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Menopause is Punk

the beautiful eggsWomen make eggs from puberty until middle age, like hens, except our expelled eggs don’t make for good eating.  For years we are in the human-production zone.  Sex has a biological purpose whether we let it express itself or not.

My human-production facilities are packing it in, a moment I have been waiting for for years and I want to CELEBRATE!

So the first thing I wanted to do was announce the news that I’m perimenopausal through the gramophone of social media so that everyone would know.  I’m not embarrassed to discuss life stages.  Why should I be?  People announce their pregnancies constantly expecting everyone to be EXCITED and JOYFUL and CONGRATULATORY because it’s such a great moment (if it’s a moment you actually want in your life.)  Everyone is so happy for you (unless they are crusty old baby-hating Angelinas*).  Everyone cuts ribbons and pastes puffy hearts to your name.  I can count the number of times I’ve heard people announce that they are beginning to go through menopause.

Big fat fucking ZERO times.

Why?  Are women embarrassed to tell others that their womb is shutting its doors to make room for other possibilities in their lives?  Do they think it’s too private an event?  As though announcing that you had sexual intercourse that resulted in the creation of a fetus in your womb isn’t super private?  I guess if you can’t hide your pregnant state you may as well announce it to everyone but since menopause doesn’t give itself away we should be silent when it comes?

A friend of mine pointed out that many women don’t make their menopausal state public because they’re up against agism when seeking employment.  She makes a good point that deserves validation.  I can respect a woman protecting her ovarian status if it might hurt her opportunities.  There are few enough of those for us as it is.

But I say that being at this stage of life makes us more valuable assets to practically everyone and to hide ourselves under a shimmering ambiguity of age is a crime.

I say FUCK THAT STUPID SHIT.

Menopause is PUNK

I want to throw a menopause party.

I guess there is this idea that when a woman goes through menopause she loses an essential part of her womanly power – the power to make babies.  I find this perplexing.  My power isn’t really anchored in my ability to make babies.  I made one single baby and I’m happy that I did because I love him best of all people but he is not the thing that defines who I am.  He is an important part of my life but isn’t what makes me purposeful, full, or complete.

I make myself complete.  Period.

Period.  Haha!

I have resented and hated having periods since the very first one on my 14th birthday discovered by some girl in the Junior High locker room while I was changing into my gym clothes and later amplified by my parents who may as well have announced the arrival of my menses on the local Ashland radio station.

I have referred to my “MEN – STRU – A – TION” as being “on the rag” for as long as I can remember and someone was recently shocked when I used that expression.  What?

Oh.  I’m SORRY I don’t like leaking blood.  Rags is what women have used to soak up the flow for a couple thousand years until we got industrial.  Most mammals don’t drip blood during their reproductive cycles anyway.  How have humans not evolved to do this thing better?

I have been looking forward to the end of my cycles for exactly 29 years, 5 months, and 28 minutes.

Menopause is PUNK

I’m only at the very beginning of it all.  When I was 15 I planned to kill myself.  The thought of turning 30 seemed mystical and improbable because I mapped my death as carefully as a cartographer measures mountains and valleys.  I wasn’t even going to see the windy side of 20.  I think suicidal ideation can be a gift.  It teaches you things if you live through it.  If you live through it again and again.  It teaches you the impossible.  It teaches you the power of hanging on.  It teaches you detachment from outcome when the chips are melting into one heap of toxic plastic in the devil’s barbeque.  Every day you don’t kill yourself has the potential to be a blessing.

To have been a suicidal 15 year old and become a 43 year old peri-menopausal woman is something to celebrate.  To have experienced suicidal ideation at the age of 41 and 42 and once again manage to wait out the darkness long enough to still be alive is something to celebrate.  Having to grapple periodically with suicidal fixation gives me a detachment from living that is sometimes uncomfortable but has the side effect of giving me an appreciation for very small details.  I don’t live for large concepts, I live for the sound of mourning doves on warm mornings.

Once you’ve skirted suicide for several rounds it’s hard to believe menopause has real teeth.

I’m the one with the real teeth.

Young girls have nothing on me.

Menopause is PUNK!

*This Angelina loves babies as long as they aren’t hers and though she understands you continue to be excited every single time you give birth, she just can’t get worked up over any baby but your first because she is pretty  much PURE EVIL.

*MFGDFWFacedGITandGFYYSOaB*

window full of meat

Ahh – meat.

*Mother Fucking God Dammed Whore-Faced Git and Go Fuck Yourself You Son of a Bitch*

Apparently I am the Universe’s bitch.  And I just found out it’s into bondage.

This sums up Monday through Thursday adequately.

The last breath that threatened to blow my house down was finding out that Bill Hader is leaving Saturday Night Live.  I am devastated.  Heartbroken.  Desolate.  Unbeknownst to him, we are Cuckoo-eyed twins.  I love his teeth.  I love his comedic genius.

Never-the-less: It’s all going to be okay. Maybe not today. Maybe not next week, but eventually and for a few days. And then it will all fall apart again. Life ebbs and flows. The light never stops giving balance to the dark. So it’s going to be okay again for a while when it stops sucking. Word.

While Tuesday was a hatchet-faced whore, Wednesday (traditionally an adversary of mine) has somehow sprouted wings and possibly saved Thursday and Friday from complete annihilation.  The bad persists in that Philip was home for a third day in a row – and he’s a man who is rarely stopped by sickness (turns out to be Labyrinthitis) and Max came home from school with a horrid sore throat.  I’m already wicked tired so I was ready to consign Wednesday to a napalm cocktail when it suddenly redeemed itself kind of late in the day.

First – I went to get popsickles for Max to soothe this throat and because I could and because I needed to do something unplanned and fun I rode my scooter through the warm air to the Asian market where I spent a good hour locating a mere 4 items on a list of things a couple of friends might enjoy receiving in the mail.  I find it exciting and simultaneously calming to shop in Asian markets even though there’s so little I can buy for myself in them (so much fish and meat) but the jars and boxes and packages of dried things entice and fascinate and give great pleasure.

Second – when I came home Max came downstairs in all his painful misery to watch something on “television”.  He could have done that upstairs so I knew he wanted to be near his parents.  We watched a couple of episodes of Bob’s burgers and then I suggested we watch the first episode of Arrested Development because it’s been my quiet plot to get him to watch it for a while now knowing that it’s exactly the kind of humor he would enjoy.  He agreed.  I was surprised and pleased.  We started watching and immediately he was sucked into it as I predicted he would be.

Third – in the middle of watching the first episode of Arrested Development Max said he was hungry and asked if he could have a veggie burger with lettuce on a hamburger bun.  People – I have been making many batches of whole wheat hamburger buns in the last month but I had none on hand tonight.  I offered him egg toast or sugar toast but he drooped in that disappointed way that kills me when his disappointment is because I don’t have the makings for something he wants to eat that I would consider a major triumph.  He wanted a goddamned veggie burger and I was unprepared.  Because that’s how it happens all the time.  I asked if I should go out and acquire buns for his veggie burger and he lit up.  Lit up – for a fucking veggie burger.  He wanted it with LETTUCE.  No lie.  So I went to acquire some buns.

The only kind of buns available of an acceptable uniformity and lack of messy seeds or bran on the tops are pure white hamburger buns.  White and nutritionless shite.  He loves whole wheat but he loves uniformity and wrinkle-less bun tops more.  If this is the vehicle available to deliver to him some lettuce and mushrooms and grains – I know my place in the universe.  I’m going to get on my damn Vespa and cruise off to the store because I’m its bitch and it likes to punish me.

Whatevs.

There are many ways my efforts could have been rewarded.  With complete failure – like the kid requested the veggie burger but once in front of him he changes his mind.  The bun is wrinkled.  There is some speck of weirdness on the food.  Or he could eat it and enjoy it.

Tonight he ate 3/4 of a veggie burger on a white bun with ketchup and mustard and two pieces of romaine lettuce.

And he loves Arrested Development.

I have stopped playing nice with the school, incidentally.  I have a true and deep respect for public education and for teachers especially but it is not serving my child in any way right now and it is, in fact, detracting from his learning.  I have opted for more plain speaking and bald honesty in dealing with his school because being careful and politic has served me not at all.  So I’ve become the desperate pain-in-the-ass parent I never wanted to become but I brought Max into this world and that makes him a huge priority and being liked by others is never going to take precedence over meeting my child’s needs.

So fuck it all to hell.

I feel like a soldier a lot of the time.

I’m soul-tired.  But it’s okay.

My triumphs are very small.  I take them with gratitude.  My son ate some lettuce today.  He became a fan of Arrested Development.  If the apocalypse arrives tonight I can handle it.

*********

And here it is Friday – FINALLY – and it feels like fucking Sunday.  I wanted to icepick Monday.  By Wednesday I wanted to Napalm this week.  By today it’s become clear that the only way to deal with it is to nuke* the fucking stuffing out of it.  Too many things I’m not at liberty to discuss at the moment – but believe me – if I could I’d spill the whole fucking show for you.

Max has been home sick for 3 days this week.  Philip has been home the whole week.  I’m not awesome is all I have to say.  Except for the part where somehow I managed to make three veggie burgers for Max that he ate and loved.  Last night he wanted to know if he wouldn’t like some vinegar on his next veggie burger so I gave him a little taste of red wine vinegar and balsamic.  He liked the balsamic.  Today he wanted me to drizzle some balsamic on his caramelized onions…

————- let that sink in – picture that shit ————-

Dude liked it.  Except for the part of the bun where I accidentally dripped the balsamic on the bun in a dark splotch.  Kid doesn’t eat dark blemishes on his hamburger buns.  But he just ate a gourmet veggie burger today.  My extreme picky eater.  I know the score – this is going to devolve again into 2 weeks of nothing  but round crackers.  But this – this thing that’s happening – this is a glimpse into a future I have been believing in forever.  Max has the makings of a connoisseur of the things he likes and if only I can stretch that palate he could become a true gourmand in his adulthood.  If only I can maintain the patience not to get angry when the only thing he’ll eat for days is cheese puffs and sugar toast.

I have been developing a relationship with that patience for years.

All day I worked on organizing my kitchen and it feels great.  And then I did all my filing.  And though the things that were bad this week have not vaporized as I demanded them to – and have the potential to be devastating in the near future – I am seeing the good in the disaster.

Like when your skin doesn’t melt in an atomic blast and you’re all “Oh yay!  I might starve to death but at least I’ll starve to death in my actual skin!”.

I will close the week day war with this gem:

Max made up a song he thought was hilarious featuring men putting their wieners in pies. I asked him how he knew about the movie “American Pie” at which his eyes bugged out of his head “There’s an actual movie where someone puts their wiener in a pie?!?!” Proof that “American Pie” was written by a 12 year old.

 

*Someone else pointed out that napalming had become inadequate and suggested nuking and I couldn’t agree more.

What if everyone wore shiny tight dance pants?

dance pants

I remember taking ballet when I was a kid.  It took one class to know that I was not built to be a ballerina.  I remember how excited I was when I got to take tap dance classes during sports camp and how devastated I was when my mom got me some patent leather tap shoes from the good will that had obviously previously belonged to a dowdy lady in the previous decade (the early 70’s) and they also didn’t fit my feet.

That just reminded me of the pair of 1960’s red sparkly stiletto heels I once owned and wore out to a party in San Francisco when I was 17 years old.  I also wore this length of black chiffon rose covered fabric as a skirt.  I managed to come home without the shoes or the “skirt”.  To this day I have no idea how that could have happened.  If you think that left me in my underwear then you don’t know me at all.  I never wear skirts with just underwear underneath.  There would have been tights and a slip too – probably a vintage slip from the 40’s.  It takes a lot to expose this girl’s girly bits.  I must have been shoeless, however, and I think it’s funny that 26 years later I still regret having lost both those things.  The shoes were as superbly uncomfortable as they were superbly stylish and that rose fabric was going to become something gorgeous.

When I saw the dance shop’s display of shiny tight dance pants I had a sudden image of every single person in the world wearing them at the same time.  Wouldn’t that be the most surreal and awesome thing ever?!  Men and all!  EVERYONE in tight shiny dance pants!  Everything else would be forgotten for a few minutes while we all stared at each other in horror and yet also humor, because – SHINY TIGHT DANCE PANTS ON EVERYONE!

All the world’s a stage, they say.  We should endeavor to make it a great show.

The Importance of All Things

tight pink buds

If I’m going to rate the importance of all things, then I must rate empathy above all else.  The ability to step into another’s shoes with compassion and a willingness to comprehend and sympathize is worth gold, worth food, worth the air the effort takes.  If I’m going to rate the importance of all things, then I must put the insects before the mammals, the wild before the tame, the small before the large, the adaptable before the fixed.  I know that in the hierarchy of all things I am nothing.  This is not a subject of pain to me but one of fact, something to know and not take personally.  I am nothing when held up to everything.  This is not the same as being something to those who love me – because that is precious and real but totally different.  If I am to rate the importance of all things, then I must rate the hierarchy of nature above my wishful thinking.