Monday, February 27, 2012

The Indignities Continue

Down in the hormonal hellhole, hopefully just visiting, not planning to stay. I want to devour the world's donuts, chocolate, cheese, olives and wine, pasta, hamburgers, salmon and croissants. I grit my teeth through each day. I want to want to exercise, but I do not. So I don't. My neck is tight. My shoulders hurt. My jaw feels like a vise. Yoga, hot baths, physical therapy--yeah, I should, shouldn't I? But I don't want to. My thighs are stippled with new blossoms of fat cells, butter- and sugar-filled globules crowding each other under my skin like bunched grapes. I see them and I think "I should cut back," but I don't. Lucky I don't smoke. Menopause: the ultimate unfairness. Wasn't it bad enough that you had to bleed once a month for forty years? That if you missed one period you panicked? That when for two years, you finally wanted to conceive you didn't? Or was it couldn't? And now that you can finally get off that merry-go-round, which you 100% regard with great relief, it's like you're seasick. Moody, nauseous, sleep-disturbed, howling with hunger for those things you know are not good for you, angry that all the control and reason you used to have at your pinpoint disposal has flown out the window. And you can look forward to at least a year of this, when a month or two is more than you can imagine surviving.
On top of this, you are a lucky rich woman who has nothing to complain about. Everyone, but everyone, has more and better reasons to complain. Your elders crumble, your children strive and pine, suffer through first love or heartache, and you, you're sitting pretty in the place you love to be, surrounded by love and having gotten all the best things in life--a good family, a good man, a good son, all good from here on in, and then this chemical--this hormone--sandbags you from behind. Whap!
The new you, an angry, complaining, inventive whiner who won't shut up, or eat less. Nor can you really believe that it matters all that immensely what your thighs look like, because--who's looking? Anybody worried about 55-year-old thighs has got to be the shallowest person on earth. And you, you may be menopausal, but you're not shallow. Not yet.

2 comments:

  1. Ah, white-girl problems, a.k.a. First World problems. As I used to want to say to Ann Landers, just because you're not a refugee dying in a ditch doesn't mean you're not in pain. Hang in there and OWN the pain.
    (Is that advice? It's not meant to be advice. Just empathy.)

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    1. Thanks for the empathy.
      Blogging as owning all I can do at this juncture.

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