I don’t know if you are aware, but there is a whole THING about “breathing correctly.” I have read one (1) book on the topic, so now I am ready to tell you. (Also, I can tell you that if you read such a book, you will feel the entire time as if you can’t quite catch your breath.)

1. Breathe ONLY through your nose. ONLY THE NOSE. NOT THE MOUTH. THE MOUTH IS THE POISON BREATH. YOU WILL DIE IF YOU BREATHE THROUGH YOUR MOUTH. EVEN WHILE VIGOROUSLY EXERCISING. HOW ARE YOU NOT ALREADY DEAD, WHEN I’VE TOLD YOU IT WAS POISON AND YET YOU HAVE BEEN DOING IT FOR DECADES.

2. Except if breathing out. You can breathe OUT through your mouth if you want. That’s fine.

3. Breathe slow and shallow, or possibly slow and deep, or maybe it was slow and shallow on inhale and slow and deep on exhale. There were some mixed messages. Approximately five in/out breath-sets per minute is pretty ideal, all the ancient religions say so.

4. You know how you think you breathe for oxygen? Actually what you want is the carbon dioxide, which you may remember is the stuff you think of yourself as breathing OUT. Or I guess you want both? I was a little unclear.

5. You breathe TOO MUCH. All Americans do!! It’s like how you EAT TOO MUCH. You just BINGE on that air. You FEAST on it. You OVERINDULGE. You’re DISGUSTING AND GREEDY, and it makes you FLABBY WITH AIR. Things that are vital to your existence are things you should be depriving yourself of. Depriving yourself will feel bad, which is how it is SUPPOSED to feel.

6. You can tape your mouth closed at night, so that you won’t accidentally breathe through your mouth. This is the best tape. Yes, I have ordered the tape. No, I have not yet tried it, because the idea of taping my mouth shut at night freaks me right out. Yes, yes, I did order it though. (Paul tried it last night, and said it worked perfectly with just a one-inch strip on the center of his mouth.)

7. I skipped the second half of the book, where he was like “These are the REAL good breathing methods, but also be careful because if you do them wrong you might accidentally give yourself brain damage and/or die.” Just, skipped right past all that.

Why did I take this book out of the library, you may be asking yourself/me. It’s because I am noticing that my heart is doing the weird thing it did last election, where it kind of flippers around, especially if I’ve had any caffeine. I’d thought a book on breathing might be helpful/soothing.

I think one of the reasons I was distressed by recent photos of myself is that the photos made it clear how silly I’m being with some of my little potions and rituals. Here I am, using a nice anti-aging face cleanser, and then carefully applying toner, and then the anti-aging daily moisturizer—and making sure with each product to put the extra onto the backs of my hands. Using a special acid formula once a week before bed. Making all these tiny, possibly imaginary differences, that from three feet away are utterly invisible, if they even exist at all. No one is going to even be able to TELL if my eye wrinkles have decreased by 5%. Meanwhile here I am fussing away, spending both the time and the money.

Well. I have soothed myself by realizing that Everyone Already Knows What I Look Like. These photos are surprising to ME, but not to ANYONE ELSE. Because EVERYONE ELSE can already SEE ME—and from more angles than I’d want to explore. To them I look absolutely normal and Like Myself, just as they all look absolutely normal and Exactly Like Themselves to me. Their dear faces and forms! I would not notice if their wrinkles or stomachs had decreased by 5%, nor would I care!

Noticing how we’re all aging during the menopause transition has caused me to notice What’s Next for us: it doesn’t stop at the wider tummy and the greying frizzing hair. My sister-in-law and I were discussing how we’ve both recently even found ourselves doing some distressing Age Math. Like: how many more years can we reasonably expect to live, even if all goes extremely well—that kind of math. And I wonder what we will lose on the way! Teeth, mobility, sight, hearing, breathing, THINKING. People who live to the “if all goes extremely well” point are not typically still living with all their original functions. I have also been having those sudden “I am actually going to die, and the only question is HOW WILL IT GO DOWN” thoughts. Not like I didn’t have them before, but now they feel realer/nearer. Several of my former friends/classmates have already died. I feel like we’re gradually filling in a dark little spreadsheet: this one got pneumonia and the hospital couldn’t stop it; this one had a heart attack; this one, cancer. There’s my little empty spreadsheet cell, waiting.

I WONDER IF WE COULD FIND A MORE CHEERFUL TOPIC. Oh, hey, have you bought any U.S. presidential election MERCH yet? I wanted to buy an official (i.e., sold by the campaign) t-shirt, but found all the choices boring—and almost entirely men’s cut, even the cat-lady ones. Inspired by local friends who are at this point curating little COLLECTIONS of campaign t-shirts, I finally chose this one as my first:

(image from Amazon.com)

It has the happy, cheerful vibe I was looking for. It looks black in the photo, but I ordered it in navy. (If you click through, it’ll revert to the men’s cut and the black color, which I find annoying.) I found one I liked even better, with daisies, but it said KAMALA/WALZ and I don’t like the mismatch. I don’t mind using first names, but we are not going to use first names for woman and surnames for men, not on my t-shirt.

An amusing number of the shirts on Amazon say Harris/Waltz. The one I bought has Walz on the shirt, but the listing title says Waltz: I was very alarmed when I got my purchase confirmation!

Also, I have filled out my calendar with the election countdown. I don’t want to be thinking about it constantly, but I do want to easily know how many days are left. I put a tiny number in the top corner of each day. Sixty-six days left, if I didn’t mess up the numbers. (Do say so if I’ve messed up the numbers.)

We are bringing the twins back to college, and I am not WORSE than I was their freshman year, but it’s close. For one thing, when we dropped them off freshman year, it’s not as if I didn’t already appreciate them as Beloved Household Members, but I didn’t appreciate them as much as I appreciated them after they were gone and then I had them back home again. And now they are leaving again, and I already know how much I will miss them. And also because I have seen how Rob, now age 25, was a member of our household and then he went to college and now he is gone and living elsewhere and we hear from him only very infrequently, and only when he feels like it and not when we feel like it, so I am thinking of that as well. It is difficult to avoid becoming a GRASPING sort of person, when they keep just SLIPPING AWAY like LITTLE FISH.

Then of course there is the additional layer of worry about Edward and that situation. My primary worry is not that the semester will result in another batch of D’s; that would be fine, and then we’d know, and then we could then figure out what the options were from there—and there are plenty of options left. I have mentioned that I am lucky enough to have had several friends and co-workers go through this situation with their kids before I had to go through it with my kid; and each time, with each kid, each friend/co-worker chose the “one more semester Just To Be Clear” plan and, each time, as the friend/co-worker of the parent in question, with no skin in the game, I felt that was Right, and Good, and I was glad they’d chosen that plan. And I feel right/good/glad about that plan for Edward, too, whether it ends in A’s or F’s or somewhere in between: the plan is to TRY THIS AND SEE WHAT HAPPENS AND THEN WE CAN GO FROM THERE, if you see what I mean, and I know from the comments section that many of you don’t, which likely means some of the people in my daily life also don’t. I am cringing already, imagining the semester not going well and how many people might think “SEE?? WE KNEW IT WOULDN’T WORK!!!,” without realizing what the plan was, or that it DID work.

But my REAL concern is that Edward will not see this plan the same way we do, and that Edward will see this as some sort of IF YOU FAIL, THAT WAS YOUR LAST CHANCE AT SUCCESS gladiatorial arena, and that Edward will see the D’s/F’s coming in and will resort to Acts of Despair—rather than seeing this semester as one more scientific input for our spreadsheet, helping us to see what the next plan should be. That is my real fear. Oh OF COURSE I have said so to Edward, EXPLICITLY, but do you remember being 19? Me neither, but I remember just enough about being 19 to be worried. I remember adults saying a lot of things that seemed oblivious/stupid/clueless. Hey, do you remember adults telling you to Be Yourself, and to not change who you were just to impress someone you wanted to date, because then even if you succeeded in your ruse, the person wouldn’t be dating The Real You? And back then I was like, “Um, yes, thank you, CRAZY CLUELESS WEIRDO, but THIS GUY doesn’t WANT to date The Real Me, so clearly?!?! this is my only chance at success!!!” And I would have looked them right in the eye and been absolutely confident that they were the stupid one.

Anyway. Last year I was buying the extra-long sheets and the mattress pads and the desk lamps and the towels and the shower caddies and the shower shoes; this year it’s more just replenishing the trail mix and the body wash and the deodorant and the floss picks and so forth. There is less to do but just as much to worry about.

I have been having some lil self-esteem issues recently, almost entirely due to seeing some candid photos of myself.

I have a friend who says she thinks she has whatever is the opposite of body dysmorphia: instead of looking in the mirror and seeing herself as exaggeratedly ugly/fat/etc., she looks in the mirror and thinks “Damn!!” Then she sees herself in photos and thinks “…Oh.”

I don’t look in the mirror and think “Damn!!,” but my mental image of myself is of someone much cuter than I am. And if I see a photo of myself taken head-on and when I’m ready for it, I am not generally inordinately displeased: I have the usual critical thoughts (ug, my chin! ug, I’m so squinty!) but I’ve become accustomed to combating those, and also I know from experience I will like the picture much more in about ten years, so I can make myself okay with it. But then I see an action shot of myself from the side, or of course an unexpected front-facing camera view, and I feel bad about absolutely everything. I am OLD AND DISFIGURED AND NO ONE WOULD EVER THINK I WAS CUTE IN ANY WAY.

It does help, though, that when I look at the OTHER people in candid photos, I often think “Wow, that is not a good photo of them”/”Wow, that is really unflattering”/”Wow, they don’t look like that at all,” and that this includes, for example, people I know to be very, very cute.

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.