We could have had CAKE! (Ruby)

Let’s get the Menopause thing straight…and if I already explained this to you, my apologies up front. It will occur on ONE DAY and you will not know that it is THE DAY at the time…which kind of takes all the event-planning and party-potential right out of it. Menopause is technically the one day that is one year from your last MENSES (a word I love to say in my old puckered Spinster face and voice; from Latin, plural of mensis ‘month’). Anyway, our Moms don’t tell us this because they are clueless and Doctors refuse to tell you this unless pressed, because they enjoy secrets, so I am committed to sharing what I do know – in humane terms - about this bizarre and often troublesome female passage. I kept saying to my doctor “I have been non-stop hemorrhaging to death for two years….is this menopause”?...and she would say, with a wink and a knowing but private-not-sharing-shit look “oh no…..PERI…menopause…”. So the mystery for me was the whole Peri thing, which seems to be more symptomatic than Menopause itself…you could stop bleeding altogether, or sporadically, or hemorrhage-style bleeding off and on or continuously like I did, which leaves you light-headed and distracted at work. Not to mention a million other little annoyances like hot-flashes, night-sweats, libido issues, etc…a different bundle of pleasantries for different women. My confusion was always when does it BECOME “menopause”, certifiably?? When can we drop the stupid PERI prefix? When I finally had stopped bleeding to death and I had essentially been dry docked for about one and a half years, my doctor decided I was grown up enough to hear that menopause had occurred on that magical date one year after the bleeding officially stopped. “Now you are POST-Menopausal and have been for about a half year”, she explained. My office buddy said, when I told him this, “Aw, shit…you mean we missed it? We could have had cake!”…which is why I said before that you really cannot celebrate menopause itself…only peri-hemorrhaging or Post Menopause,…which I am now thinking could go on for ever. I am in the throws of such insane hot-flashes that my back is almost always sticky, if not drenched, and at any given moment I can turn beet red and have a body temperature of 200 degrees Farenheit. Luckily since I wear my hair short and spiky-ish, hair sweat can double as styling product...a huge savings for me. Hot flashes seem dangerous though, like it’s all a mistake…as in how can our bodies endure that much heat? I think of a car that overheats and has the good fortune to be treated to care and repair when this happens while women just have to keep huffing and puffing along with steam coming out of their nostrils like furious dragons, pretending to be fine, fanning with feminine dignity at our faces with our hands or shopping lists, a shoe, whatever we can find. I have been known to run to the freezer and cram my face between the frozen spinach packages. None of it seems fair, but…whatever. My mother insists that she never actually went through menopause; I keep telling her “uh, Mom….we all actually HAVE to go through it….it’s that no-more-eggies thing…I think you were just thinking about other things at the time and maybe didn’t notice…”. And for her, that’s fine...because she’ll be 100 years old and still be adorable and stronger than I am now, flirting with her plumber, doing the girly thing…she lucked out by having no raging flashes or soaked sheets or anger management issues as a 50-ish woman. Which gets me finally to you…don’t worry about any of this…it’ll happen. I think it’s kind of cute that you have not done it yet…but are you not Peri at all?? Like no changes in your MENSES (ha!), whatsoever? Not so much as a temper tantrum? Good for you, girl!

Please do me this favor, then, so that you can be the ONE person I know who gets to have a Menopause party: carefully document the EXACT last day of every period you get from now on, since one of them is bound to be your last…then start counting…get the dang thing on your calendar and when you are about a month or two away from the one year lapse from that truly LAST one, I will work on cute, girly invitations and we’ll do it up…can’t you see it…party favors in shades of red…lot’s of red balloons, Pomegranate-Vodka-Punch (duh), red velvet cake, red jellybeans (eggs, get it?), etc…the theme has endless possibilities in my mind.
In fact I am thinking there is some career potential in this for us…we could become the Global-Menopause-Party-Planners (GMPP, Inc.), shedding light and good will upon something that can otherwise be a pinnacle of female doldrums.


Start Counting!!!! And I'll be looking for a fun red hat to wear!


Ruby