Day 27

Solo challenge. Estimated time: four hours, roughly 7 p.m. to 11 p.m. Day 27 of a 28-day cycle. Work through the waning hours of luteal phase while your four-year-old, who has also somehow entered her own small luteal phase today, escalates through a series of asks — water, different water, water not in that cup, the cup she asked for but now doesn’t want. Using only ambient lighting and whatever pre-shower dignity you have left, get through the teeth-brushing negotiation, the two-book bargain that becomes a three-book bargain, and the post-lights-out knock on the door, without snapping, crying, or Googling “is rage a PMS symptom” for the seventh time this cycle. Bonus points if you don’t eat the chocolate hidden in the cupboard behind the pasta. Expert mode: cramps already started.

The Tracker Check

Solo challenge. Estimated time: ninety seconds. Open the app. It’s day 23. You are sobbing at a commercial for a hot water heater. Determine, without external help, whether the sobbing is a real response to a sad thing, a hormonal response to a neutral thing, a hormonal response to a sad thing, or just Tuesday. Expert mode: your partner walks in during the sob and asks if you’re okay in a tone that implies he already has a theory.

4 A.M. Luteal

Solo challenge. Estimated time: one to three hours. Wake at 4 a.m. with the clear, still certainty that you are failing — at work, at parenting, at the marriage, at the body — and that all of your friends have figured out something you haven’t. Know, intellectually, that you’re on day 25, that this feeling arrives on day 25 every month, and that by day 3 you will look back on this moment with tender bewilderment. Proceed to feel it anyway, in full cinematic resolution, until sunrise. Extra challenge: don’t look at your phone. Bonus: don’t wake up your spouse, who is sleeping in the exact posture of someone who has never felt this.

Ovulation Small Talk

Solo challenge. Estimated time: one workday. It is day 14. You feel inexplicably well. Your skin has decided something. In a team meeting, a male colleague who has been neutral for six months makes an unusually sustained amount of eye contact. Work through the next seven hours pretending not to notice that people are reacting to you as if you are a slightly different person today, which you are, and which you will not be tomorrow. Expert mode: do not schedule any important conversations for day 22, when this same colleague will say something that annoys you and your face will show it.

The Phase-Aware Supplement Regimen

Solo challenge. Estimated time: four minutes, twice daily. Remember which of the eleven pills are for the follicular phase, which are for the luteal phase, which are taken with food, which are taken away from food, which are taken away from the iron one, and which you added three months ago because of an Instagram reel and have not been able to stop. Successful completion is swallowing all of them without Googling whether any of this is real.

The Wet Towel

Couples’ challenge. Estimated time: thirty minutes, escalating. Day 26. He leaves the wet towel on the bed. He also left it there on Tuesday. You mentioned it on Tuesday. Today, on day 26, the towel breaks something open. Work together to hold, at the same time, that the towel is a real issue, the towel is not the issue, the feeling is real, the feeling is hormonal, and that none of those sentences cancel out the others. Bonus: nobody checks the tracker mid-conversation and says, “Oh, it’s just that.” Automatic fail if he says, “Is it that time again?”

The Cycle

Meta challenge. Estimated time: approximately four hundred and fifty repetitions, give or take, across a lifetime. Track it. Don’t track it. Track it again. Accept that the body is not a machine that misfires but a rhythm that is trying to tell you something, that the days you feel like you’re failing are often the days before you bleed, that the days you feel like you can do anything are often the three before ovulation, and that none of this is a flaw — it is the information. Notice it, on the good months. Forget it, on the hard months. Notice it again. ♦