Menopause Monologues

When it was my mother's turn, she went a bit weird, she says.  She was three years older than I am now, and it's funny but I can't remember her weird spell.  Perhaps I was caught up in my own stuff and didn't notice.  Which makes me feel particularly sad, because it is a rather intense experience to have to go through unacknowledged.

She got all paranoid, the way I am at the moment.  Was convinced Dad was having an affair.

My auntie, her sister, got ultra sensitive and would slam out of the room and off to her bedroom on the edge of a comment which left my cousin and her dad scratching their heads and asking what upset her this time?

My body hasn't reached the menopause threshold yet.  Except for the paranoia bit.  But I have all of the body chemistry that points to it being an experience much more difficult than it needs to be - low progesterone, high estrogen, high copper.  It's that trio that makes it such an intensely uncomfortable experience.

And if I'm not even there yet and I'm feeling like this - well, all I can say is that I'm actually sorta hoping that what I am doing at the moment is ironing out all the creases, a little early, so that when menopause actually happens I will fly through it, relatively speaking.

That's the plan, anyway.

~

I remember the day my cousin got her period for the very first time.  It must have been a weekend or school holidays because I was there, as was usually the case :)  I think it was mid-morning.  I don't remember what happened exactly except for murmurings and toilet visits by her mother.  I don't remember any conversation.  I do remember the feeling though.  It was mystery, a place I wasn't yet.  There is an 18-month gap between us, and it was perhaps never so deep a chasm as it felt on that strange day when my cousin turned into a being different than she was before, now this thing was happening to her :)

I mean, it's so weird, right?

The world is bizarre :)

~

I sat outside with my chooks after letting them out of the pen this morning.  Selma and Tristan scrabbled around in the dirt pecking at things and brrring and clucking and being all chicken.  Patty was nowhere to be found.  She was off in the dark confines of the nesting box, doing the secret women's business of egg-laying that Selma is yet to be initiated into. 

Such a common thing, laying an egg.  But such a production, as well.  I feel honoured that we get to eat what her body works so hard to produce.