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My Profile
Gift from Hil Part 2 - 2014-12-30
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11:57 a.m. - 2011-10-21
Not that I wish or want anyone to be with me in this brain-fagged hell, but holy crow is it nice to find out I'm not alone in this mess. Since ever people have been up my butt about how skewed my perceptions are. (Too intense, too weird, too wussy, too dumb/over-sensitive/hippy-ish/paranoid/defective/needy.) So to hear from others who were normal people until menopause reached in and gave their brains a scramble too...wow! What a relief. For once it's not me and my outsized, socially unacceptable messy way of going on! How about that? I'm actually part of a gang. Doing something normal for once! Even if it is something as absurd as getting lost on my way to the insurance agent's. Me! LA the Freak. And I'm within acceptable and known parameters for the menopausal. Holy crap! Well, first time for everything, eh? My age peers are getting whammed with confusion, tears, forgetfulness, sleep dysfunction, and the rest of the unholy host of mental and physical manifestations just as I am! I'm plotzing here from the wonder and relief. And to think this maddening, frustrating, oh so painful mental mess has been marked by society at large and twisted into "Aren't middle-aged women pathetic, daffy and laughable? Sooo amusing!" Yeah? I, for one, am not amused. But I'm not alone either, so my relief is exponentially larger than my resentment. Thanks for chiming in. It helped a lot. Wolf has a quasi-first date on Saturday. He asked his very good friend, Liv, to the Homecoming Dance tomorrow night and she said she'd meet him there. He's not sure whether "I'll meet you there" means she is his date or it's a nice brush-off as in "I like you as a friend and I'll hang with you but..." In either case he's pleased with himself for asking her. I'm tickled with my kid too. Social doings are tough at that age and add in the Aspie stuff and it would have been no surprise if he'd gone through all of high school without getting the nerve up to ask a girl out. I have to keep reminding myself Wolf is half my kid too and perhaps inheriting some of my ferocious sociability offsets the innate social handicap of Asperger's. Hey, he got my eyes and good skin, so it's possible. Tonight he has a date with his old mom. We're going to Sam's for meat- Shoprite just can't match Sam's quality and prices. While we're there we'll eyeball potential Christmas gifts and have a lovely dinner at the snack bar. Wolf's jones for that nasty snack bar pizza is mystifying to me, but I guess we all have a strange goodie or two that we love but is gross to others. I had a college friend who used to top Cool Ranch flavor Doritos with spray cheese and peanut M&Ms. She called them 'PMS hors d'oeuvres'. Mick, thank heavens for small favors, has to work a football game. There isn't enough time for him to come home between the workday and kick-off so he'll stop by his folks' house. They live quite close to campus and he'll have supper there and visit with them for a bit. Works for me. In a bunch of ways. Yes, things between Mick and me are still strained. I just don't feel like glossing his shit over this time. Being all "It's okay, dear, crap all over me again, it's what I was born for." I truly don't enjoy having this wall up between us. It smacks of game playing and manipulation. But I have to be a friend to myself (finally) and if anyone other than my husband had unloaded on me like he did I'd have lowered the boom big time. As it is I told him my side as honestly and clearly as I could. Of course this was after he'd made everything about him as usual. Now it's on him to be patient until I work through my stuff. If Mick won't be the best friend a husband should be (with love and freely-given support), then he must give me the space to take care of myself. Bottom line. Funny, I always swore it was the best thing for my peace of mind if I were the sole female in my house. I could be 'The' Girl while swimming in a testosterone sea. The overwhelming female skew of my teenage years with my domineering mother and three sisters (my poor Pop the sadly neglected court eunuch) burnt me on the idea of ever willingly sharing my space with another woman. A roommate. A lover. But especially a daughter. A recipe for toxic disaster, that one, absolutely. And yet this being the only one in the house with ovaries is tough sometimes. I have no idealized rosy picture of the cozy chumminess of mothers and daughters, I know better, but it also feels like I'm forever an alien to the penis owners I birthed and married. For all that I honestly believe both genders are and should be allowed to do and be everything they long to be, there's a lot more to gender than some plumbing differences. This isn't a slam on men either. I like men. I like how furry they are. I like their B.O. I like how they can cut through the consensus building kumbaya of woman-speak and insist on doing for themselves- screw everybody else. I like how for the most part they're willing to forgo feelings in favor of getting shit done. If women had the charge of it we'd still be trying to finish the Trans-Continental Railroad. We'd have never accepted the deaths and the maiming and the environmental destruction and the outright cruelty it took to build a railroad across the Rockies. Hell, for that matter we'd have never slaughtered the Native Americans and shafted them with the reservations and disease and endless fuckery it took for the white people to own this country in the first place. I'm no fan of pemmican or living in a leaky longhouse during the winter. I like having a furnace and double-glazed windows. So in many ways the male "My way or the highway" view of things is to my benefit too and I appreciate it. It just makes for some sucky places in a marriage, that's all. And right now Mick and I are in one of those places. A He said/She said Hell. Our misfortune to get zapped with circumstance that for the first time puts him in new territory about what it really takes to share his life with a woman, and me being in THE most female thing I'll ever do again. Mick's a dick-centric bully who'd been allowed to barge around doing exactly as he pleased for 50+ years and I am a witchy estrogen-driven uber-female deep in throes of The Change. Oil and water, anyone? Of course there's love. Tsunamis of love and desire and good intention. No doubt about that. (At least I don't doubt and that's what counts.) We simply need space and time and a bit of courage and forgiveness to build a bridge and get across a breach neither of us wanted. (No pic today, I look and feel like shit.)
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