Is there possibly a more inelegant phrase than ‘she’s on the rag?’

Maybe. I’ll search for it later.

My mother told me that when she was a teenager growing up in a small town during the Depression, she and her sister actually used rags that were washed and bleached and hung out on the clothesline to dry, each rag hand-fed through a wringer washer. Nothing came easy then.  If you were going to be on the rag, you better learn to wash them. Harsh business.

Being on the rag is not a situation for me anymore. One of the many benefits of getting older is being able to wear white pants anytime, not having to rummage through the drawer for a Tampax like I was looking for the last remaining cigarette on earth, the one that would save me from nicotine withdrawal and wanting to kill all my children…