Day 87, August 17

I refuse to think of them as chin hair. I think of them as stray eyebrows.
~ Janette Barber~

Well, we've returned to that nasty subject of unwanted facial hair.  I'd be more patient with these hairs if I could find them when I go to pluck them.   Aging eyes and an unsteady hand, however, make that nearly impossible.  So I went another route.  I decided to cream them in to submission.

This sounds good, in theory.  Smooth on some depilatory cream and watch the hairs fall off.  Another problem arose, though:  depilatories stink to high heaven. 

So there I was:  faced with three choices:  pluck, depilatorize, or ignore.

Pragmatist that I am, I chose the last.  I just make certain to hang out with friends whose eyesight is worse than mine.

Day 86, August 16

"Friends are angels who lift us to our feet when our wings have trouble remembering how to fly.' In a pinch I use my broom. "

If you are familiar with my other blog, you know that friendship is an important theme to me.  Well, a  dear friend sent this quote to me.  I love it!  I love the punch at the end, that unexpected kick of humor.

Now, to the subject of brooms, I am not opposed to people seeing me riding around on a broomstick.  Nor am I particularly opposed to them seeing me as a witch.  (Believe me, I've been called worse.  Much worse.)  Witches have power.  There are good witches and bad witches.  I like to think of myself as a good witch, but I'm open to change.

If I can be a bad witch to those who deserve some witchly retribution in their lives, I'm happy, even eager, to serve.  In the meantime, I've got to get back to my broom.  My cat and my husband have made a mess on the kitchen floor.

Day 85, August 15

One of the problems menopausal women face is that of failing eyesight.  At the same time, we are dealing with high-maintenance to retain even a fraction of our once good looks.  This means more creams, more cleansers, more foundation, more eye makeup, more blush.  In a word, more.

On one rushed morning, as I was preparing to go to physical therapy, I penciled in eyebrows (my own brows have grown distressingly thin).  I gave myself one last look in the mirror, decided I was good to go, and took off.  When I arrived at the rehab center, my therapist (a beautiful young woman) looked at me and said, "Jane, why do you have green eyebrows?"

"I didn't know I did."

She nodded and patted my shoulder.  Surrepitiiously, I spit on my hand and tried to wipe away the green eyebrows and ruefully, if silently, acknowledged what had happened.  I had mistaken a green eye shadow pencil for my eyebrow pencil.   My aging eyesight had failed to distinguish the difference, even when I checked myself in the mirror.

Satisfied that I'd removed the offending green brows, I went from physical therapy to a doctor's appointment for a check-up.  The doctor looked at me and said, "How did you get the bruise under your eye?"

In my attempt to wipe away the green eyebrows, I had apparently smeared the eye shadow under my eye to give me a bruised appearance.

"I walked in to a door," I told him, lying through my teeth.

He patted my shoulder.  I get a lot of that lately.

Day 84, August 14

Have you ever paid attention to all the cermonies and celebrations of life  that go on around us?  There are birthdays, baptisms, bar mitzvahs, graduations, marriages, anniversaries, and a host of others.  Yet our culture has no event to celebrate the change of life.  Even Hallmark, which produces cards for nearly every occasion, including that of divorce, fails to cash in on this opportunity.

I can conjure up several greeting card ideas to mark the passage in to menopause:

Front of the card:  Welcome to Menopause.  You're used up, dried up, and washed up.

Inside:  Don't worry.  Be happy.

And another:

Front of the card:  What do you do when good sex goes bad?

Inside: Increase your chocolate intake.

Maybe I'll take up  a career in writing greeting card verse.

Day 83, August 13

If there's one thing that menopausal women are on intimate terms with, it's guilt.  We wear it.  We eat it.  Indeed, we feed on it.  This doubles, or triples, if you are an MMW (Menopausal Mormon Woman). 

I can hear you Young Mormon Women (YMWs) now, crying, "Hey, we have guilt, too."

I know.  I feel your pain.  The difference is MMWs have thirty plus additional years of guilt on you.  What do we feel guilty about?

As a start:

Our children, now grown, have come back to us, complaining, "You did that TO me."  "You didn't do that FOR me."  "You spent more on HIM than you did on ME."  And they're right.

Our husbands complain, "You've let yourself go.  You're no longer the young, beautiful woman I married."  They're right.

If our parents are still alive, they tell us that we haven't done enough for them.  Right, again.

And then there's the church:

Have you done your missionary work?  (No.)
Have you done your genealogy work? (No.)
Have you done your visiting teaching? (Well, sort of.)
Have you participated in every service project (which number approximately 5 a week)? (No.)
Have you pulled weeds at the stake farm?
Have you cleaned the chapel this week? (No.)
Have you put 200% into your church calling? (No.)
Have you cheered up the sad and made someone feel glad? (No.)

Well, you get the idea.

Yes, guilt is our constant companion.  We take it to bed with us at night and wake up with it in the morning.  We take it to the grocery store with us when we are tempted to buy a box of Oreos.  We take it shopping with us when we try on a pair of pants and find we can no longer get in to the size we once wore.  We take it to church where we're told "You're not doing enough.  You're not good enough.  You will never be good enough." 

We just take it.

Day 82, August 12

Fortune is not for the faint-hearted.--Sophocles

I was a faint-hearted young wife and mother.  I deferrerd--to everybody.  Not a contentious thing escaped my lips.  These may be good qualities, but, looking back, I realize I did myself a disservice by always being willing to give in.  And give up.

These days, I'm more of a tiger than a pussy cat.  (Though I adore my cat.)  I've written in earlier posts how I channel my mama wolverine when someone threatens my family.  In fact, that same wolverine made an appearance or two in my younger days, but never in defense of myself.

I let people walk all over me.  And I took it.  Again and again.  I allowed others to see me as weak and wimpy and wussy.  (Don't you love a good alliteration?)

I still occasionally struggle to stand up for myself, but menopause (with its accompanying lack of estrogen) has given me the gumption to stand up and give back as good as I get.   Yes, I'm a menopausal mama with her own set of claws and fangs.

Day 81, August 11

By now you know that I am fascinated by all things strange and downright weird.  Take my fascination with the woman with the world's largest breasts.  Who could predict that such a topic would intrigue me so much?

And then there's my interest iin the mating habits of insects.  Do you know that in the copulation of some insects that the female dispatches (kills) the male after he has serviced her?  Depending on the state of my marriage (and my mind), this does not seem an all together bad idea.

I didn't used to be so intrigued with these kinds of subjects.  Before menopause, I could converse intelligently on a number of subjects; indeed, I was considered to be not too shabby in the brains department.  When menopause hit, my interest in normal topics took a nosedive and I started collecting these tidbits of oddities.

Ah, well.   It makes for fascinating dinner conversation.