

In that moment, with my red silk-clad mommies gathered around me on the summer solstice, I wasn't sure precisely what to do in order to postpone my menarche indefinitely. But I was absolutely certain I could figure out how.

I set to work the next day. As I'd been taught to do in the face of any difficult problem, I set up a three-pronged attack: analysis, meditation, and dream-quest. I studied up on the physiology of the female reproductive system till I could picture every detail of its operation. With my inner eye and proprioceptive nerves, I divined the specific shape and location of my own organs. Next I launched a series of meditations and prayers to plumb for the exact information I would need to carry out my desire. Finally, I devised a dream incubation quest.

There was a slight obstacle. Our ancient order teaches that meditation and prayer are at best useless and at worst rife with distortions when applied towards a goal that is purely selfish. And I firmly believed that, as I still do. Could I therefore twist and tweak the mission somehow so it would be morally correct? Something other than my petty and infantile rejection of my mothers' hopes?

The answer surprised me. It came in my very first meditation. The still small voice rising up from the supernal depths said, with no ambiguity, something like the following: "Unless you are completely united with the goal of serving as the avatar of the Pomegranate Grail, there is no use even trying to fulfill that goal. Therefore, you should either renounce the goal for good, or find a way to embrace it wholeheartedly -- by any means necessary."

"By any means?" I asked the still small voice.

"The obstacle to passionate commitment is your feeling that an important part of your self is not being included in the mix," the still small voice replied unhysterically. "If the only way to include that part of you is through rebellion and rejection, so be it."

"So you're saying, basically," I questioned the voice further, "that in order to become the avatar, I should reject becoming the avatar?"

"Yes," soothed the voice, "at least as your mothers understand the role of the avatar. Who knows? The real avatar might be something very different from what your mothers imagine. And you'll never find out if that's true unless you wound your mothers' model."

I couldn't believe it at first. It was such a tricky thing for my still small voice to tell me. And yet it was speaking to me in the same direct and low-key tones I had long come to regard as a measure of its authenticity.

I had to make one more test. "OK, still small voice," I said with my inner whisper, "so in order to become an unselfish messiah working for the good of all humanity, I am not just being allowed but actually encouraged to be a selfish little brat."

"Now you're talking melodramatic nonsense," the voice signaled back. "It's not being a selfish brat to make a symbolic statement of resistance against an oppression that needs to be undone."

I had copped the perfect rationalization for refusing to menstruate, and it wasn't even a rationalization at all. It was a righteous sanctification. My meditations in the coming weeks, along with my dreaming mind's vivid replies to my incubation quest, gradually built up in me an understanding of the subtle visualizations I needed to practice in order to accomplish my goal. (Rumbler even showed up twice in dreams, once in a classroom where he lifted me up on his shoulders so I could get a look at a blackboard that was too high to read, and another time in a bathtub, where he washed moldy red bugs out of my hair.)

A little more than a month later, I knew beyond a doubt that I'd set in place all the inner adjustments necessary. On a cool August morning I woke up with the gift of a sign: a dream of a blood-red bull skull turning pale white right in front of my eyes.

More than five years later, I had still not acquiesced to nature.

From time to time, my seven mothers made efforts to get my flow going, though most were pretty timid. There were polite dress rehearsals and group prayer sessions and herbal treatments and trips to doctors and midwives. My moms were holding back from acting as hog-wild as they felt because they couldn't be sure my amenorrhea wasn't ordained by Goddess Herself. None of our scriptures or prophecies mentioned anything about the avatar not menstruating, but then again they didn't say she -- I mean I -- did menstruate.

There was also the fact that several of my mothers had dreams that could be interpreted as sanctioning my barren state. Vimala, for instance, had a doozy in which she watched me as I emerged from a cave dripping wet with a vulture on either shoulder -- a sure sign that this was a vision directly from Persephone. As I strode towards my mother, she dropped to her knees as if in supplication. I handed her a large reddish egg and muttered, "Take, eat, for this is my body, which is given for thee." Cracking it open, she found it was empty.

The signs and portents changed, though, once I reached sixteen. Artemisia woke up sobbing on the summer solstice, having just dreamed of me collapsing in her lap and crying, "I want to learn the power of those who bleed but do not die." Cecily's twelve-year-old biological daughter Lilly had her menarche in July, and on the night after the ceremony both mother and child dreamed of me standing at the edge of a ritual circle with grief and longing, as if I wanted to come in but couldn't.

The garden that year was bizarrely and inexplicably unproductive, and even the fox and raccoons and deer and skunks were noticeably sparse. I felt the same as ever, at least in my mothers' domain if not in Melted Popsicle Land (whose name had changed to the "Televisionarium," as in television + terrarium), but everyone else seemed to think that I wasn't making as much progress in my lessons, and that I had suddenly become less wise in the advice I was so often called on to dispense.

As I look back now, I surmise that my evolving relationship with Rumbler was covertly messing with the collective mood of the Pomegranate Grail. Unbeknownst to everyone else--thanks to my perfect secrecy (and apparent ability to dissociate) -- their avatar was indulging in an ever more intense and intimate exchange with male energy. True, the unknown polluter wasn't officially a human being, by normal definitions. But maybe that made his influence all the more profound. Rumbler was more beautiful and smart and interesting and fun than any imperfect boy could ever be. I opened my heart to him in ways I could never have done for anyone else.

Who knows? Maybe Rumbler and I would never have gone as far as we did if my mothers had granted me the time and permission to go on dates with actual guys. While Vimala and company were never shy about giving me the lowdown on sex -- it was included in my curriculum -- they were adamant that I would not even be able to think about romantic liaisons until I was eighteen. Even then -- so I was brainwashed to believe -- I wouldn't have much interest in such things; my destiny led in another direction.

Thank Goddess for Jordan and Elijah, the sons of Artemisia and Cecily, respectively, who grew up in large part in our community. Without their matter-of-fact presence in my life, Rumbler would have been my only break from unisex monasticism. But they were too different in age for me to brew up any flirtations.

No. If I wanted to go out on dates -- if I wanted to improvise with the mystery of erotic attraction -- I had only one choice: my best friend from the Televisionarium.

Still, it did not occur to me at first that he could be the solution to the strange longings that began to stir in me at age thirteen going on fourteen. Our timeless time together in the woods was filled with epic but innocent adventures, like journeys to see the Queen of Rats, who laughed beautiful stories for our ears alone, or leaps off the tops of our special tree, Fortify, whose supernatural help allowed us to fly over rivers of fire that we could not otherwise find.

Our first kiss came not in the Televisionarium but in a dream a few weeks before my fifteenth birthday. As the dream began, I was high above Rumbler, standing on a giant purple popsicle that was carved in the shape of a balcony jutting out of a purple popsicle tower. Gazing down, I could see him through clear water curled up in a ball at the bottom of a river. "Let's meet in the middle," he gurgled up to me as he launched himself towards the surface. Without thinking, I threw myself off the balcony. I fell in slow motion and felt a surge of sweetness welling up all over my body.

I landed safely on a boat that was also a bed. He was already there, acting as if he were just waking from a long sleep. "There's blood in your bed," I whispered to him, pointing to a red blotch on the sheet. "Yeah," he murmured back, "I just had my very first period. One of us had to."

He chuckled as he made the last comment and moved into a position where his hands were around my waist and his mouth on my belly button. Slowly he kissed his way up my abdomen, unbuttoning my white blouse as he progressed. At the center of my chest he said a prayer--"Dear Goddess, let me be the boy behind the girl, the man behind the woman" -- as he ran his tongue along the two arms of my scar.

Finally his face arrived in front of mine. For a while we barely pressed our lips together as both of us hummed the song "Row, Row, Row Your Boat." Currents of heat were running down my legs and arms. Dizzying music was circling through my belly and pelvis. My hair felt as if it were as alive with sensation as the rest of me. Snakey strands floated out away from my head as if I were in zero gravity.

We stayed like that for a long time. My scary joy grew steadily bigger and wilder, until I wondered if I might die. I couldn't believe, didn't trust, how full I felt. Then, unexpectedly, Rumbler and I touched our tongues together and rolled them around the inside of each other's lips. Suddenly, all the jangly, fuzzy electricity that had been pulsing crazily around inside me became very lucid and pointed. From a lazily swirling sweetness I mutated into a well-organized grid of fierce bliss -- bliss that somehow felt as if it had an intention and will of its own. At the center of this grid was my heart, which was fluttering in a way that was both terrifying and gratifying. I wasn't sure if I was having a heart attack or the opposite of a heart attack -- a heart expanse? Finally I felt an engulfing squeeze, then a delicious eruption that was simultaneously the taste of dark purple grapes and the sound of a cello and the smell of the ocean at dawn and the sight of an orange moon rising over a green hill. I woke from the dream awash in tearful rapture. The phrase "drenched in heart river" was echoing over and over in the back of my throat.

The dream was a taboo-breaker, an eye-opener, a hunch-generator. A few days later I smuggled myself into the Televisionarium bursting with a hypothesis I had never before entertained. Could my best friend and I give each other the same pleasure here that we'd had in the dream?

The answer was a thousand times yes. In the very first experiment, I danced with him cheek to cheek in an underground garden where giant, seed-laden sunflower heads burned like inexhaustible torches with blue flames. We jumped in mud puddles as we twirled and put four-leaf clovers on each other's tongues. When I dared to press my lips against his, he raised his eyebrows and laughed, "What revolution is this?" And when I picked him up and wrapped his legs around my waist, waltzing him around the diamond ladder as if he were my darling, he howled with shocked joy. "Bind me to you," he sang, spurring me on as he so often did, and I danced him over to an oak where the mistletoe hung down in fountainlike tufts. Using two such stems, we tied my left hand to his right. The kiss that began then did not stop until we disappeared together in a reverie of the thermonuclear ecstasy at the heart of the sun.

So began a new phase of our old relationship -- infatuated courtship. It did not replace our epic play, only enhanced it. During the ensuing months, I sought him out in both dreams and the Televisionarium more often than I ever had before. I was not obsessed -- one who was trained to be as balanced as I was is not capable of that state -- but I was assuredly in love.

From what I could tell, our blooming union improved my concentration on the educational tasks my mothers pressed me so hard to master. I felt lighter, less resentful of my benevolent incarceration as the avatar. My need to inject humor into all the dry details of my rhythm had less of an edge. And yet there was no mistaking the fact that my mothers' joie de vivre was declining as mine waxed. No doubt this had to do with their growing frustration at my failure to menstruate. What had been a rationalizable glitch in their master plan when I was thirteen or fourteen years old had evolved into a potential refutation of the master plan itself.

But in retrospect I am positive that my love affair with Rumbler was at least partially responsible for the ever-souring mood that climaxed just before the winter solstice seven months after my sixteenth birthday. What my mothers weren't consciously aware of, they were being affected by on subconscious levels. I was like a married person who was secretly cheating on my mate. A third party was mutating the chemistry of our community, and my mothers had no idea.

An almost hysterical undertone had begun to pervade the atmosphere of the Santa Cruz chapter of the Pomegranate Grail. Yet while this superficially suggests there was an overabundance of emotions, I noticed an increasing dryness in the way we all related to each other. There were fewer of the warm, pleasing surprises I'd come to expect from my interactions. Compliments seemed forced. The temple rituals lacked the full-bodied passion I'd grown used to.

The first two weeks of December seemed to be the most depressing I'd ever witnessed -- not for me, of course: I was in love. Everyone else was miserable or down or dishwater grey. Vimala cried every day. No one wanted to cook. The pomegranate orchard had produced a pitiful harvest of tiny fruits.

On December 16, an emergency summit convened. Not only were my seven mothers in attendance, but all the other thirty-two members of the Pomegranate Grail who lived in the vicinity, as well as fifty-three grave-faced honchos from chapters as far away as Melbourne, Australia. There it was decided, after long, rancorous debate, that my problem had gone on long enough: It was time to fix it with a forceful act of ritual magic. This was by no means a unanimous decision; barely a majority, actually.

The next day I was installed, bed and all, inside a ceremonial circle in the temple. For the next four days, until the climactic ritual on the solstice, I was at the mercy of the mojo. The women massaged my belly and body till I was gooey jello. For food they fed me nothing but cranberries, pomegranates, plums, and eggplants. For drink I was forced to rely entirely on an emetic tea composed of pennyroyal, blue cohosh, tansy, and false unicorn root. Songs were sung over me, chants chanted. Talismans that looked to have been forged when the world was young were pressed against my belly, and the name of Persephone was invoked so many times I grew to feel as if I were made out of it. I still wasn't ready to rescind my order to my reproductive system. I mean I was in awe of the rigamarole that had been summoned to oppose my secret pact. And part of me felt like, what the hell, if it's really that important to you, I'll give you your damn menstrual blood already. But another part of me wanted to test my power. Was curious about who would win the battle. Longed to know who, when it came down to it, really controlled my destiny.

And so I stuck to my guns. Even as the horde of magicians hovered around me, drumming their fervent intention into me with breathtaking ferocity, I was silently instructing my body to hold its course.

The spectacle culminated in the early evening of the winter solstice. While the teenage daughters of the Pomegranate Grail's fully initiated members took care of the young children, I was surrounded by ninety women from age twenty-five to eighty-six, each of whom was redolent with musky sulfur and dressed in a red silk gown. Their collected faces would have been shockingly tonic to behold even in a profane setting; each was the most poignantly weathered, soulfully crafted face I'd ever seen. Even the familiar visages in the crowd were streaming forth a flood of fresh revelations about the experiences that had gone into creating them. I was awash in what sometimes felt like a cacophony and other times an intricately coordinated beehive of telepathic impressions.

"May she know the power of those who bleed but do not die." For a long time, that mantra cycled continuously, often in an almost inaudible murmur, periodically in a singing shout. All the while the women spun around me in the spiral dance, each rotating slowly while also flowing as a group in a choreography designed to mimic the ovum in its journey from ovary to fallopian tube to womb to expulsion.

At one point, the assembled magicians' purr rose to a full-throated singing sound, and harmonies began to sprout into the blend. I felt the hairs standing up on the back of my neck and arms, and a zigzag chill whirled from the right side of the front of my neck all the way down to a spot below and to the right of my navel. Then, out of the shimmering cries, I found Vimala's husky alto risking a dissonant harmony a fourth above the root of the chord. In the next moment, I felt a tiny explosion in that place inside my belly where the chill had landed. I gasped. I felt a nauseatingly sweet rupture of pleasure, and yet in the next moment it was eclipsed by waves of a strange longing radiating out from the tiny explosion. There was no doubt about what this was. I knew that for the first time in my life I had ovulated.

Thirteen days later, I was sitting in my classroom with Vimala and Cecily on the first morning of school after the holiday break. At about 10:30, as we discussed the tragic bifurcation of science and magic four hundred years ago, I felt another burst. This time I was prepared. The sanctified linen pad was in place to collect my first offering of blood.

I interrupted Cecily in mid-sentence and told her and Vimala the news. They shrieked with joy and hugged me as if I had just been born. School was dismissed for the day. That night my guardians gathered around me in a ritual of celebration. At age sixteen years and almost eight months, I finally had my menarche.