The Perfect Lapse

So I turn on the computer, intending to first do this menoblog but I got distracted by another thought in my head: to check my Facebook page. Arbitrary thoughts and nonsensical tangents flit in and out of my mind as quickly as the snow is flying outside the late April evening.

I just got back from a wonderful jaunt back east to North Carolina (not one speck of snow fell from the sky the entire week) and saw the state from border to border. I got home and because it's been a while since I was near a computer, I felt I had to catch up on a few things...,including this blog.

I proceed to the FB page and spend approximately 18 minutes browsing, answering, reading...

I then logged out of FB, my hands poised over they keyboard...and couldn't remember what I was supposed to do next.

I turned to my scientist-type boyfriend and asked, "What was it I was going to do on the computer before I logged onto Facebook?"

He pushed his glasses toward the end of his nose and looked down at me with those piercing, blue eyes, an expression of disbelief quickly replaced with one of understanding and sympathy as he realized that my short term memory is REALLY short term.

"Your blog?" he replied.

"Oh, right."

But that moment wasn't what I was going to write about but it was all I could remember to write about. As soon as I remember my thought, I'll get to it.

April...ummm....something

"You will remember the important things," my mother used to say.

"If it's important, you'll remember," someone used to say to me when I would pick up the phone to call someone and then promptly forget who it was I was supposed to call with something VERY important to say to him...or her.

Memory has always been an enigma to me. It comes. It goes...but it always came back. And it's never been a problem...until now.

I remember the basic when it came to important things like remembering to pick up my kids from school, finishing a music clearance project, remembering to go to work in the morning, remembering to announce the right call-letters at the radio station and just remembering that I had kids...a no brainer.

So imagine my surprise!

I was in the middle of a terrific "Exhausted Parent Network" radio show. The topic of the show was on traveling with the kids. I had great in-house guests, a great back-n-forth with my phone in guests and I knew that once this particular show was uploaded into www.mammothpodcast.com it would be a hit. It was one of those "feelings" you get when you KNOW something is right.

The EPN show had a sing-a-long with Danna Stroud and I belting out, "Leaving On A Jet Plane" to the version by Peter, Paul and Mary. It had a terrific interview with Erinn from the U.S. State Department talking about international travel. Katrina from www.houseexchange.com was a positive addition with her knowledge about why it's a better deal for parents to travel with their kids when they rent an entire house, for free, in another country. And Linda Kagen, an attorney from New York has a website, www.Forms4Traveling.com that will take parents on a step-by-step journey about the paperwork needed when traveling out of country with the kids...especially divorce parents.

It was a great show!

So imagine my surprise (wait...I just said that).

I turned my head to glance into the production room to make sure the levels were okay on the recording of the show and saw that I had forgotten to press the "record" button on Adobe Audition and the show had not been recorded. Dismay is putting it likely. I almost said the "F" word on the air. In fact, I did say the "F" word on the air but I altered it, using "Friggin'" instead of ...."F"...blah blah blah.

How could I have neglected to do the most important thing just before my show?

It was as if my mind blanked out!

What could have caused this lapse in my memory? I refuse to believe that what I have to look forward to as menopause slowly leaks its way in and around my bones is this type of inexcusable memory loss.

What if I start to forget the basics? What if I can't remember who I am any more when I get up in the morning? What if, one day, I forget who that fabulous looking man is beside me in bed? My bed? My bed that is in the house of someone else?

Okay, I'm being a bit melodramatic but....WHAT IF?

I think I need to go to my quote book and find some quotes from prominent people on memory loss just to make me feel better. I do have a quote book, don't I?

I did, I know I did!

Yoga-Flash

So I'm in my gentle yoga class, doing some stretch that is making my right leg throb. I can't remember the name of the stretch..hashawanda...shivasanogi...something like that. Then as a reprise from THAT stretch...we went into downward-dog.

Those of you who have been doing yoga for years know that 'downward-dog' is a pose that can be hard on your wrists and elbows if you are not used to doing a pose like that but it sure feels good on the back of the legs.

The schwavanandi-type pose before downward-dog made me sweat a little bit so I was glad when it was over. Not that I'm adverse to sweating. I've been doing the sweaty thing more than usual these days. As a matter of fact, just as I was relaxing into the downward-dog pose, holding in my core (that's flabby belly for those of you who are unfamiliar with the word "core"), my body decided that while my head was dangling down and my body looked like an upside down "V," it should proceed to the hotflash I had yet to experience that day.

Did you know that when sweat pours down your body onto the yoga mat, the mat gets rather slippery? (That's slipping and falling on your ass in yoga class for those of you who aren't familiar with the word "slippery.")

Did I loose my ATM card...again?

I remember the days when my boys were teenagers. Many of the conversations we had circled around their lack of memory. Or "selected memory" as I used to say. Did they remember to brush their teeth? Did they remember to do their homework? Did they remember to call their grandmother? Did they remember to write thank-you notes if they received a gift?

And when they started to drive..."Don't forget to call me when you get to your friends' house," or "Don't forget your drivers license!"

My memory has been okay throughout the years. I remembered.....umm.....well, you know. Anyway, now.....I was just.....DAMN!......What was I......OH YEAH! My ATM card.....

I used to pride myself in always remembering where it was and to pull it out of the ATM machine after I withdrew some money but for the third time within the last several weeks I've walked away from the ATM machine without my card.

The first time I did this I was crazed looking for it. I searched all the nooks and crannies in my car, the pockets of all my jeans and jackets, my workplace and retraced my steps for hours hoping to see the shiny blue card. When I went to the bank to report it missing, it was found in the 'lost and found' because I had left it in the machine.

The second time I 'misplaced' my ATM card I searched my purse, my clothes and when I thought I would have to retrace my steps a blizzard poured from the sky. No retracing my steps with snow on the ground. So with my tail between my legs I went back to the bank and lo and behold...someone had turned it in...again...because again...I left it in the machine.

So two days ago I realized the ATM card wasn't where I usually put it, again. Before work I pulled up to the grocery store and pulled the ATM card holder out of my purse. The card holder bent. When my ATM card is in the holder, it doesn't bend.

After working at the radio all morning I went back to the bank, hoping that someone had turned it in. I was calm and collected and didn't go crazy trying to search everywhere for the card. I had a feeling I knew where it was.

"Godfrey the Teller" rolled his eyes as he saw me walk through the bank doors. I knew then and there, without him having to say a word, that my ATM card had been turned in...again.

I smiled sheepishly as he handed me back my card.

There was nothing more I could say except to remember to say, "Thank you."

I'm trying not to freak out about why my mind literally goes BLANK after I get my hands on a few twenty dollar bills. I take the money and walk away. It's happened a few times now.

Should I panic? Or should I look up that chapter in my new menopause book?

The Female Body is Not a Car

I just got off the phone with a girlfriend who told me that she doesn't think she's ever had a hot flash...only that her body has just been overheating for the last couple of years.

What do I say to that?

How about I can be at one with my mood swings or I can quote Sylvia Path: "I have the choice of being constantly active and happy or introspectively passive and sad. Or I can go mad by ricocheting in between."

I wish I'd said that.

The Boyfriend

I just asked my boyfriend if he would follow my new MENOBLOG.

His response: "I'm living it. Why do I have to follow it?"

Enough said.

An Hour In The Life...

7:43 pm - Start to sweat as my mother gives me the earthquake chronology for the day beginning with the 7.2 in Baja

7:51 pm - Walk to the front porch with my cell phone while she's still talking to cool off.

7:55 pm - Hotflash over.

8:01 pm - Hotflash not over.

8:02 pm - Get out of my jeans and sweater, put a t-shirt on and stand back on the deck. It's a bizzard outside but I don't care.

8:05 pm - Hotflash over, go back in side. It's bloody freezing outside.

8:10 pm - Wondering what to have for dinner.

8:15 pm - Go upstairs and make Cream of Wheat

8:21 pm - Hotflash back. Cream of Wheat might be too hot to eat.

8:22 pm - Go back outside on the deck

8:27 pm - Hotflash over. Back into the kitchen. Cream of Wheat has coagulated and got hard. Not in the mood for Cream of Wheat anymore.

8:35 pm - Mom calls again with another earthquake update. I'm still hungry but not for anything hot.

8:41 pm - Decide to try Cream of Wheat again.

8:45 pm - Hotflash again. Throw Cream of Wheat down the sink. Stand outside on the deck as the snow whips around my head. Not hungry.

8:55 pm. - Have an apple. Watch Weather Channel Tornado show....on the bed...naked.

Book Waiting Blues

I normally try to go to our post office when I think that everyone else is at work. Why? Because going to our post office isn't just and in-and-out deal. It's an event. However, in this case, I was determined to slide through this event because there was a yellow card in my post box. A yellow card means that something to big to fit in the post box has arrived and they are holding it for you in the back somewhere. (I've always wondered what it looks like in the back of the post office where they hold all the yellow card goodies.)

On this day, I knew what it was because several days earlier I had ordered a special book right after I had such a knarly hot flash that it sent me flying out of the radio station to stand under the falling snow, little white, flakes sizzling on my chest and arms as they fell from the sky.

The line at the post office was out the door. Not unusual for lunchtime. People of all shapes and sizes and ages were waiting with their yellow cards. I could hear the scrunching of snowboarding pants as the "dude" in front of me shifted his weight from one leg to the other. A Latino Senora was scolding her two little boys in Spanish because they were pulling out all the colorful packing envelopes from the wall display. And among the group of us standing in line, there were about twelve, was an elderly gentleman wearing a tan ski had pulled low over his ears. He was standing perfectly still. So still, that I wanted to sneak up behind him and blow in his ear to see if he was still alive. But I didn't. But I wanted to.

I bet he wasn't picking up the type of book I was waiting for. No way. Unless it was for one of his daughters who happened to be my age and who also happened to be in the beginnings of "the change."

Friendly postal worker Debby came out from the back and announced, "Does anyone have a yellow-card?" Three-quarters of the line scrambled to the front holding their yellow cards out in front of them for Debby to collect. Once the cards were all collected, Debby dissappeard again and we shuffled to the corner, waiting patiently for our gifts.

I couldn't help but wonder if I was the only one in town expecting the book, "The Wisdom of Menopause" by Christiane Northrup. I had heard about the book years earlier but like I said, I somehow thought I would skip through this part of life since no other women in my family ever talked about it. It was something that "other" women dealt with. Not the women in my family. Or so I was lead to believe.

After about six minutes, Debby returned with an armload of goodies. She called out our PO Box numbers one by one and when mine was announced, I held out my right arm, letting the cardboard-wrapped book slip into my hands.

I jammed out to my car and tore open the cardboard. And there it was. The book. No, THE BOOK!

I opened to a page, any page hoping that the wisdom I read would be a sign that it would all be okay. What was the first sentence I read? "Like many other peri-menopausal women, I had hit a metabolic wall; our midlife bodies seem to hold on to fat for dear life until we learn the secrets of releasing it!"

Great. Now I have to learn secrets.

Menopause: Day One

It started January 20, 2010.
I live in the mountains. It's cold at night and mostly during the day but until January 20th, I didn't really appreciate the climate. I took it for granted...until that night.

It was about 3:30 in the morning and as I snuggled next to my man, the heat burned through me from the inside out. It started near my heart and worked its way out towards the rest of my body parts. I got up and stood on the deck of our house. It was cold. I was hot. A perfect match.

I knew this was going to happen but just like I didn't expect to become a grandmother before I reached the age of 50, I didn't expect Menopause to seep into my lifestyle. My grandmother(s) never spoke of it. My mother never had it because she went right from a hysterectomy to Premarin and I always thought I'd somehow be spared the journey.

But no, I'm not spared.

So hold on tight. It's going to be a ride that y'all will never forget.