getting older

Perimenopause



I have never been a fan of my plumbing. From the day my mother handed me a little booklet with characters out of a John, Jean and Judy book explaining the “exciting and wondrous miracle puberty”, I pretty much knew that girls got more than their fair share of the short end of God’s stick. It starts with not being able to be an altar-boy and just goes down hill from there. I think I was in sixth grade. Not quite twelve. And big for my age. So, my mother assumed, incorrectly I might add, that it was time to bring me up to speed on the whole menstruating thing. As it turned out, I didn’t start having a regular cycle until the beginning of eighth grade and that my greatest source of information about getting my period was not my mother, who’d had a hysterectomy before I was even born and hadn’t ever had what one could call a “normal” cycle, or the charming pamphlet or even the 1960-ish filmstrip presentation the sisters at my school inflicted on all the girls when they reached a “certain age”. No, like most things to do with the nether regions of my body – I learned what I needed to know from my peers. A dubious source of information to be sure but one that has stood the test of generations of young people everywhere. That is to say – the near-blind leading the legally so.

Now that I have once again reacher “a certain age”, I am finding that my peers are once again the leading edge of information as I wander, sometimes willingly and sometimes resentfully, into the valley of the shadow of menopause. 

Ironically, it is my husband who has supplied me with much of my current information as he as been down this path, so to speak, before with his late wife. All manner of natural supplements have been suggested for my own good and his comfort. Black Cohosh and red clover for hot flashes, he thinks. The hot flashes are mainly a night time thing right now and only around that time of the month. Too much information? The change is like any other phase in a woman’s reproductive and sexual existence. When it is in season, it is fair game for conversation. That’s why preteens obsess about their breasts and when they will get their firs period and teens and twenty somethings can think and talk of little else but sex. It’s why married women suffer, loudly, about baby hungry and pregnant women will divulge the most intimate (and disgusting) information to anyone without even being asked for it. Labor and Delivery stories, breast-feeding adventures, and the big C of life – we are arguably more fascinated with our bodies than any man could ever be.

I am technically not menopausal. I know this because I was having issues last spring and my wonderful doctor did blood tests and had an ultra-sound done just to make sure that nothing more sinister was afoot (which caused a fair degree of worry for both Rob and I because we are now firmly in the camp of “it can happen to us” because it has). As it turned out I am just experiencing that long and winding down part of the reproductive years. From my reading, I know that it can take up to a decade to wind down to the point of actual menopause and that your best predictor for a time frame is the age at which your mother and grandmother stopped unwinding and ground to a halt. Being adopted, I don’t have that information. But, given that I was about 42ish when I first noticed things starting to change, then 52ish is a good guess. That’s eight years. Good God. That is a heck of a long time to wait for the demise of something I have never been all that fond of in the first place, and the list of symptoms that I am/could experience just bring up the short stick thing I mentioned earlier. One of the symptoms I noticed on the list was memory and concentration problems. Oh great. First it is PG brain, then mommy brain, followed by caregiver brain and then widow-brain. Top these last six years off with the hormonal (or lack thereof) induced thinking blips caused by peri and definitely menopause and by the time I am in my “right” mind again I will be too far gone in senior “moments” to notice.

Until recently, the whole aging thing hadn’t been a big deal to me. I look a tad younger than most of my peers – which I attribute to good genes and a near shunning of the sun when I was a teen and in my youngest adult years (fat girls don’t wear bathing suits). But, the white hair is getting harder to hide with just highlights and the physical things I once did without thinking need to be thought about it, and I am not sure that when you throw hormonal imbalance on top of this that I am as indifferent to getting old as I have been in the past. Rob is always talking about having this finite number of “good” old age years. As he sees it, one can still be okay – as in fit and healthy – enough to do as they would like during the 50’s and into the 60’s but that one gets maybe about 15 years max once you reach the top of the hill and round over. That is so depressing and what is worse is that I appear to be under the elder Boomer delusion that I will still be functional as a 70+ year old. Of course, perhaps I will. I read an article in the Globe yesterday about a couple of studies down with centenarians that determined it is not simply good genes that help people live into their 90’s and hit the 100 mark. Lifestyle is key as well and that they really can’t say when it is too late to improve one’s lifestyle. 

It is not easy. Undoing the damage of caregiving and the stresses of the last years. Going on six now since Will’s first troubling symptoms began. I have started Yoga and I find that if I ignore the Mahareshi side of it I enjoy it quite a bit. I walk. I even have Rob walking. I can run again but try not to overdo it as it is hard on my knees. I lift weights. Heavy ones. I am Zena. I am a near total vegan but I need to work on the fruit thing. I hate out of season fruit. It’s squishy during the winter. How can anyone think about putting squishy fruit in her mouth without gagging?

Perhaps I will do okay. 102 is a good age to shoot for, don’t you think. One can’t set too lofty a goal where living is concerned, in my opinion.

Bikinis and Me


I recently began deep water workouts again. I abandoned weight training in favor of a similar program about 8 or so years ago, and it proved to be a very effective program. Toning, strengthening and best of all it was in the water, my adopted second home at the time. Fast forward to now. I happily discovered that the local pool offered a deep water class twice a week for an hour. The upside is that it is as good a workout as I remember, and the downside is that it is from eight to nine in the evening. It’s not even five, and I am ready for a nap.

My current swim attire turned out to be unsuitable for water workouts, as I feared it would. Tankinis have a tendency to “fly up” in the water when you are aqua-sizing. Back in the day, I wore a two piece. I owned quite the assortment of bikinis, and I made good use of them. During the summer, I swam nearly everyday, and a bikini top was pretty standard for me under my t-shirt and sometimes without the tee at all if it was warm enough. When I mentioned to Rob that I owned several of these suits, he asked if I had been an exhibitionist. I never thought of myself that way then though I suppose, looking back, I was. Growing up I had been quite uncomfortable with skimpy because, as I have mentioned before, I was pretty hefty. When I reached thirty though, years of religious work out, including an avid love of running, had put me in the physical shape necessary, in my opinion, to carry off a two piece. However, pregnancy and years of care-taking pretty much wiped up my gains, both physically and confidence-wise. Though I am in actuality thinner than I was a decade or more ago, I am not nearly in as good a shape, but I needed a two piece to be able to work out sans annoying suit.

So yesterday, I trekked across Edmonton (by myself thank you very much) to the West Edmonton Mall. It’s fall here in Canada and the swim-wear is gone from the department stores, but there are plenty of specialty shops at West Ed because Canadians, as I have oft-mentioned, take their holidaying seriously. The Surfco shop was nothing but suits and the vast majority were really tiny bikinis. Sure they had one piece suits that would have worked, but I just can’t work out in them. They are too short=bodied for me. So, with the help of a very pretty and annoyingly thin shop girl, I picked out three suits that I hoped wouldn’t shatter all the confidence I had built up just for this occasion and into the dressing room I went.

The first suit was actually too big. It feels great to try something on and find that it is too big for you. That doesn’t happen often. Usually things fit but are too short or not the right design for my frame, but too big is always a treat. The next suit, I have to admit, I looked pretty darn good in for someone my age. I read recently that the actress Demi Moore has spent about a half million dollars on “upkeep’s and upgrades” for her body. She is a year older than I am, and looks better than both her teenage daughters, but she has the too-taunt facial expression that screams “botox” and a stomach too flat for a mother of three that plainly pronounces her a cheater because once you’ve given birth there is a certain curvature to the solar plexus that you will never be rid of regardless of how stringent your diet or vigorous your workout routine. Looking at myself in that light blue sting bikini, yes….it was a string bikini, I felt sorry for her. I looked great. No muffining over the stings. The bum cheeks didn’t have that stuff sausage look of trying to put too much flesh into to small of an area. Yeah, my stomach could be more flat and my thighs a shade thinner, but I am nearly forty-four. I’ve had a child and know the stress of long term care-taking. My arms and legs have seen a bit of sun, though no deliberate sun worshipping. I am not young and firm and impossibly thin though I am smaller than the average size American (and Canadian for that matter) woman.

However, I didn’t get the string bikini. Maybe if Rob had been shopping with me, I could have been (easily) persuaded, but my old prejudices and standards wouldn’t allow the purchase. Looking good for my age, doesn’t quite cut it with me even now. Last year I would watch the girls in the high school where I taught with a feeling that couldn’t decide if it was admiration or horror. They would strut proudly up and down the halls wearing clothes that were clearly designed with small and taunt in mind, not pudgy, paunchy and even quite overweight. When I was in high school, well…..I wore a uniform it was Catholic school, but girls of a certain size were barred from wearing “thin girl” outfits. And this was not just a social admonishment, it was by design. There wasn’t yet the financial incentive needed by clothes makers to cater and pander with lycra and spandex enticements.

Suit number three turned out to be the winner. And not by default. There is something about practical, functional and sexy rolled into one that takes a clothing purchase to the next level past shopping nirvana. It’s halter style made it good for actual use in the water, and it fit even better than the string one, although there is something about a string bikini that just says sexy in a way that no other suit truly does. For my part I am pleased to be back into a two piece. Believe it or not it is part of the reclaiming of myself process that has been going on for a long while. I modeled it for Rob later that evening and he pronounced it hot looking. Of course there is some bias there.