Category: Memoir

Menopause mentors–here’s an idea worth pursuing.  When we hit puberty we turn to our friends for information; we do not want to talk to our mothers, celebrate, or otherwise acknowledge the horror we experience.  Our mothers wanted to talk to us then, and in fact tormented us with stories of poorly inserted tampons and bulging pads and mysterious belts, they wanted us to know because no one ever told them.

But what about now?  Now that once again my body is turning on me? Where is dear old mom with her post-menses wisdom? Isn’t there some sort of comforting ritual for us now? Something on par with that trip to the drugstore for a box of pads and a bottle of Midol?  I try to seek solace in my friends, but none of them really know any more about these changes than I do,  and what we do know about The Change isn’t something we want to discuss with friends.

I don’t know about you all, but when I was a teenager my friends and I all coded our sexual adventures–it was a system loosely based on the old baseball theme–first base and so on, but we found our adventures went beyond the infield and that there was a whole world between first base and home run. So we improvised on a theme.  I’m thinking we need to repurpose the old metaphor for this next phase, or maybe we just need those who know to give it to us straight.

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Just last week, as some of you might know, I completely fell apart in a staff meeting, much to my mortification.  I’m on shaky ground at work anyway, but this, uhm, episode really did not reflect well on me at all.  Those crazy Catholics–the ones with and for whom I work– kindly cut me huge slack for my low low low protestant church upbringing, and they even tolerate my being a lesbian.  But now my rosary is a decade short of a century, and  just a touch of the menopause may find me out of communion, shall we say.

Why the reticence, Mother (and by Mother, I mean all our mothers, not mine, specifically)? Why the sudden and feigned indifference toward your daughters’ biological clocks?  Must we suffer alone and without your guiding hand?  I take back every less-than-appreciative remark I made about your giant Kotex pads and utter ineptness with tampons.  Just tell me what to expect and how to deal with this, this horrible affliction.  Alas, my sneaking suspicion is that you still don’t have the first clue about menopause–when it begins, what the symptoms are, when, or if, it ever ends.  Oh sure, there are a few rumors and some menopause-ish standards:  hot flashes, erratic monthly visits from Aunt Flo, monstrous mood swings.  But there’s more.  Far more.

Unfortunately, we (and by we, I mean all of humankind) don’t know squat about this death of our reproductive system.  And that’s what it is–the end of our, that is women’s, ability to bear children.  Which by my experiences so far, is meant to be the end of our natural lives.

We’ve not yet evolved enough to be able to live with our own old damn selves.  Our minds still believe we are young and vibrant, lithe and sexy, clever and witty . . . okay, some of us may still be clever and witty, but none of us are young or lithe, and sexy is now an extraordinarily subjective state.

Oh, I can hear you all clucking in the background–this is going to set feminism back a few years.  What feminism?  Have we looked around lately, and anyway, that’s not my point.  My point is that no one wants to talk about menopause, not really.  Sure, we are all taking better care of our bodies, eating right, exercising, meditating, playing Bunco with our girlfriends, but it’s not doing a damn thing to stop our bodies from their eventual rejection of all things procreative.  And I’m not even exaggerating–I’ve actually heard rumors of vaginal atrophy.  No wonder no one wants to talk about it!  What special brand of hell is this?  Men get Viagra and Cialis, and we get stuck with vaginal atrophy?  How is that even right?

Vaginal atrophy, pubic balding, month long-hemorrhaging.   Our mothers don’t or didn’t want to tell us about menopause because they can’t or couldn’t actually believe that it never really ended. They did not want us to know what they looked like under their matronly polyester pants and appliqued sweatshirts.  It was bad enough that they had to watch their once buoyant breasts droop to their knees, let alone tell someone else about it.  That’s not a legacy anyone wants, but it makes perfect sense for them to keep quiet about it 

Many of our mothers were fortunate enough to unravel, physically and emotionally, in the comforts of their own homes.  Most women my age can’t stay home for this unraveling, with only the children as our witnesses (not to mention scarred for life).  We must, in our menopausal states (both states, pre- and full on), pull ourselves together and go to work in a world where at least half of our coworkers do believe we have lost our minds. We sell ourselves so we can afford all of this whole and local, sustainable food that will keep us healthy, if not lithe and young, and the gym memberships that will keep us toned (under the sagging skin) and to make arrangements for our old age because you can bet our kids are not going to be able to take care of us (I could give you a million reasons why not, but I am trying to be positive).

How does any woman work with these mood swings? The bloating? After sweating and not sleeping the night away? What can we do about sudden-onset madness? Just how many pads per hour can one woman go through? And aren’t you kind of sad to see your pubic mons as less of a well-forested mountain and more like a vast and wind-swept, treeless desert?

Clearly it can be done–women are not sissies. A few survivors seem to make it through the madness and into the golden years to thrive.   So, start talking, dammit.  What does it take? We can even dust off the old baseball metaphors if it will make you more comfortable.  I need to know while I still have a job.

I need a menopause mentor.

Sometimes life just whizzes along so fast that there is not time to stop and look around and think, let alone write about what I think. Such have been the last two weeks for me. So, I’ve not paid too much attention to the news about the iPad (aka the Tampod), that new “intimate” (Apple’s word, not mine) device.

I did forward the viral MadTV “iPad has wings” video to a few folks, most of whom were not very happy to find themselves watching the video at work. I must have had a momentary lapse in judgment or just figured that most network admins and IT managers have better things to do than monitor every employee’s computer activity. I know I certainly do. Sure, I’ve got logs and logs of every user’s Internet activity but not enough hard drive space available to even begin opening those reports. And yes, I can remote into any computer or check any email in the organization . . . but do I want to? My email is boring enough. I certainly don’t want to read another 300 inboxes (that’s a hell of a lot of email folks).

Not that I haven’t come across a few flagrant violations of computer use, but it’s not because I went looking for it. The violations came to me, completely unbidden (and certainly unwanted).

The first time, our antivirus software notified me of a virus on a staff member’s laptop, not a particularly unusual occurrence. The irony was this: had the staff member not taken such pains to cover up her tracks (i.e. locking/encrypting the illicit photos and movies), I would most likely never even noticed anything amiss, but those locked/encrypted files would not defrag (something I did routinely on laptops in for any service), and the defrag program let me know: Error defragging files listed below, the screen read: c:\documents and settings\username\my documents\my downloaded files\naked_teen_rodeoQeens.mp4. I couldn’t just let it go. I had to follow up. Someone lost their job.

The second time, I was testing some reports on our firewall. I had just got the report server up and running and was anxiously awaiting the full-color charts and graphs. The software presented me with a list of websites visited by IP address in the local domain (that is, I learned quickly which computers at work had been where on the Internet. One computer just happened to have recently been to http://www.amazingsexualcontraptions.com (not the actual website, but close). And wait, this one too: http://www.mommystalker.us (not the real name, but again, a good approximation). How could I possibly ignore this? Just a few clicks of the mouse stood between me and the idiot who thought it was a good idea to browse such sites at work. Idiot discovered, idiot fired. That wasn’t my plan.

People don’t seem to really understand that computers are only as good as their users. Computers do exactly as they are told, and that’s why dumb things happen on the Interwebs or via email, on the job and in the home. We have a communication problem. Computers like precise, definitive instructions. Most users view computers as the modern day Jesus: one miracle after another, directed by some mysterious force beyond comprehension. The aforementioned files were locked and couldn’t be scanned (as directed) and were thus pointed out as unscannable and locked. Naughty files.

Somebody else in our organization visited the same two websites at the same time each morning and the computer simply reported that information. Nothing is secret, nothing is sacred. Forget big brother, this is little brother tattling all our secrets, telling mommy and daddy where we’ve been and what we were doing there.

This past week, some lady got busted for cutting 30 trees (in addition to the two she actually had a permit for) by Google Earth cameras. We all know someone who has gotten a speeding or red light running ticket thanks to cameras. Just tonight I read about a principal (now unemployed) in AZ who mistakenly sent home to parents a sarcastic and derogatory email that should not have ever been put into binary. Shared at the water cooler, maybe, written on a legal pad, possibly, but never entered into a device where it could be saved, shared, posted, attached, printed, or emailed.

The intimate iPad . . . one device on which we do everything: banking, schooling, shopping, reading, streaming, skypeing, sharing. My favorite local independent bookstore has a sign that says something to this effect: we do not share information about your purchases here with anyone. I take some small comfort in that (the information is stored on the computer, after all). Who is going to refuse to share my Netflix lists, my email contents, my phone records, the books I (guiltily) buy from Amazon?

It scares me a little, this new intimacy.