The earth turns. The world
goes round and round. Spring follows winter follows fall trails summer. Life is
a spinning wheel, inside a circle of stars, revolving on a hula-hoop of
hormonal booger dirt.
Sorry. It’s day thirteen.
Bad. Angry. Phrase. Day.
I know I don’t write about
being menopausal much and that a few readers might find this surprising, but
honestly there are some subjects that even I don’t find funny: bubonic plague, Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle, finger nails, and menopause.
Then I realized that my
“change of life” could be documented on a merry-go-round pie chart of hormonal
predictability, and while I haven’t felt this out of control since I was a
hysterical thirteen-year old, it is all kind of silly in a tragic, life cycle
kind of way. I’m just not sure that it’s funny. Then again, fifty percent of
the time I’m not sure that I don’t have the Ebola virus, one hundred percent of
time, which is a not and a don’t and that equals a double negative. Get it?
Here are the facts on my
monthly, revolving, day-by-day “change of life” spin cycle.
Days 1 through 3: For
three days a month, I feel as if I’m breathing liquid cement, and it’s hard to
drag my lungs around, also my arms, legs, and hair. I’m really tired.
The Three Days After
That (Days 4, 5, 6) or the Mobster Mentality Days: I feel like I want to
encase people in cement and throw them into a deep ditch full of swampy water.
I begin to make a list of likely candidates. By day six, I find that I have run
out of time and homicidal desire.
Day 7: There’s a spring in my step, a glow to my skin, and no bloating. I want
to live long enough to be interviewed by someone famous.
Days 8 through 11: I congratulate myself on not being a fifty-three year old pregnant
person.
Day 12: My skin dries up. My hair thins. Wrinkles grow more
pronounced. I get pimples. What the fudge
sickle?
A Vague Number of Days
After That, Ranging From A Single Day to Most Days: Wandering around my
home, I shuffle about ranting about the deplorable state of everything from the
burning in my finger bones to the potential collapse of the Greek drachma. Or
as my granddaughter asked, “Why you talk yourself all time, YaYa?” “Because, dear,” I tell her. “I’m the
only one who’ll listen to me anymore. Besides, I’ve become the smartest person
I know. Let’s get ice cream.”
Day (I lost track):
Be afraid. Be very afraid.
There’s a bright light but I don’t go near it. I feel too mean. The light is
all shimmery and shivery. The light is quite possibly afraid of me.
Day 28: On my knees, I raise my clenched knobby knuckles to the sky and shout,
“As God is my witness, this sucks.”
Rinse and Repeat.
I know in my heart that I’m
not supposed to be at the mercy of my body chemicals. I. Know. That.
In addition, highly
educated tenured college professors have informed me that there is no real
difference between the sexes. That male and female exist only in our societal
heads. That we are simply the result of our “conditioning” or is it conditioner?
When I hear troubling
theories like that, I look down at my too-tender-to-touch mammary glands, the
ones that dangle off the front of my unisex chest on day thirty of my “change
of life” pie chart, and I whisper, “Who told you that you were girl boobs?”
Linda (Dizzy Dame)
Zern
