I’m at the age where it feels natural to take stock of my life and sort out the decisions and people I likely wouldn’t do over again if I had the chance. I also feel like it’s time to forgive myself for the bonkers way I conducted myself once upon a time or two.
It’s appropriate to start with how I treated women of a certain age when I was between 18 and 24 years old. In other words, I’m sorry for mentally rolling my eyes at the menopausal mavens who found it necessary to take college classes at Chico State and, more importantly, ask questions. Ya, I was that little snot. In they’d waddle, always sitting in the middle of the room, I guess so everyone could hear them when they digress while asking what could have been a short question.
I never said anything to them. I didn’t actually roll my eyes. I wasn’t that kind of little snot. But I mentally wrung their jiggly necks every single time. So, I’m sorry. Yes, it took me this long to get my apology locked and loaded, likely because I couldn’t relate to it until recently. Well, maybe not the waddle, but definitely the tendency to use more than the required number of words and ideas to make my original, intended point.
I also tend to lose my train of thought, and when I realize it, instead of stopping and remaining silent until the words can sort themselves out and get back in the ol’ word chute, I keep yabbering. At some point, I just give up and let my voice trail off; then, I chuckle softly until no more sound comes out of my mouth. I also notice people who are related to me saying “Oh my god” or “Oh jeez” under their breath, and people not related to me just smiling and waiting it out. Bless those people. My people, not so much.
In my opinion, it really is the weirdest age of all of the ages I’ve endured as a human (so far). Weirder than the onset of puberty, weirder than the fucked up teenage years, weirder than the childbearing years (an absolute science fiction-fantasy mash-up), weirder than the child-raising years (see “childbearing years” description, but add “fairytale-horror”), and far weirder than the decade before my fifties: the fabulous forties. Man, those were the days. Kids were getting themselves out of the house by themselves, going to their jobbies a couple of nights a week or on the weekends, eating anything I cooked because they were hungry around the clock, not just at bedtime; I was exercising regularly, day drinking if I felt like it, and my synapses were firing on all fucking cylinders. Life was good.
And then, I ended up here. I’m approximately the same age as that broad in my Feminist Literature class, the one who squished up her little face and giggled when the professor assigned a critical analysis of Eva Sedgwick’s essay, “Jane Austen and the Masturbating Girl.” And while I am that age now, I’m not that broad. I’m other types of broad, but I’m not that broad.
So, while I’m not the early-1990s version of the menopause mavens I secretly poked fun at, I am, nevertheless, in the subset of women known as menopausal. Hormones are like accelerators and brake pedals that are just mis-wired. You get less of what you want and more of what you want less of, and you have no choice in the matter. Or, very little. For example, I want to say fewer words. I want the words I say to make more sense. I want more muscle tone. I want more energy. Now, I have to work very hard at all those things I used to take for granted when I was sitting in literature class smirking, thriving on a Monday morning with barely four hours of sleep in the previous 48, and able to stand up without saying, “oooofff.”
Now, I have to put a post-it note on my mirror to remind myself to do that thing I really wanted and needed to do today. Now, I head upstairs to do the laundry, and two hours later, I’m beaming with pride after having cleaned out all the laundry room cabinets. Then, I leave the room without ever actually having done any laundry. After dinner, when I think about what I am doing tomorrow and that I’ll most likely need to wear clothes, I remember the laundry; but it’s too late to start a wash because I’ll be going to bed soon if that damn sun would ever set, and I don’t want the washed clothes to sit in the machine all night.
So, if you’re reading this and you’re still in the sweet spot of life, before things go soft or completely dry up, be nice to us old broads. We were you once. And someday, you will be us.
That is a threat and a promise.
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