And Now I Am Fifty

I had a birthday last week.  Fifty is one of those milestone birthdays that get a lot of press and I spent a lot of time trying to decide how I wanted to celebrate.

I seriously considered a tattoo. I came up with designs and words that I loved and even got the name of Max’s heavily inked stylist’s tattoo guy but in the end, I decided against it. It wasn’t that I was scared of needles – what I had in mind was so tiny, I’m sure I could handle that. And it wasn’t that I was distressed about the permanence of getting inked. Fifty, I discovered is one giant lesson in impermanence. When I thought about getting a tattoo and was really honest about why I wanted one, I think I wanted to change my physical body – my outsides – in order to reflect a change I’m cultivating on the inside. As the day got closer I realized that what’s happening on the inside is enough for me. I don’t need to etch something onto my body as a sign.

I didn’t want a big celebration either – though I struggled with this too because isn’t that what you’re supposed to do on a milestone birthday? I thought a long time about how I wanted to celebrate and wound up having a really perfect day that balanced time with friends and solitude. There was cake and dinner at the mexican place down the street and it was exactly the kind of celebration I wanted.

But it is fifty.  A milestone to be sure (and if I wasn’t sure, my AARP card came in today’s mail just to drive the point home). So in honor of fifty, I hereby declare this my jubilee year. (In the bible, the old testament, God declares every 50 years a jubilee year wherein debts are forgiven and celebrations abound.) I will celebrate this birthday all year long, choosing at least one special something to celebrate every month.

It is as simple as that.

Hobbled and Healing

I pulled a muscle in karate class yesterday. I took a step back, rolled a little onto the side of my foot and something went twang! and I've been limping ever since. I spent most of yesterday doing the very-elderly-lady shuffle – small, short steps, no striding down the sidewalk, no sprinting to answer the phone.

It's feeling better today but I'm still moving gingerly, visiting with my friend the heating pad, giving my leg some time to heal.

As you probably noticed, there was no Project Arse update yesterday. I am officially dropping out of the 5k Ass Project (gasp). Here are my two primary reasons: I'm bored with the pictures of my rear end and I'm no longer trying to change or shrink my dear old arse. Frankly, I like it just the way it is. I'm walking and studying karate in order to feel good, to make myself happy, not for the purpose of butt shrinking.

A million years ago, a boy, a summer romance, said something romantic and sexy about my ass. He said that I had the kind of ass he'd like to see walking from the bed to the bathroom every morning. (Thank you, Brad Herron, wherever you are!) We were teenagers and it was true, my ass was stunning.

I remembered this the other day and decided, I am happy with the ass I'm walking around with today. I like the way it moves me through my days and nights, providing a soft place to sit, cushioning falls and balancing me as I gallop (or hobble) through my life. I'm fine with it as is.

I may start posting photographs of things other than my butt on Wednesdays. While alternating ice and heat on my leg yesterday, I started reading my camera manual and I think it would be fun to sharpen my camera skills, focus my eyes a bit more on the world around me.

What I find myself thinking and writing about these days is the creative process and how we find time to do whatever creative thing we're called to in the midst of an average day, an ordinary life. That's the conversation I'm interested in having.

Field Notes from the Pause

I was going to post and warn you about this place. DO NOT GO THERE. It's like Chuck E. Cheese on crack. We were there for a birthday party on Saturday and I left feeling damaged. My ears may still be ringing but this could be a slight exaggeration, you know, for effect.

Then I was going to post about our neighborhood association block party where the representative from the association jokingly called our neighborhood "the ghetto" because our little houses share the same zip code with some pretty fancy mcmansions on the other side of the school district. This offended me, because it trivializes the concept of ghetto by calling our very safe and tidy little neighborhood one. It trivializes the fact that there are real ghettos in this city where it is not safe, where children are victims of drive by shootings and where danger is real and ever present.

I was going to be all funny and sardonic and indignant, but then I got sidetracked by this: My hot flashes and night sweats have returned with a vengeance. The last few nights have been a grueling mixture of damp tank tops, tossing, turning and very very little sleep, leaving me sort of dazed and unraveled during the day. It's kind of like being very hung-over, without the party the night before.

For those of you who've been around awhile, you may remember I've gone the alternative route with supplements and acupuncture and though these things worked for a while, they've stopped working completely and the little estrogen pucks I agreed to last month may still not be enough. Although I swore myself to a natural perimenopause and that I would not treat it like a disease but like a natural transition in my life, I may be looking down the business end of Hormone Replacement Therapy because I'm one of those people who has to get a good's night sleep every few days or I am a wreck and not just a little fender bender, a full on hazardous chemical spill train wreck.

I am still terrified of the carcinogenic possibilities of HRT. Conceiving a child at 38 years old requires a certain amount of hubris, of feeling bullet-proof. And now that I'm a mom, I'm defenseless. I cannot risk cancer because I have a child to raise. Yet I can't be the mother, wife and human being I want to be if I'm thrashing around in a pool of sweat all night, every night.

I'm hoping this is just a hormone fluctuation and that it will get better. Every night I go to bed, hoping to sleep, hoping to not wake up drenched in sweat every two hours.

I have an appointment with my gynecologist at the end of the month.

With the Handy Plastic Applicator

Oh, there are so many other things I could have titled this post but they are all in such bad taste that I must refrain because my mom reads this blog and I would not want to embarrass her too terribly. That being said, I went for my annual visit to the gynecologist on Friday. I had to cancel an appointment earlier in the week because of the flu thing and I was still feeling a little peaky on Friday, but kept my appointment anyway.

Let me say this at the very start, I love my gynecologist. Dr. D is exactly my age and no matter what offbeat perimenopause symptom I bring to her, she can always relate. She's funny and we generally share quite a few laughs, even during the exam. Really, we just crack each other up the whole time. Since we hadn't seen each other in a year, I had lots of notes. I had a chart of my insane menstrual cycles for the year, (24 days, 66 days, 72 days, 29 days) – I'm married to a scientist, we make charts - plus a list of new symptoms. For those of you who've been around since I started this blog, you may remember that I was having terrible hot flashes and night sweats for awhile there. Supplements worked for almost a year (black cohosh and soy) and then I went to the fabulous Dr. Chen and acupuncture worked for about 9 months before everything stopped working and I was driven almost completely insane by my body's crazed thermostatic shifts. And at that time I said I would happily take Hormone Replacement Therapy even if it was labeled "cancer in a bottle" as long as I could get some relief.

The hot flashes eventually got better and have shown no sign of returning with such intensity, but to be on the safe side and to combat some other perimenopausal treats like tissue thinning and vaginal dryness (ack!) I have agreed to 2 wee and very weak estrogen pods that are inserted (and not into my mouth) twice a week. Although it does not say "cancer with a handy plastic applicator" on the box, it's all there in the fine print. Dr. D promises we'll keep a close eye on everything and I believe her. I'll see her again in eight weeks.

During the course of the visit, I had to confess that I completely spaced out my mammogram last year - lost the paperwork, every excuse in the book, but mostly life just kept thrusting itself in between me and my ability to go do the thing. After much tsking and finger wagging (which I totally deserved) from Dr. D and her office manager who is a breast cancer survivor, I was allowed to leave the office on the promise that I'd schedule my mammogram for this week. And so it with that promise in mind that I'll set out bright and early tomorrow morning to, as The Kid says, have my milkies checked.

If you haven't already, you should get your milkies checked too.

Happy Birthday to Me!

Today is my birthday and I am 46 years old. Last year I joked that I was halfway to 90. This year, I guess I'm more than halfway.

I'm proud of my age, proud of the things I've learned over the years. I'm glad that I'm not as self-destructive as I was in my twenties, glad that I'm less afraid than I was in my thirties. My forties have made me courageous. I am exploring new things, writing more, enjoying my life and my family.

I believe it's important to embrace getting older. We get older or we die, no alternative. I know that my years show. I see it in my face and my body. I will never again be the most beautiful woman in the room and I am really okay with that. I'll happily be the wisest woman in the room, the funniest woman, the friendliest, the most charming, the happiest. I'll take any of those.

I can stand in front of the mirror and I see all the wrinkles I've made over the years by smiling. My breasts no longer reside in the same zip code. I am softer and rounder than I was 10 years ago, but my legs can still walk as quickly as I could want. My arms are strong enough to hug and hold the people I love. My heart is looking with hope into the years ahead. From here, middle age is looking pretty good. Happy birthday to me.

A Whole Lotta Not Very Much

Hello from the No-Man's-Land that is the time between the actual holidays and the recommencing of school (The Kid's first grade and Lefty's Spring semester). Realizing that I was badly in need of some time alone, I set out this morning to run a few errands. Alone. I picked up a few groceries, found a calendar that will fit into this funky little wall space in my kitchen and wandered around with the cool kids in Whole Foods. I also bit the bullet and bought some circular knitting needles for this baby blanket I'm knitting for a baby boy to be born in March. The weight of the blanket on the straight needles was making my thumb hurt every time I picked the project up and I was beginning to despair.

Several people have asked what The Kid is listening to in his New Year's video. It's Joe Jackson's "Look Sharp". I have to also clarify that the MP3 player tucked into his pj bottoms is not actually an ipod. He asked Santa for an ipod for Christmas and Santa informed me that those things are sort of (ahem) expensive and The Kid is seven and sometimes forgets about new toys in the space of a Cartoon Network commercial break. So Santa found this lovely compromise which is called a Zen Stone. It's half the price of the smallest low end ipod and it holds 250 songs. The Kid doesn't even know 250 songs. Right now there are FIVE songs on his ipod. Lefty and I each chose two songs from our rather eclectic music collection that we thought he would like. But wait, you say, two plus two is four, not five. After an eternity of agonizing (maybe it just seemed this long to me) Lefty declared he could not choose two and had to have three songs and since his third choice was "Look Sharp" I let him, knowing that The Kid would love the song with it's funky keyboard break and opening drums. This has indeed become one of The Kid's favorite songs along with one of my choices, REM's "Stand".

I realize, we prove ourselves to be VERY OLD by these song choices.

Weekend Roundup

I would have posted this sooner but I was completely mesmerized by the photos of good old George Clooney over at Mrs. G’s blog. The man just keeps getting better looking. Sigh.

Anyway, we had a lovely weekend around here. The weather was somewhat cooler and there was a nice breeze. (We celebrate anything under 90 degrees around here. ) We swept off the deck and made elaborate plans to have a fire in the backyard one fine evening soon. The Kid mixed up science experiments in old coffee cans using mostly water, sticks and his own spit. I was offered the opportunity to contribute some spit to the project, but I declined.

The big news is that my hot flashes are back with a vengeance despite the tender ministration of Dr. Chen. The daytime is not so bad but I am having miserable night sweats. So terribly bad that I made an appointment with my gynecologist for two weeks from now - figuring that if this is just a spike in my crazy hormone cycle, it will have evened out by then and if not, then I will gladly go into the office and beg for a IV drip of the evil carcinogenic ESTROGEN. I said that last sentence verbatim to the secretary in her office when I called and there was this long quiet pause and then she said, “Um, ok.” Note to self: Odd sense of humor and sleep deprivation do not mix.

On a lighter note, we’re putting up Halloween decorations and The Kid’s getting a haircut this afternoon. That’s all, I cannot write another word – must horde ideas for NaBloPoMo.

My Glasses

I’ve had glasses for reading since I was in my twenties. I wore them for intensive reading and extended computer work. I also wore them for social gatherings and meetings where I felt a little intimidated. I always felt a little smarter, a little safer with them on. Basically, I wore them whenever I wanted to.

However, during the last six months, I found myself increasingly needing them for seeing things around the house. Small print is getting harder for me to read without them. Then on Tuesday I left the house without them and had to muddle through a day of work, straining not only to focus the computer screen but every document I touched. The farther away I held things, the easier they were to see but my arms are not quite long enough (though our karate teacher says I have a really long reach for a girl)!

So I broke down yesterday and bought one of those things that allow you to keep your glasses around your neck. I am officially middle-aged.