Hello, I feel like I can hardly stand to talk about the HUGE POLITICAL SHIFT that happened a week and a half ago. On, pleasingly, National Ice Cream Day. Our dear old Uncle Joe and his ice cream cones!

Earlier this week I got together with a relatively new friend I see only every month or so, and she said, “…Soooooo…there’s been a HUGE POLITICAL SHIFT since we last met…,” and I said “YES…”—but with some hesitation because although she and I have discussed politics enough for me to be certain she could not tolerate the president-before-this-one, we have not yet discussed politics in enough detail for me to feel entirely confident that I knew how she would feel about This Particular Political Shift—and then she said, “I was sure I would never have Hope again, but as it turns out…” and I said “I know, right: I am totally 100% not getting my hopes up again this time, but also I want MERCH!!! I want to THROW MONEY AT THIS FEELING!!,” and she said “YES ME TOO” and we looked at each other with brimming eyes. Friendship level-up.

Then we talked a bit about Last Time. Both of us got through 2016 with shock and dismay and permanent crushing/disfiguring disillusionment, but nothing medical. Both of us were then surprised to find ourselves in 2020/2021 having scary medical issues that turned out to be related to stress—even though our guy WON, but somehow…? For both of us, things started in late summer or early fall, near the 2020 election, then got worse in early January 2021 with the insurrection, and then gradually improved in the ensuing months after that. Feeling like a foolish oversharing/overreacting/TMI fool, I’d mentioned I’d had stress hives and general GI/GERD/esophageal/intestinal issues: had to stop drinking coffee, had esophageal spasms that made me think I was having a heart attack, etc. But she was nodding: it turns out she’d had GI issues as well, leading in her case to severe weight loss and many medical tests to make sure she wasn’t dying. We talked a little here about Edward and Crohn’s disease (Edward is dramatically underweight), and about the various other relatives/pets we’d had whose weight loss had been an indicator of severe illness and/or impending death, and how these things had permanently changed our societally-imposed views of “Weight loss is always wonderful and always to be desired!!” and had made us realize that weight loss can be quickly/truly precipitous and scary and deadly. You can put on weight and society will SCOLD you about your increased risk of dying—but it is nothing like the CERTAINTY of your risk of dying if you keep LOSING weight. It was a satisfying discussion.

Then it shifted to: So…what are we going to do to protect our mental health this time? Both of us have run the gamut of psychiatric medications, and neither of us have found sufficient benefit from any of the daily-dose options/combinations; both of us have found sufficient benefit from short-acting options (i.e., various tranquilizers) but have also found that doctors are reluctant to prescribe them (my doctor, for example, will prescribe me ten of the smallest tablets of l0razepam per year; I need 1.5 of those tablets to feel any effect at all, 2 tablets to reach the low end of what the psychiatrist prescribed many years ago for me to take up to three times a day). We both get some relief from the “drinking and talking with friends” option, but of course do not want to overuse it. I am not kidding when I say I am considering experimenting extensively with p0t. (The children tell me I am supposed to say “w33d.”)

I have discussed this with William, too. He’s been doing things I find concerning (too much time monitoring polls, for example, which is something I learned in 2016 not to do), and I said to him that I thought he and I should compare notes about how we were planning to protect our mental health during this election season. He agreed. The ensuing discussion involved us saying things like, “…I’ve heard meditation can be helpful,” with both of us saying “Uh huh, uh huh, yes, I guess.” I’ve found Vigorous Exercise useful for emotional stress, but (1) my knee is a problem right now and indefinitely, and (2) it’s hard enough to get myself to do vigorous exercise when I’m NOT mentally shaky. William said he has some settings on his apps, so that it’ll only let him check certain things once a week—but then he said if he wants to check them on other days, it just makes him sit through a one- to three-minute timer, which he says is sometimes enough to make him reconsider his plan, but not usually.

My problem is more with Twitter-like apps (I now use Bluesky), and the doom-scrolling, but I FEEL like I do a pretty good job now of getting to the point where I think “This is no longer serving me” and I get up and do something else. But…do I do it soon/often enough? And also: this still means I pretty often get all caught up in a huge panic about some huge impending thing…which then ends up fizzling out naturally before it ever gets significant, so what good did it do for me to panic about it? Oh, sure, maybe, yes, maybe it WOULD HAVE gotten significant without all that buzz and commotion!! …But also: maybe not, and maybe it’s a good example of how Being Online isn’t useful, and only gets us all worked up over things we didn’t even NEED to be thinking about. It isn’t as if My Personal Panic Contribution did anything to prevent the thing from getting significant.

Well. What I am still wondering is: What are we going to do to protect our mental health this time? WHAT ARE WE GOING TO DO??

If you are in the perimenopause/menopause boat with me, I think you might very much enjoy this book:

(screen shot from Amazon.com)

Sandwich, by Catherine Newman (Target link; Amazon link)

It is recognizably Catherine Newman and her husband and kids from her various non-fiction writings, but of course fictionalized to a tantalizingly unknown extent. There is a lot in it about perimenopause and menopause, and about the joys and difficulties of being the parent of adult children, and about dealing with aging parents. I thought it was funny and delightful and sad and good. I had been putting off reading it (because I can only read it for the first time once), and then my sister-in-law, who did not know I will pre-order anything by Catherine Newman, emailed me to say she had just read this book and had I read it because she had to talk to someone about it. We both loved it. I have been wondering about maybe buying it for every middle-aged woman I know? Is that too pushy?

Speaking of perimenopause, my hair is suddenly becoming a problem. Some of it is changing to be different than the rest of it, and the upshot is that the changed hair is “simultaneously coarse and weightless”—that’s a quote from the Catherine Newman book. It STANDS UP over the rest of my hair, so that if for example I wear a ponytail (all summer I wear a ponytail), there is a halo of frizz. I do not like it. I have tried my usual taming products left over from the years when I used to style my hair: I have mousse, gel, an anti-frizz silicon (?) product, assorted leave-in conditioners—but haven’t found any of them to be The Thing. I have also tried scrunching up the rest of my hair,so that it’s allll textured and frizzy (mostly what bothers me is the part HOVERING over the other part), but that just made my hair look messy.

Do you have any products to suggest? I’m thinking of leave-in products but also maybe I need a heavier conditioner in the shower? (I usually use OGX tea tree peppermint, or Finesse moisturizing.) My hair is fairly thick (for now), somewhat/irregularly wavy, tends toward dry rather than oily; I shampoo and condition it every two or three days, and use conditioner-only in between washes; I let it air-dry. Now, I don’t want to prevent you from commenting if, for example, you are 34 and you are recommending an anti-frizz product that works for your non-silvering hair. This comment section is not just for me, it is for US ALL! So you should go ahead and recommend that product! But just so I don’t go out and buy a whole bunch of things that would have worked for my 34-year-old non-silvering hair but will NOT work for my current hair, it would be useful (not just for me, but for US ALL) if you include in your comment what SORT of trial you’ve given this product. Are you in your 50s and you had a silvering frizz halo until you started using it? MAKE SURE I KNOW. Are you in your 30s and you DO have a frizz halo but it’s NOT from greying/aging/changing hair so it’s hard to say if the product will work for a greying/aging/changing-hair frizz halo or not, but it works like billy-o for your current type of frizz halo? THAT IS GOOD TO KNOW ALSO! It might still be exactly what I need! And if not, it might be exactly what someone else here needs!

And as soon as summer heat is dying down, I am getting a CUT. My hair would be long enough to cover my chestal region if my chestal region weren’t moving the goalposts these days; even a high ponytail hits me below the shoulders. I think a nice mid-neck-length might go a long way toward fixing the feeling that my hair is driving me crazy.

Here is our current crisis: we found out recently that Edward’s freshman year of college resulted in mostly D’s. These were not just required/core classes, but classes in the chosen major. And Edward did not tell us, but let us cruise along inexorably toward the next school year without knowing anything was wrong, or that academic probation was in place, or that the academic scholarship had almost certainly been lost. We found out when we received a tuition bill for Elizabeth for next year, but didn’t receive one for Edward. (Interestingly, this turned out to be a glitch unrelated to the crisis. I am reminded of a college administrator joking to parents during an orientation seminar that they could not breach student privacy but they could sometimes give hints that might cause us to breach it ourselves.)

I found out about this situation abruptly, and so my initial reaction was to say “What happened?? What HAPPENED?? But what HAPPENED??,” with varying degrees of emotion and intensity and voice-breakage, roughly twenty times. Edward was not able to answer this question in any way that would make anyone go “OHHHHhhhhhh I see!!” Still unknown: if Edward DOES know what happened, but can’t/won’t answer, or if Edward doesn’t know. The only thing we’ve heard so far is that the classes were all repeats of already-repetitive high school classes, and Edward couldn’t stand to do Computer Programming 101 for essentially the third time. This could be true! This could also be bullshit. The thing about this claim is that the chosen strategy for dealing with it has resulted in needing to take it for a FOURTH time, so I’m not sure reason and result line up. Part of Going To College is slogging away at some classes you don’t want to take and classes you find boring/repetitive, and/or finding ways to get more out of them, and/or doing such stellar work that the professor notices and asks you to be a teaching assistant. That is PART OF IT. If that’s not something a kid can do, there may need to be a reevaluation of the plan.

Oh: we have also heard that the roommate was fine in most ways, but would talk on the phone for hours a day, in the room, often into the wee hours of the morning. That DOES sound bad. But…part of Going To College means dealing with a roommate situation, one way or another. You can talk to the roommate about it! You can talk to the R.A. about it! You can investigate changing roommates / getting a single room! You can find other places to study! You can get earplugs! You can ask your parents for advice! What you can’t do is get all D’s and think everything will be fixed when you get a different roommate!

We’d asked for updates about college throughout the school year: we saw Edward every six weeks for Remicade treatments, and that is two long car rides, and we talked about it every single time, and the report was always that everything was going great—or, actually, I remember hearing that all the courses were easy. I filed that as “Everything is going great.” Well, and of course it’s not that Edward said in depressed tones that all the courses were easy, and seemed steeped in discouraged misery: the reports were upbeat.

Edward wants to go back and give it another try, and thinks things would be different next semester. It is not clear to me that anything would be different—but in part that’s because I still don’t feel like we have a grasp on What Went Wrong. (Again: Edward may know what went wrong, and may therefore have reason to believe changes can be made.) This is one of those situations, I think, where a kid can think it’s better to play things confident, when actually it would be more confidence-inspiring if they were like OH GOD I DON’T KNOW WHAT HAPPENED BUT I WANT TO GO BACK, LET’S BRAINSTORM WHAT MIGHT NEED TO BE FIXED.

We have a gap in how the parents want to deal with this. My first reaction was that this is a “Yank The Kid Out”/”Huge Reevaluation” situation: kid can drop out of college for now and reconsider career/education options! kid can go to local community college or local inexpensive residential college and regroup, and maybe return to Preferred College after a semester or two of Renewed Effort and Better Grades! Paul’s first reaction was to say in dramatic tones “This could have been ME” (it was in no way ever him, so?) and to be willing to cash in some of our retirement savings in order to continue to pay for the more-than-we-can-afford-because-of-the-presumably-lost-scholarship college tuition. I say like hell we do that.

Here is where we have agreed to find temporary compromise. [Edited to add: To clarify, I am saying this is the decision that has been made, not a decision that’s still open. We are choosing a path with a known low statistical rate of success, but we are choosing it on purpose, to bring us to the next step of the process: either it will work, in which case wonderful, no problem, just a rocky start to freshman year! or else it will not, and it will be abundantly clear that we are not acting too hastily to pull the plug and try something else.] Edward will be given ONE more semester to show that this was a weird glitch and not an indication that this is the wrong college/major/career/time/diagnosis. (Paul does not agree on JUST one semester. I will agree to rethink/reconsider after one—but in my mind, at this price, if things don’t work after one semester, this is too expensive an experiment to keep dabbling around with, and we need to find solutions before continuing the scientific trials.) Because of the academic probation status, someone other than us will be supervising this: there are requirements about meeting regularly with advisors and maintaining grades/attendance and so forth. And we are of course discussing issues such as: (1) getting set up with someone at the Student Mental Health Center; (2) please for the love of god let us know if there are things you know about that are preventing you from succeeding. But I feel like I am getting the patient “Yes, Mother. Yes, Mother” response to this.

If the GPA-based scholarship has been lost (there is some slim hope that it is not yet lost), Edward will take out a loan for the difference in tuition. [Edited to add: This means not needing to dip into retirement savings.] This is another reason I will not want this to go on semester after semester.

If this semester does not go well, then there will be all the more justification for a reboot. But also: Edward can feel that there WAS a full chance to Try Again. This isn’t “One slip and you’re DONE/OUT, buster!!” Edward will not have to eternally wonder what would have happened with Just One More Semester To Make It Right, and cannot lean on “If only my parents had just let me try One More Time!!!” I’m reminded of when my mother had a medical incident involving persistent fainting, and was insisting to the EMTs that if they would just help her to bed, she’d be fine; they said okay, let’s see if you can even stand up without fainting. “That’s what I thought,” one of them said, affectionately, as they caught her.

If we’d known about all this, say, back in MARCH OR APRIL OR MAY, maybe we could have set up a therapy situation over the summer. But we did not find out back in May. We found out in mid-July. There is no way we will get in to see anyone before the semester begins in August. My friend’s kid is in far more dire psychological straits, and the earliest they could get an onboarding appointment was NOVEMBER—and they started looking in MARCH.

If we’d known, say, back in MARCH OR APRIL OR MAY, we could have had Edward re-take at least one of the classes at the local community college over the summer. But we did not find out back in May. We found out in mid-July, when it is too late.

I have been very fortunate that several of my friends and coworkers have gone through similar experiences with their children. Not only does this mean I’ve had a lot of chances to think about such things, it means I have people to talk to about how they went through this and what they tried, and what worked and didn’t work.

ALSO, I am finding it helpful to think back to how I felt, hearing the news about other people’s kids, when I had that layer of remove. I remember I did NOT say “What HAPPENED???” over and over again in a panic. I remember I did NOT think this was an unmitigated disaster from which no good could come. I remember thinking more like “Aw, poor kid! This is rough. Well, the path to adulthood can be winding! So interested to see what they do from here!” Applying this attitude to Edward’s situation has been helpful.

I would really welcome more such discussion in the comments: Has something like this happened with your kid? Better yet: did it happen TO YOU, and you can give us insider insight??

Here is a niche tip: If you, like me, sometimes have swallowing issues—well, let me pause here and say FIRST of all you should see a doctor about it, to rule out Various Scary Things. But if you have seen a doctor, and they have done the barium swallow thing and an endoscopy, and they say, no, you’re basically okay, you just have a weird swallowing thing where sometimes it feels like a bite of food won’t go down and then you have to hack it up like a cat, and what a delight it is to get older, in THAT case, I have a possible tip for you to try when swallowing large pills: take them interspersed with FOOD in addition to water. That is, I used to take my pills after breakfast, or after dinner, with drinks of water, and sometimes the bigger pills would feel bad going down, or feel as if they were getting a little stuck. Now I put the pills in a little bowl near me while I’m eating, and periodically throughout the meal I take a pill with a little drink of water or coffee and THEN I take a bite of food and THEN another little drink, and that seems to work much more consistently well.

Oh! And while I have you here, let me tell you about something many of you are likely already LONG SINCE doing, but others of you are going to be more like me and maybe you haven’t yet thought of this exciting news: you can reuse MANY TYPES of plastic bags. I have gone through several levels of this. The first level was boring: just reusing the plastic bags from the grocery store or Target or whatever—which, now we mostly use cloth bags, so I don’t get as many of these as I used to. The second level was a bigger leap for me: years ago, I wanted to reduce our food-storage plastic bag usage, and yet there were things I wanted to put in plastic bags: leftover pizza; raw bacon; cheese. It occurred to me somehow, perhaps by divine inspiration, that many of our purchased food items were already packaged in what were evidently food-safe plastic bags, and that we were throwing those bags away; we could instead REUSE some of those bags, FOR FREE, before throwing them out. So for example: we buy a pack of hamburger rolls in a bag; we use the hamburger rolls; we then put the opened package of raw bacon into that bag, and we can in good conscience throw away the raw-bacon-fatty bag after that. We did not WASTE a plastic bag on the raw bacon, and yet we still got to put the bacon into a bag; the bag itself got TWO useful uses, instead of just one as it usually does.

Oh sure: you could put the bacon into a plastic/glass CONTAINER instead. I’m not saying you couldn’t. We use reusable containers for MOST food storage. What I AM saying is that if you’d LIKE to use a convenient disposable bag for gross raw meat, or for food you’re bringing somewhere with you and it would be inconvenient/icky to bring the containers back home, or for the assorted blocks of cheese that don’t fit nicely into any of your containers, or WHATEVER, that there are FREE BAGS we are ALREADY THROWING AWAY AFTER ONE USE, and those bags can instead live a second life. You can use a disposable plastic bag AND not be adding to plastic-bag usage, is what I mean. The BEST bags (and to my children it is a strong marker of age that I have strong and detailed opinions about this) are the ZIP-CLOSE bags that come filled with things such as tortillas. A free ziplock bag!!! I can’t believe we used to carelessly pitch those into the trash, when we could instead shove them into the bags/foil/parchment drawer until the drawer is so full of bags, they start falling down back behind the drawer and ending up mingling with the pan lids!

My third level of this thought is this: I had been wondering WHAT I could use as bags for scooping the cat litter, now that we were using reusable bags at the grocery store and not accumulating vast heaps of the thin plastic bags I used to use. I had wondered about taking bags from bag-recycling bins in store lobbies, and I do still think that’s a possibility, but I am somewhat grossed out by the idea of what condition those bags might be in (wet, sticky, etc.). So it was a relief to think of another idea. I don’t know if this is the same for you, but I recently realized we naturally acquire MANY cat-litter-quality bags. I ordered a pair of pants: they arrived wrapped in a plastic bag, which was then put into a plastic mailing envelope. That is TWO bags for scooping cat litter into. I would not put FOOD into those bags—but they are PERFECT for cat litter. Similarly: the empty spinach bag, the large empty chips bag, the bag I used for raw bacon and was about to throw into the trash. A SECOND (or THIRD) LIFE for plastic that was GOING INTO THE TRASH ANYWAY. Very pleasing.

I am just back from a trip with Paul and Henry to see my parents, and I’ve realized the trouble with having a blog my parents read is that I can’t give you a frank report of the trip, NOT THAT THERE IS ANYTHING FRANK TO SAY. I’m just saying if there WERE something, I wouldn’t be able to say it. My CO-WORKERS would end up getting a franker report than you would, and that just seems wrong.

We had a nice trip. This is the first time Paul and Henry have been to visit my parents since they (my parents) moved away, so it was in part a trip to spend time with my parents, and in part a trip to show Paul and Henry around the new state where my parents live. On earlier trips, I have taken with me: Elizabeth; and then Rob and William; and then Elizabeth again with Edward. It should have been Henry and Edward on that third trip, but Henry was at a behavioral stage where I could not imagine traveling with him. And I could have taken just Edward, but by then I’d learned how nice it is to travel with two traveling companions, so that you can take up a whole row of three seats on the plane and not have to sit with a stranger and/or figure out how to get to the bathroom when the stranger falls asleep in the aisle seat. So I asked Edward who we should bring as our third, and Edward said it should be Elizabeth, so anyway Elizabeth has been twice, and now finally Henry (who is a perfectly pleasant traveling companion at 17, and it’s hard to remember feeling like he wouldn’t be) has been once, and Paul has been once, and I have been five times, because I also went once with my brother.

It is odd to get to the parenting stage where “taking turns” becomes a different kind of issue. I was thinking about whose turn it would be to go with me the NEXT time I visit my parents, and in the All Housechildren Era it would be Rob and William’s turn again—but they’re both in their 20s now, and Rob lives elsewhere, and it feels like they have both exited the rotation, turn-wise. Similarly, for many years we’ve had a system of taking turns choosing the Christmas tree lights: some of us prefer colored lights and some of us prefer white lights, so we have two sets of lights and each year it’s someone else’s turn to choose. But Rob no longer lives here, nor has he come home for Christmas the last two years, so when his turn came up we skipped him. Soon the same may happen with William, and then with the twins, and then with Henry, and then perhaps it will be just Paul and me, pretending our cats are taking turns choosing the Christmas lights.

Ever since noticing certain Perimenopausal Shifts in my own body, I’ve been surreptitiously researching other women’s bodies/faces at the grocery store, at Target, at the library, etc. Now that I am looking for it, it’s very clear: older women have, in general, substantially different bodies/faces/skin/hair than younger women. Even if we use unrealistic societal ideals, a slim, very-exercised, well-moisturized 60-year-old model does not look remotely the same as a slim, very-exercised, well-moisturized 20-year-old model. It is right there before me, clear as day, just as clear as the difference between the young women and the children who have not yet gone through puberty: there is a second dramatic BODILY SHIFT, later in life. Maybe a third. Everyone changes, and then everyone changes again, and maybe again. This has not been kept a secret; I just wasn’t paying attention because it wasn’t yet happening to me, and because it wasn’t a situation where EVERYONE WAS CONSTANTLY TALKING ABOUT it, the way they were with puberty. ARE YOU THERE, GOD, IT’S ME, MIDDLE-AGED MARGARET

Why HASN’T it been clear all along? My mind first went to the knee-jerk response about older women being invisible, but that didn’t sit right with me. I think that expression can be useful for describing how older women might be invisible TO MEN and TO MARKETERS, and CULTURALLY of course; but I don’t feel as if older women are invisible TO ME. After a little more thought, I realized what it was (in addition to a SHAMELESS lack of scientific research / medical information), and it was a happy relief of a realization: it’s that their bodies/faces/skin/hair look ABSOLUTELY CORRECT. They look NORMAL and RIGHT. They don’t catch my eye in any way, because WHY WOULD THEY? They look the way they are supposed to look. Younger people look like younger people, older people look like older people; the snail’s on the thorn, all’s right with the world!

It is only when those changes started happening to MY OWN PERSONAL BODY that it felt Wrong and Uncomfortable and Highly Noticeable. The CHANGE feels uncomfortable, as any change wrapped up in identity might feel—particularly if it’s a change that our…is it safe to say “entire world”? I think it is: that our ENTIRE WORLD associates with a loss of attractiveness, however much we want to kick that perspective in the entire world’s nuts. Plus: the exhausting reevaluation of clothing. I don’t enjoy figuring out clothing even under the best of circumstances. Today I am wearing a t-shirt I bought at Old Navy when William, now a college graduate, was a toddler. It has quite a few snags and holes in it by now, but it’s comfortable and familiar and I can’t buy an exact replacement so I’ll keep wearing this one until it falls off me. I don’t want to have to re-figure-out EVERYTHING THAT TOUCHES MY WAIST.

Doing my surreptitious research about other women’s bodies has led to some discoveries about their fashion. It’s different fashion. Some of the women do not seem to give a damn about their lil tummies; some of them do seem to give a damn. Some of them are going for snappy little coordinated separates; some of them are going for monochrome. There are some tum-hiding fashions at play that some of us may want to investigate; there are some yes-there’s-a-tum-what-are-YOU-looking-at-ASSHAT fashions that others of us may want to investigate.

I recommend, as an exercise, looking deliberately at some of the women you interact with. Quick glances, maybe, so you don’t freak them out with your peering. Did you even notice their wrinkles, and the variety and depth and specific locations of those wrinkles, before you made yourself look deliberately? Did you evaluate their necks, the way you evaluate yours? Did you count their grey hairs? Did you scrutinize the texture and color of their skin as if from six inches away, and compare it to the smoothe glow of a 20-year-old model’s digitally-corrected skin? If so, I am sorry, and I can tell you it is a blessing to go through life without clocking those things in that way, and I have appreciated (and continue to appreciate) that blessing of relative obliviousness. I am sure my friends don’t appreciate it when they lose 20 pounds and I don’t even notice let alone comment; but I hope things balance out when they gain 20 pounds and I don’t notice then, either. I am not in general noticing/counting their veins; I am not noticing/measuring their forehead lines; I am not noticing the specific depth/width/darkness of their undereye sags; I wish I could be the same when I look in the mirror.

It is reassuring, though, to think that WE TOO must be going through life with other people not noticing or caring about our stomachs, our necks, our wobbly upper arms, our thinning hair, our thinning and irregular skin. We just look RIGHT to them. They already know what we look like, and how old we are, and our whole package deal looks normal and right to them. WE ARE GETTING OLDER. AND SO IT LOOKS RIGHT THAT WE THEREFORE ALSO LOOK OLDER. I AM TRYING TO FORCE THIS TO SINK IN.

Today I am in the mood to talk about the list of potential perimenopause symptoms I saw in a book. Those of us in perimenopause could talk about which symptoms we have, and those of us past perimenopause could talk about which ones they had. But I was reading the book while at the library, so I don’t have it here with me; it was a new release, and the new releases are like debutantes: they never get more attention than when they’re on the new-release shelf. So I like to leave them to it, and check them out when they have aged out and are far less popular. I’m not enjoying this metaphor anymore.

I wondered if by any chance the “read a sample” portion of the book on Amazon would happen to have that symptom list AND IT DID. So here is the list, from the book The New Menopause by Mary Claire Haver, MD, which I am definitely going to check out and finish reading in a couple of months:

acid reflux / GERD
acne
alcohol tolerance changes
anxiety
arthralgia (joint pain)
arthritis
asthma
autoimmune disease (new or worsening)
bloating
body composition changes / belly fat
body odor
brain fog
breast tenderness/soreness
brittle nails
burning sensation in the mouth/tongue
chronic fatigue syndrome
crawling skin sensations
decreased desire for sex
dental problems
depression
difficulty concentrating
dizzy spells
dry or itchy eyes
dry mouth
dry skin
eczema
electric shock sensations
fatigue
fibromyalgia
frozen shoulder
genitourinary syndrome
headaches
heart palpitations
high cholesterol / high triglycerides
hot flashes
incontinence
insulin resistance
irritable bowel syndrome
irritability
itchy ears
itchy skin
kidney stones
memory issues
menstrual cycle changes
mental health disorders
migraines
mood changes
muscle aches
night sweats
nonalcoholic fatty liver disease
osteoporosis
pain with intercourse
sarcopenia (muscle loss)
sleep apnea
sleep disturbances
thinning hair (on head)
thinning skin
tingling extremities
tinnitus
TMJ (temporomandibular disorder)
unwanted hair growth (whiskers)
urinary tract infections
vaginal dryness
vertigo
weight gain
wrinkles

Well, HELL!—as an elderly client of mine used to exclaim if presented with too many things at once. This is like the flip side of when you try to look online to find out why your feet are so frequently cold, and you get everything from “Because you need to turn up the thermostat a degree and put on warmer socks, genius, maybe walk around a little from time to time” to “Brace for imminent death.”

We don’t have to talk about ALL the things we might or might not be experiencing / have experienced. My parents and brother read this blog, so, you know. I’m not going to be SHARING-sharing.

But I will say that I am definitely noticing weight gain and, much more importantly, weight redistribution: the center of my typical weight range is only up maybe five pounds, so all my clothes should still fit fine; it’s the SHIFTING AROUND that’s causing me enormous wardrobe complications. My waistbands don’t fit! If I am experiencing irritability, perhaps it is because I am being uncomfortably squeezed all the time! I am experimenting with finding new clothing options, but I am feeling surly about it and not making much progress yet.

I was diagnosed with acid reflux / GERD in my forties, so I don’t know if that’s perimenopause-related or not. But it has been getting worse lately. I have a swallowing issue sometimes; commenter Ess referred to this as “cat throat,” and I have thought of it that way ever since. It used to happen only very very infrequently; now it happens much more commonly. I am also more likely to need a second dose of my daily medication.

JOINT PAIN. Yes.

I have had a few mild and fleeting feelings of vertigo over the last few months, and hadn’t had any idea it could be associated with perimenopause.

Dry eyes, yes. I didn’t know those could be a perimenopause thing.

I used to get UTIs pretty regularly, but in recent years had not; now they are back.

ITCHY EARS!! YES!! My friend Surely told me about that one!

Sleep disturbances: yes yes yes. Waking up early and not being able to get back to sleep; or waking up what feels like about every ten minutes for the last few hours of the night. And more recently, night sweats. Not terrible drenching ones, but quite dampening.

Wrinkles, yes, hello. A sudden acceleration, especially on the throat and around the eyes. The ones on the forehead are digging in deeper, and are obvious even if I am not raising my eyebrows which apparently I do a million times a day.

Anxiety and depression, well, it’s hard to say. Those have been ongoing for decades. It’s hard to say if they’re worse. And if they are worse, it’s hard to say if it’s because of perimenopause or if it’s because of the ongoing/impending situations with United States politics.

I don’t grow my fingernails long, but I’ve noticed them chipping/breaking before the point at which I’d usually trim them.

I have noticed that I smell a little funny sometimes, and that my deodorant doesn’t seem to work as well as before, but I’d wondered if that was because of adrenaline at work: I LIKE working at the desk, but it’s definitely a more up-energy role.

Incontinence, yes. Increasing over the years. I am going to address that this year, to see what can be done. The little strength-training workout has 30 seconds of jumping jacks, and I pee my pants a little bit each time, which is discouraging. I wear a liner every day now (I use the cloth ones from SugarMonkies, and I am dismayed to see her shop has permanently closed; let me know if you have had good experiences with another cloth pad).

Fatigue: who can say what causes what? Life can be tiring. I am getting older. I am sick of doing the same old chores over and over again.

I get only the occasional single chin-hair, but the entire lower half of my face now gets Noticeably Downy with fine, light peach fuzz.

My cycles are still pretty regular. I haven’t skipped one yet, or had anything else surprising happen. My PMS is worse, though, accompanied by new bloating, and I also get PMS symptoms mid-cycle. I don’t seem to be getting hot flashes, unless night sweats are from hot flashes I’m sleeping through.

I have been talking for a long time. Would you like a turn?

I am getting gradually better at the customer service part of my job. After a number of years of ONLY paging (i.e., putting things back on shelves; fetching things from shelves), I have been working on the checkout desk now and then; and, recently, I’ve been increasing the number of desk shifts I cover for other people, in order to get more experience/money. I am getting less scared of the library patrons (I would not have described myself as “scared of them,” but it’s the explanation that matches my behavior), and less panicked/flustered when asked to do something I don’t immediately know how to do / don’t immediately understand. I can’t believe I am 50 years old and this is still an issue, but here we are, and at least it is nice to see there can be progress within repetition. I keep thinking about how, in my pharmacy job many years ago, there was an arc from panicked inexperience to calm expertise, and how gratifying it was to get to the point where I could take almost any problem and just SOLVE it. Insurance rejecting the claim? Diagnosed and fixed! Customer says their copay used to be $5 and now it’s $40? Investigated and explained! Customer needs something tricky, like an early refill of their medication to take on vacation, or a replacement for pills that fell into the sink, or maybe they’re from out of town and also normally use a different pharmacy chain but they’re having a medical situation and their doctor is trying to get them their medication here and it would be really nice if their $1200 medication could still go through their insurance and be $15? I GOTCHA. And I will get there with this job, too, if I keep practicing. The first two years are the hardest!

Yesterday I dealt with several situations a significant level up from what I used to be able to handle. One is a type of situation I’ve had several chances to deal with lately, and it’s where a patron has a book in mind, and they are giving me both the somewhat wrong name of the author AND the somewhat wrong name of the book. I used to punt that directly to a reference librarian (is “punt” the sports word I want? maybe I mean “hike” or “pass”), but now I spend at least a few minutes seeing if I can gently figure out what we’re looking for. (But not TOO long, because nobody wants that.) It’s very satisfying to untangle it and IN FACT FIND the thing they’re looking for. (Ah ha!! Thunderstruck by Erik Larson! Not Thunderstorm by Eric Lawson!)

I also dealt with a patron who started a conversation by saying WELP he’d lost $850, and then went into a long story about something he’d bought online that hadn’t worked out, and I managed to hold up my end of the conversation despite the non-library-related twists and turns, including one part where he said that in the last 16 years things in this country had really changed (hmm, what happened to this country for the first time in 2008 I wonder), and now the migrants were pouring in, and I said, Oh and also! there’s our downtown area! It was built for when this town was 1/3rd the size, and now it just can’t handle all the traffic, but there’s nowhere to expand! not without tearing down historic buildings!—which completely redirected him. He then kept talking long enough about those buildings, and about the cell phone coverage in the area, that a coworker attempted to bail me out by bringing me a little pile of work, but when I left the desk with that work, he started telling his story to two patrons with young children, so then I successfully extracted THEM from his conversation, and anyway I spend every work shift with damp underarms but also with increasing feelings of ability and competence.

Well, and increasing numbers of Work Stories. The other day I dealt with a patron who came up to the desk and was telling me about one of his many theories, this one involving AI—and then he paused and said, as if in sudden anxious consideration of my feelings: “Wait…are YOU a robot?” Friends, I was grateful to be wearing a mask on the lower half of my face, so that I only had to worry what my eyes were expressing. After a pause, during which I thought of the “meet them where they are” training of my eldercare job, I realized this was a question I could truthfully and directly and simply and easily answer, and so I did: “…No.” He went on with his story, reassured.

We are having some upheaval at work, and my last few shifts have been stressful and fraught instead of the usual happy and energizing, and I am trying to think about other things so let’s do the requested photos of (1) Nutmeg the Mother’s Day horse from Henry, and (2) the Mother’s Day cat embroidery from Elizabeth.

The twins are home from college and looking for summer jobs, and neither has had any luck so far. One major issue is that we have two cars for five drivers, and Paul and I take both cars for our jobs many days each week, so it’s hard for the kids to look for any job they’d need to drive to. We considered adding a third car—but even a used car would cost way, way more than they could earn over the summer, so that seems like the wrong way to do things, financially-speaking. And we do live just a few minutes’ walk from the center of town, so there are lots of businesses they can walk to. Businesses that do not seem to be hiring.

My sister-in-law told me about this 7-minute strength workout, which I have now done one (1) time. And by “done” I mean “attempted.” There are quite a few areas in which I will need to gradually approach the goal. For example: I cannot do even one push-up, no not even the knees kind. I can lower myself down to the floor, and I can even do it slowly and with control, but I cannot get back up. But I could easily work ON that for 30 seconds: I just did little partial push-ups, to the depth I COULD push back up from, and if I keep doing those consistently I will get better and better.

But standing on a chair was a complete bust. I put one foot on the seat of the chair, and then stood there for the entire 30 seconds trying to figure out a way to PARTIALLY do it. My sister-in-law says she’s using a step stool, so I will try that. I complained about this to the children, and Elizabeth, maintaining eye contact, put one foot ON THE KITCHEN COUNTER and then brought up her second foot. That seems wrong in its own way.

I am continuing to try to drink down some chia seeds or hemp hearts each day, For My (Peri-)Menopausal Health. I am continuing to feel as if there must be a better way to consume them (as far as I can tell, all the good ways are incompatible with keto). And yet: I DO succeed in getting myself on the outside of the seeds/hearts each time, and the main sacrifice is that I need to drink a bunch of water to wash them down; and I am supposed to be drinking a bunch of water with them anyway, so. Success! Triumph!

I don’t know if the seeds/hearts are improving my health, or how to tell. In so many cases, Nutritional Scripture must be taken On Faith. Fortunately, I am someone who enjoys Taking Pills, like when I have a 10-day course of antibiotics or whatever, and Food Rites can scratch that itch: I swish down my Nutritious Fiber, with its accompanying Striving and Very Mild Suffering, and I feel the happiness/satisfaction of having Taken My Medicine.

Long-time readers have noted that I did not talk about Mother’s Day this year. I am happy to report that it’s because Mother’s Day went well. There were doughnuts at breakfast, by my request; the line at the doughnut shop was reportedly LONG, which was pleasing to me: all those other mothers, receiving doughnuts too! For dinner, Paul made lasagna and rolls from scratch, after consulting with me well ahead of time to see if that was what I wanted. We watched a movie of my choice (The Hundred-Foot Journey); I try to choose something that no one except me is enthusiastic about, but that I think they WILL enjoy. William and Edward each bought me chocolates. Rob sent me an email. Elizabeth made me an embroidery of our cats. Henry bought me a plastic HORSE, like an 8-inch plastic horse of the sort girls my age used to collect along with Barbie dolls (I had neither plastic horses nor Barbie dolls as a child, but played with them at friends’ houses); and when I said no one had ever given me a horse before, he was pleased and said he’d suspected as much. He said the horse’s name is Nutmeg.

Well. Really, a success in every way. Sometimes it feels as if things cannot change, and that we cannot expect them to change, and in fact we are specifically TOLD not to expect things to change; but then sometimes they DO change, and what are we supposed to do with THAT.

Would you like to report in about your Mother’s Day? Please don’t feel that this is no longer a place to vent. I have to say, this is the downside of things going well this year: I actually do look forward to bonding with everyone else who has an upsetting Mother’s Day—but NOW look what’s happened.