Someone Open A Window!

I’m HOT.  I’m hot at night, I’m hot in the morning, I’m hot when no one else in the room understands what’s wrong with me.  Warning: this is not the start of a sex or fashion blog.   And I’m not about to begin a diatribe about global warming or a Bay Area weather report.  When I say I’m hot, I’m getting way personal here.  And if you dare discount my discomfort with the change-of-life “M” word, I can guarantee a meeting with my left hook.

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Okay, so I took out my one book by Christiane Northrup, author of “Women’s Bodies, Women’s Wisdom,” trying to get some inspiration.  Naturally I got perspiration.  Then I thought about my mother’s female journey towards age 84. Let’s see, there was the summer I found out she still took the pill, followed by the observation that the Clairol number 10 she poured on the gray made her look like a shiny wet otter. Then there was her “operation” years later, the one my father was too mortified to speak of.  I was in college by this point, obsessed with my waxing womanhood.  The fact that hers was waning, in the form of a hysterectomy, made little impact.

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Now I’m terribly hot and bothered over the entire ordeal.  Yes, I’ve had my children, in the brink of time thanks to good fortune and frequent mucous checks.   So there is gratitude.  But I’m too heated up to feel grateful.  Yes, I know I am not alone, there are millions of women everywhere living in the “span” of peri-meno-and post.  But in the moment, as I ponder that I get hotter alone than I do in midst of my dear husband’s overtures, I know I’ve turned a corner. 

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Long ago I accepted the fried egg breasts and kangaroo pouch reality of child bearing, birth and aging.  I’ve been going there a long time.  But in my mid-forties, this new reality of hot, bothered and unfertile is taking me to an entirely different place.  I start to notice other, older women.  I see something new in their eyes, a feistiness or calm, depending.  We have a dear family friend who, at age 76, practices daily yoga, rises at 5 a.m. to brisk walk and cackles when she laughs the way a freshman would in the dorms.  She’s long since passed through my hot phase, but she remains hot in the best sense of the word.  That’s what I’m after.

xxx

When I weaned my second child, after two years of constant nursing, I was not sure who had the harder time.  It was a letting go, the first of many, I knew.  The good news is that my children are far too self-absorbed to notice much about the loss I’m experiencing.  “My mom sweats and gets grumpy.  Does yours?”  My husband, likewise, is purposefully oblivious, in keeping with most men’s reactions to all things blood or female related.

It’s okay.  I don’t expect my family to appreciate the spiral staircase I’m climbing.  Maybe my daughter will one day, but that’s way too many heat flashes away for me to think about.  For now, I only want to “transition” to my next female stage with women who are HOT like I am.  Now someone please turn on the fan!