Day 56 Great News – I’m Not Pregnant
But it certainly explains the blueberry-sized pimple percolating unicorn-like on my forehead. It’s an evil joke that puts chin hairs and zits on the same face, but I know of many women around my age that are dealing with this. Hot flashes interspersed with menstrual cramps. Mood swings and memory lapses, (which is actually a good combination when you think about it.) Insomnia, cravings, and get-the-hell-out-of-my-way rage. PMS on crack, that’s perimenopause, except it’s less predictable and it seems to last longer.
Yay, right?
I’ve been in it for the last three or four years and, between herbal supplements and bioidentical hormone replacement cream, I’m dealing. Sometimes better than others, but I haven’t killed anyone, so that’s something.
I always told my girls that the emotional ups and downs that sometimes – but not necessarily – accompany the menstrual cycle are not a “bad” thing, but rather a tool we can use to identify something that perhaps we’re unhappy about, but that three weeks out of four, we’re pretending is just fine. My daughters have all inherited the “nice” gene, I’m afraid, so I always felt this was information they needed.
We try so hard, us nice girls, to deal, to make things good, fine, okay, great, happy, smooth, peaceful, that we sometimes roll right over those aspects of our life that aren’t quite as they should be. We don’t ask for help when we need it; we don’t say when we’re disappointed; we agree to things when we really want to argue. PMS rips off the veil, forcing us to see what’s real, instead of what’s easiest.
So, yeah, now that I seem to be in a permanent veil-lifted stage, the lessons I taught my girls are coming home to roost. I might look a little more selfish, crabby, argumentative, and a little less compliant and obliging. What I am definitely more of these days is honest. And I think that’s the real task of mid-life.
It comes circling back to that central question: what do I really want? For myself, not anyone else, just me?
Because as my primarily-mother years wane, I’m back to me, myself, a woman I need to get to know all over again.
Day 55 Monkey-Mind Chatter
Most of the usual crowd had other things to do on a sunny Saturday, so there was only eight of us in the hot room this afternoon. I’d worked in the yard, gone grocery shopping, took my daughter out, and ended up being very nearly late for class. Which wouldn’t be good, because then I’d have to make it up somewhere in a double, and I’m NOT going to do that again.
But despite my rushed start, I found myself having another strong day. That’s, like, several days this week. Whoo-hoo! And although I haven’t been doing it deliberately, it seems that as my physical abilities improve, my practice is becoming more… meditative, maybe.
Although I still want to execute a perfect Standing-Head-to-Knee one day, I wonder if quieting the monkey-mind chatter, moving inward and focusing on the breath isn’t an even more important exercise.
And at least as difficult.
Day 53 A Disturbed Minority
Well, a reader corrected me recently on my use of slang. I referred to the heft on my torso as “meat flaps” when I should have used the term “bat wings.”
Whatever. To-may-to, to-mah-to, right?
Not so much, according to the Urban Dictionary. “Meat flaps”, I’m told, might be confused with “meat curtains” or “beef curtains” or a few other terms, all of which refer to “pendulous external female genitalia.” Urban Dictionary goes on to illustrate the usage as follows: “So, I was doing this slut the other day, and her beef curtains were hanging almost to her knees.”
Am I the only one that finds this sentence incredibly offensive?
Don’t get me wrong, the definition creates a funny visual. Having put myself through college working in a nursing home, I can assure you, there’s some truth to it. And it’s not just women; time and gravity is even harsher on elderly scrotums. And, while I’m on the subject, there’s nothing like bathing a dementia patient happily sporting a full-grown erection. Or, a Parkinson’s patient with unimpaired mental facilities, weeping with humiliation in the same situation.
I got quite the education, while getting my education. There’s humor and pathos in the human condition.
But back to Urban Dictionary. Some of it is hilarious. For instance: “hangry:” so hungry you’re angry, or “Dutch oven:” when your mate traps your head under the covers after releasing a particularly vile stench, or “paper GPS:” any non-electronic format for finding directions.
These are great. Unlike the beef curtain comment.
I think what bugs me is that it illustrates a pervasive attitude toward sex, reducing what can be an act of intimacy to an impersonal exchange that’s less, and worse, than casual. There’s an anonymous brutality that disturbs me, partly because so few people see it.
“It’s a joke,” people say. “Don’t be a prude.” Okay, but the “slut” is someone’s daughter, even if she’s just a placeholder in a joke. And the guy “doing” her is a man who’s learned to treat his “dates” as service providers at best, and interchangeable objects – pieces of “meat” – at worst. And the more we accept things like this, laugh at them, the more we normalize them.
Most people with similar sensitivities to mine just avoid this kind of content, or they laugh at the visual and leave it at that. But, perhaps because of the recent, horrifying trial of the two teenagers in Victoria, sentenced as adults in the sexual torture and murder of Kimberly Proctor, it hit a nerve with me. If this is the sort of culture our young people are immersed in, no wonder we’ve got monsters like Cameron Moffatt and Kruse Wellwood among us.
And yes, I know I tend to over-think things. But I’m not apologizing. Somebody’s got to do it.