Fifty and Other F-Words

by Margot Potter

  Billions of dollars are spent researching, marketing, and promoting solutions for erectile dysfunction—a global crisis, apparently—but comparatively little money is spent researching, marketing, or promoting solutions for the symptoms of menopause.

  I realize that not being able to get a boner is a tragedy, but not being able to function in your day-to-day life without wanting to run off into the woods screaming is a bit more challenging. I’m just saying.

  cactus flower

  I have been dragging three cacti around for years. They were given to me to care for, and I’ve done my best, despite my brown thumb. They’re barely hanging on, and only thrive in the summer months when they can sit outside and soak up the sunshine and raindrops. They’re bedraggled and half dead, and I have counted them almost out many times. Yet, ever the stalwart fighters, they continue to surprise me. One cactus has grown a flower every year. This little cactus is half dead. Yet, somehow, it summons the will to form a stem and grow a flower that blooms for eight glorious hours. Weeks of anticipation, for eight hours of triumph.

  I can relate to this little cactus. Sometimes I feel half dead, bedraggled, and lacking in sufficient sunshine and raindrops. There are days and even weeks when I think whatever hope I had of blooming again is delusion at best. Last week was one of those, and it was a doozy. I was down, out, and being pummeled relentlessly. It was tragi-comical, emphasis on “tragi.”

  There’s a pattern of late: A seemingly wonderful opportunity appears out of nowhere! I get super excited about it!

  “Hooray! New opportunity!” Take that, Failure.

  Failure: “Not so fast, honey.”

  Then the new opportunity fizzles spectacularly.

  Me: “Crap.”

  I toss up my virtual white flag and surrender.

  “Okay, Failure. You win, I give up. I’m just a half-dead cactus in a crappy clay pot.”

  Resounding silence.

  Me: “Whatever.”

  This morning, I woke up with a renewed resolve. I remembered that I’m not alone. There are millions of women like me. Our knowledge has value, our passion has not faded. We’re not half dead, we’re fully alive. Late bloomers bloom best, because we’re survivors.

  We’ve survived the unspeakable, we’ve navigated the impossible, we’ve been knocked down, shut up, and rejected over and over again. Yet, ever the stalwart fighters, we continue to surprise. We summon the will to form a stem and grow a flower even if it only blooms for a few hours. Then we do it again.

  We may be counted out, but we’re only out for the count if we refuse to get up and fight. We’ve got plenty of bloom left in us.

  Everything You Ever Wanted to Know about Menopause, But Forgot to Ask

  What, exactly, is menopause? Well, first there’s perimenopause. Perimenopause is triggered by the decrease in the production of the hormones estrogen and progesterone. Perimenopause begins several years before the cessation of menstruation. As your estrogen and progesterone levels fluctuate, you experience physical symptoms. Menopause begins when menstruation ends, and once you are a year into menopause, you’re officially post-menopausal. That said, the symptoms can continue long after you have reached post-menopause.

  Beyond the cessation of the ability to conceive a child, a woman’s body changes in myriad ways. Everyone is different, but here’s a fun-filled overview of what happens to a woman’s body when the production of these hormones is decreased enough to trigger menopause. You may experience some of these things, all of these things, or none of these things, in which case, go eat some kale and leave the rest of us alone.

  • Menstruation ceases. I think we can all get behind that initiative.

  • Your vagina dries up. This makes sex challenging, thus the lady lubricant market.

  • The fluid that has left your vagina takes refuge in your tear ducts.

  • Your bladder goes on strike. This makes sneezing, laughing, and coughing rife with potential for embarrassing leakage, thus the adult diaper market and jokes about older women peeing themselves.

  • Sleep becomes elusive. You may find it difficult to fall asleep or find yourself waking up every hour or so staring at the ceiling. Lack of sleep will contribute to your rapidly declining enthusiasm. Whee.

  • Sex, well, it’s complicated. For some women the libido exits stage left, for others it goes on overdrive. The good news is that accidental pregnancy is no longer a concern. There’s something upon which we might hang our cervical cap.

  • Your mood swings rival Jack Nicholson’s in The Shining.

  • You experience the hot, wet excitement of night sweats. It might be a good time to stock up on rubber sheets and terry-cloth pajamas.

  • You run out of enthusiasm regularly due to lowered energy levels. Coffee will become your new best friend as you and Juan Valdez begin a steamy affair.

  • Your belly bloats, making you feel like the saddest float in the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade.

  • You are introduced to the joys of foughing and faughing. This is the combination of a fart and a cough or a fart and a laugh. These often happen in rapid succession. It’s especially fun in public, like, say, in the cereal aisle at the grocery store. Fough, faugh, repeat. Follow up with jazz hands—it adds a little something extra to the performance.

  • Your bowels revolt, making processing last night’s dinner an ongoing challenge. We’ll call this New Adventures in Digestion, because at least it sounds like fun.

  • Your skin starts itching an itch that no scratch can alleviate.

  • Mood swings are soon joined by irrational, debilitating anxiety. This is most likely to arise in the wee small hours of the morning when you are wide awake and staring at the ceiling. This creates a phenomenon I call “brain spinning,” whereupon you obsess over things you cannot change. This can go on for hours, and is best alleviated by getting up and watching TV. This is how the home shopping industry was built.

  • Your waistline, left unchecked, expands in direct proportion to your shock and awe. I recommend stocking up on stretchy pants.

  • Your pores expand to the size of small craters. You find yourself eyeballing spackle with renewed excitement.

  • Your bones become brittle. You will give them new nicknames like snap, crackle, and pop.

  • Your heart becomes vulnerable in more ways than one.

  • Your skin begins to wrinkle and sag, thus the multimillion-dollar magical cream market. You’ll wonder who that wrinkled, saggy old woman is in your mirror. It’s you. Surprise!

  • Your face loses volume as underlying facial fat disappears. This is what leads aging actresses to overfill their faces with silicone in a futile attempt to regain their youth. There’s a procedure that involves taking fat from your posterior, processing it in a centrifuge, and injecting it into your face to restore volume. Yes, your face will look like your ass, but in the best way possible!

  • Your neck becomes unrecognizable. You’ll start considering the logic of turtlenecks in August and stocking up on decorative neck scarves. See chapter 5.

  • You feel as if your entire body is on fire while raging hot lava is pumped into your veins, rolling up from the tips of your toes to the top of your head. This is called a hot flash, which is a misnomer. It’s not a flash, it’s more like a firing squad.

  • Your hair begins to go thin on the top of your head, usually toward the front, making it impossible to hide. Fret not because new hairs will begin to appear on your chin to divert attention away from your thinning hairline. What fun! I call them chiskers (short for chin whiskers) and I hate them. Fuck you, chiskers.

  • Your feet dry out, your toenails thicken, your fingernails thin, and the backs of your heels crack and peel. Pedicures move up to the top of your to-do list.

  • Your skin thins, turning seams on socks and tags on garments into torture devices.

  • Your brain abandons you at crucial moments.

  Menopause: More fun than a barrel of vaginal lubric
ant! Sign me up! Wait, don’t. Shit, someone already did.

  Basically, menopause is the flip side of puberty. Back then, you were feeling the overwhelming rush of hormones and now you’re feeling the overwhelming angst of their departure. I’d like to take this moment to award my stalwart husband a prize for surviving the dual assault of puberty and menopause. Yes, my daughter and I went through the change together. I’m still changing, but she’s made the leap into womanhood. We all survived mostly unscathed. Mr. Potter has managed to maintain a sense of humor and much of his sanity. I believe this was achieved by the judicious use of headphones and extended walks with the dogs.

  The thing is, no one seems to care very much about menopause, or menofuckingforever as I like to call it. It’s a lady problem, and you know how that goes. It’s also an old lady problem. This means we need to keep that shit to ourselves. We are expected to suffer through it silently, just as we suffered through puberty, PMS, periods, pregnancy, and childbirth. Keep your chin up, darling. Have another glass of wine. It’s not a big deal. Yet, it is a very big deal when you are attempting to deal with it and deal with the logistics of day-to-day life while maintaining the appearance of sanity.

  But your experience does not have to be the same as my experience. You do not have to suffer silently. You can arm yourself with information. You can demand solutions. You do not have to participate in the great capitulation. There are days when I feel like running away and joining the circus, and days when I feel like I’ve got this under control. I just keep putting one foot in front of the other. It gets easier with every step. It helps to reach out to other women who are on the same path and share the road for a while. It helps to laugh at the absurdity of it all, especially when you feel like crying. It helps to scream into a pillow on occasion. Eventually, the good days outnumber the bad. It gets easier. It took some effort, but I found my groove and I’m making my way to the other side, and you can too.

  Mom

  If you had told 25-year-old Margot that she would be married with a child at 34, she’d have laughed out loud. While I was in graduate school in Pittsburgh, I met the man who would become my husband. At the time, after a series of unfortunate relationships, I was not in the market for a significant other. Yet, something about him caught my fancy and soon we were dating. A year later, we were married, new parents, and moving to eastern Pennsylvania to open our own business. Eighteen years later our daughter, Avalon, started her freshman year in college. I never imagined that I could love anyone as much as I love my child. She is my best creation, by far. She continues to delight me on a daily basis. She’s my best friend, my favorite flavor, the sprinkles on my ice cream, the peanut butter to my chocolate. We’re so much alike it’s scary, yet different enough to find myriad reasons to disagree about virtually everything.

  Being a mother is one of the hardest jobs on the planet. Your mission is to raise your children, equipping them with everything they need to thrive without you. You don’t get time off for good behavior, you don’t get sick days, and you don’t get any medals for your sacrifices. Your heart has to open up completely, which means that when they leave it will crumble. I didn’t know how difficult it would be. I was not prepared for the gaping hole my daughter’s absence would leave in our home. Letting her go is the hardest thing I’ve ever done.

  Had I known just how hard it would be to let her go, perhaps I’d have been more present, more mindful, more fully in the moment with her while she was growing up. I look back at summers spent frantically chasing book deadlines, or afternoons when she’d rush in from the school bus to tell me a story and I found myself torn between working and listening intently. I’m ashamed to say that work won out more often than not. You can’t get those moments back. You can’t get the moments of exquisite boredom back, either, though you realize in hindsight just how precious they were. I’ve done a lot of deep thinking over the past few months. I’ve battled the demons of regret. I did my best, after all, and that’s pretty much all any of us can do. I’ve decided to cut myself some slack.

  My wise friend Tamara once said, “Childhood is something you get over, like a bad cold.” I think she’s right on that one. My daughter knows she is loved. She’s had plenty of my time, attention, and affection. Whatever indignities she’s suffered by my less than perfect parenting have not crushed her hopes or dreams. As much as looking back may make us misty-eyed and romantic, the truth is most of us do our best as parents. We go into it with the best of intentions. We get it right some of the time and we get it wrong some of the time.

  There’s the romanticized, soft-filtered, greeting-card version of parenting, and then there’s reality. Not every moment of raising children is a blissful, fun-filled, happy-go-lucky adventure. A lot of it is boring, exhausting, thankless, and unrelenting. Kicking ourselves for not parenting perfectly is absurd. Women constantly judge themselves and other women for not living up to impossible standards. I grew up in a time when kids played outside, all day long, and no one came racing after us to see what we were doing. I’m shocked that I survived childhood, considering the ill-advised nature of much of what my friends and I did together. Cries of “I’m bored” were met with sidelong glances and suggestions that we clean up our room or go play outside. I never doubted for a moment that I was loved, but I didn’t expect my busy single mother to be a one-woman entertainment committee. I learned how to entertain myself. The idea that given another chance we’d relish every second is a faulty one. If your children have left you and successfully entered adulthood, give yourself a pat on the back. You did your job.

  The Summer of Frantic Denial

  I have been in a mostly uninterrupted state of blissful denial this summer. Blissful denial is not quite the truth. I’ve more honestly been in a state of frantic denial. There’s been plenty of distraction from facing the empty nest. I’ve busied myself with TV appearances, packing, moving, unpacking, decorating, cleaning, and other domestic diversions. The day when my only child leaves for college is rapidly approaching. I am therefore savoring every delicious final moment. I’ve roped and wrangled her into all sorts of excursions to buy pillows, furnishings, and knickknacks. Any excuse for the two of us to slip away and enjoy an afternoon together is fair game. I don’t feel even the least bit guilty about that.

  What a gift she is, and what a joy it has been to raise her. What a smart, funny, thoughtful young woman she has become.

  People seem to find some sadistic joy in reminding me that she’s leaving. What is wrong with people? Can’t they see that I’m barely holding it together? Insert sound of screeching tires and shattering glass here. I can sense it coming, as they exhale, look me straight in the eye with feigned concern, and ask, “What are you going to do when she leaves? How are you feeling?”

  Seriously? How do you think I feel? I feel bereft. I feel heartbroken. I feel like the soft, cozy rug is being pulled out from under me. I feel like that fucking rug has been hiding an endless pit into which I might just fall. I feel like crap. This is going to be the hardest thing that I have ever done. This is going to make me feel unfathomably miserable. There are rivers of tears preparing to flow, damn it. She’s going to be two hours away and it is going to feel like we’re on different planets. We’ve had two practice runs at this, and she’s horrible at staying in touch with us. Snapchat, you’re my only hope!

  She’s my only child. There aren’t any others waiting in the wings to distract me from the sadness just a little. I can’t even begin to imagine what it will be like not having her here. I don’t want to imagine it.

  How am I feeling? I am feeling awful, quite frankly.

  Thanks for asking.

  I’m also feeling proud, excited, and deliriously happy for her. But those feelings don’t dull the abject pain of facing the empty nest. Still, I signed up for this job 18 years ago, and this is part of the deal.

  Here’s to the Summer of Frantic Denial, the Fall of Sorrow, and the Winter of My Discontent. I’m holding out hope for the S
pring of Thoughtful Refocus and, upon her most auspicious return, the Summer of Love.

  Empty Nest Syndrome or the Home Goods® Problem

  According to Wikipedia:

  EMPTY NEST SYNDROME is a feeling of grief and loneliness parents may feel when their children leave home for the first time, such as to live on their own or to attend a college or university. It is not a clinical condition.

  It is not a clinical condition. Therefore, they don’t make a pill for that. They do, however, make vodka, and for that I am grateful. Note of caution: Empty nest syndrome can cause depression, loneliness, identity crisis, marital conflicts, and alcoholism. Use vodka sparingly.

  The first rule of order: Take advantage of the new empty room in your house. Rather than maintaining a shrine to your not-so-wee one, take her departure as an opportunity to create a room of your own. Virginia Woolf recommended it highly. Man cave, schman cave, you need a lady room and, by golly, you’re going to get it!

  I have discovered something disturbing. I’m not sure if this is a nationwide epidemic, but here’s how it played out for me. While my husband and I were moving our daughter into her dorm, we moved ourselves into a tiny apartment. I decided to toss most of our old stuff that we’d been lugging around for the past 18 years and start fresh. I was tired of looking at the same old crap. I’ve been frequenting Home Goods on a regular basis in search of new wall art and happy tchotchkes to perk up the apartment. Since I work for myself and from home, my forays into civilization, which is a hike from Amish country where we currently live, happen during weekdays.