Not a Mama at Menopause

Apparently I have some “inner work” to do. Lately my brain is whirling like an Oklahoma twister. Lots of debris swirling around, transforming, shifting the old ideas about who I am.

Scary stuff, sometimes, but apparently necessary. A new phase of life has been forced upon me, whether I like it or not.

Now that I have officially passed the ability to have children without having any children, I am second guessing my childfree life.

I did not see this little “gift” of the Big M. coming, but here I am, feeling a bit bereft.

For the most part, I am content that birthing and rearing a child has not been part of my life. Of all the many reasons, (some under my control and some not) why I am not a mother, perhaps the strongest reason is that I don’t have much of a mother-instinct.

Not every woman has a strong mother-instinct. To put it mildly, this isn’t a popular sentiment to voice. I like babies and children; I never had a strong urge to have one of my own. This may seem bizarre and unnatural, but I always kind of smugly congratulated myself for realizing this lack of motherly feelings and then not fighting against these feelings and having kids anyway.

There were sweet moments when I enjoyed cuddling other people’s babies, truly marveling at the mysteries of birth. But when I handed the babies back, I was fairly happy to do so. Some women have an almost unbearable urge to have children, and motherhood is the fulfillment of a dream for them. They are meant to mother.

I respect that mothering need enormously, even if my childlessness has made me an outsider to a lot of what is central to most women’s lives. Childlessness makes me a bit defensive, too, as if I need to justify why I’m childless, or explain that I’m not evil, or emotionless because I’m not a mother.

For instance, I feel obliged to note that by teaching college students, I have had a turn at being a mother figure. Our student population here is a vulnerable one that often needs a shoulder to cry on, parental advice and motherly encouragement. There’s more than the typical amount of tears, tragedy, and trauma on this campus in a military community.

Maybe this is the mothering I was meant to do? Maybe if I had children of my own, I wouldn’t have as much energy to give to these students who do really need me, although I know plenty of teaching mothers who also boundlessly love their students.

I have had a fulfilling ten years giving myself to my students, and they have given back to me, too. Maybe I can be okay, knowing that I have loved these students, some who did not have loving biological parents to sustain them.

This does not change the revelation that I do have some grieving to get through, now that the door to motherhood is closed.

Even though I am still mostly content with an official end to my fertility, I have some truly unexpected, startling, sadness. I felt confident that I had already worked through my feelings about not being a mother prior to the final knell menopause brought to my fertility.

In reading about menopause, especially Magnolia Miller’s wonderful The Perimenopause Blog, I’ve found that grieving associated with this time of life is not unusual, whether one is a mother or not. Magnolia says we must acknowledge we are “mourning a loss" and "coming to terms with a new life on the other side of that loss.”

But the feeling of permanent loss, of no chance of a do-over, of not ever having the photogenic kind of family life that dominates social media, tv, and magazines does sting. Facebook, in particular, is soul-sucking for the childless woman. Some non-moms have deleted their Facebook accounts after it became too painful to look at other people's babies and children.

Even when we are savvy enough to realize that Facebook is mostly how people want to present their lives under best case scenario conditions, we still tend to buy into the seeming perfection. How can my childless life measure up?  Because that photo-shopped gourmet meal at the rustic table with the clean, smiling children, Dad carving the turkey, that's what family life is really like, right? At least some of the time.

I do grieve what I have missed and will never have, and I need others to understand that they can make me feel like an alien

Unfortunately, my grieving won’t be rushed, no matter how much I want to shake it off and move on to this new life ahead of me.

We're Going Indie-- This Includes You!

Something creative is in the wind with my indie family and friends. Something freeing, liberating.

I must pause and think about it, since I’m swept up in it, too.

My brother John is making an independent horror movie, F.U.B.A.R., in Michigan.

My nephew Will, in San Antonio, is making an independent kids movie, Fields Afire.

My friend R.K. Ryals is pumping out indie novels faster than I can edit them.

A little over a year ago, I leaped out in to the great independent blogging universe, where I’ve made friends with an incredibly inspired, intelligent, and literally award-winning group of bloggers. They’ve rocked my world.

We’re independent.  Hey, yo.

We’re taking it to the streets!

We’re not waiting for the man with the checkbook to tell us it’s okay to make movies, to write books, to blog our thoughts out to the great universe. 

We’re not waiting for the agent to call. We’re not waiting to be discovered. 

We’re discovering ourselves.

Exciting? Hell, yes.

New frontier. We’re at the beginning of a revolution in creativity and its distribution.

Where is it all leading? Who the heck knows?

Listen up y’all. It’ll be the ride of our lives.

This is getting good. Really, really good.

Polish up your crystal ball and tell me what you see coming.

Small, Small World

Do you have a small world story? Most of us do. Today the husband and I took a drive, looking at houses for sale. Many of you may recall that we have our albatross/McMansion with its king-sized mortgage on the market. 

No, it hasn’t sold, but local home sales seem to be taking a slight! turn for the better. So we were doing a bit of dreaming as we drove around the area, checking for a Tiny-Baby-Pseudo-Mansion. What a relief it will be to finally sell and downsize. 

A cute little house caught our eye. I had seen it online and knew it was a vacant foreclosure. We boldly pulled in the driveway to get a closer look. We were enchanted by the live oak trees, and just had to take a walk around the house to check out the sweet shady back yard.

It’s okay, don’t panic. It was a bright afternoon, and we weren’t carrying crowbars.  Here in the South if you’re middle-aged, wear glasses, have recently had a shower, and drive a minivan, people don’t generally call the cops on you for walking around a house with a for sale sign.

The retired neighbor man next door was out mulching his azaleas. He met us at the fence and we chatted about the house. It turned out that we all were originally from the same area in another part of our state, the Outer Banks. We knew a lot of the same people, and were practically related. We talked for an hour over the chain link fence, and when we parted, he kindly said he hoped we’d be his new neighbors.

What’s more, he told us the neighbor lady’s name on the other side of the little house. Hubs and I stared at each other, eyes wide. We knew her parents from the old hometown, hundreds of miles away.

Is that just a little freaky? Or is it truly a small, small world?

What’s your small world story?

Quitting the Q: Goodbye, Home Shopping

I’m coming out of the closet as a former viewer of QVC. Sadly, I can’t stomach it anymore. Yes, the astronomical prices of gold and silver have taken a little zest from my life. Goodbye, QVC.

For those of you who are sane, reasonable people who don’t watch television shopping, QVC is the biggest shopping network. On TV for over 20 years now, the company got its hold over cuckoo Americans like me by hawking gold and silver jewelry. Oh, and of course cubic zirconias, the diamond look-alikes that once sparkled in my ears.

Like many, I was turned on to the gateway drug of QVC by a girlfriend wearing a pretty gold ring. It was back about 1990 when she shyly told me she’d purchased it from TV. From TV! I was shocked, amazed, and I admit it, titillated. I wanted a pretty gold ring, too, by golly, and soon I had one. Set with pretty peridots and juicy-colored amethysts.

Oh, I was hooked.

I was living alone at that time, lonely and bored. The QVC “hosts” as they’re called, talked to me as if I was one of the girls. They worked to create “relationships” with viewers, and after all, there’s a 30 day unconditional money-back guarantee! They were there for my viewing pleasure, 24-7, always perky, showing me shiny stuff. I do like shiny stuff. Oh, those were heady years, way back before the internet, you sweet youngsters.

Only my cautious nature about spending money saved me from certain ruin. I liked gold, but after all, it was $200.00 an ounce! So I limited myself to one or two gold items a year (or every other year), and a sprinkling of sterling silver and gems here and there. I even tried a few of the cubic zirconias, but only if they were small enough to be possibly be mistaken for “real.” Oh, I was sly.

But then came the rise, seemingly overnight, in gold prices. QVC executives could not have imagined what nearly $2,000 an ounce gold would do to their programing, once so heavy with gold jewelry shows. 

Bracelets that once sold for $200.00 on their network now priced at a staggering $1,000 retail. Even sterling jewelry pieces today commonly go for over $100.00, a price that impulse buyers (is there any other kind of buyer for TV shopping?) found harder to justify.

What was a shopping channel to do? The Q started pushing designer handbags, such as Dooney and Bourke, pricey cosmetics from Philosophy and Bare Minerals, costume jewelry by Joan Rivers and Nolan Miller, fashions by Bob Mackie and Issac Mizrahi.

Eh. I tried a few cosmetics, but it just wasn’t the same rush.

What broke me of television shopping once and for all were the vacuum cleaners. When the best my on-air buddies could do was try to strong-arm me into buying a Dyson or an Oreck, I knew we were through.

A vacuum cleaner does not make my selfish, materialistic heart flutter like a 14 kt. gold bauble. No. Not nearly shiny enough. Maybe they could try embedding some cubic zirconias in the vac handles? Maybe not. 

Sigh.

Goodbye, QVC. It was fun while it lasted. Yet another former guilty pleasure gone. Sob.

P.S. I sold a pile of my old jewelry recently, and you know what? I wish I had bought more back in 1990. If only I had loaded up on the stuff, I’d be able to finance a Mediterranean cruise on the proceeds. Who’d a thunk my dirty little secret buying habits would have proved so profitable? I’m still astonished.

You’ll never get that kind of return on a pet-hair attachment super-suction vac.

End of Semester: Knocked-out (Knock-out roses)

Survived another semester. I love you, my readers. I shall live to blog another day, but for now, rest and recovery is needed. Summer semester begins in less than a week.
Happy Mother's Day and Happy Spring to all!

My "Ashley Judd" Moment: 34AAA and Saggy?

Ashley Judd, 44,  was in the news recently for her eloquent rebuttal after negative comments made about her face being "puffy" in a photo and some media people assuming she’d had “work done” or was “letting herself go.”

She asked women to share one of the moments when they were shamed about their appearance.

The first moment that came to mind was when I was 23. Yes, 23. I worked as a sous chef in a non-air conditioned restaurant kitchen in the American South. Hot!

It was the 1980’s and the style in the tiny, supremely casual beach resort town where I lived was for younger women to go braless, if they so desired. It was a bit of a hippie thing, and not at all unusual or remarkable. For me, a bra was more than a bit unnecessary.

I was well aware that most people thought I was flat-chested. That’s how I thought of myself, too, and sometimes it really bothered me. For the most part I had learned to accept that my breasts did not align with the view that bigger was better. But I had other things to worry about, and the size of my 34 AAA breasts was getting less important to me every year.

So there I was, well-covered in a cotton t-shirt, braless, reasonably confident about myself, sweating my ass off working in a broiling hot and humid kitchen. A young man, Tim, age 19 and a dishwasher, took a look at my t-shirt one day and made a hand gesture across his chest while uncharacteristically scowling. Tim and I were friendly acquaintances, although he ran with a different and younger crowd than me, the old lady of twenty-three.

I didn’t understand what his gesture meant, so I smiled and asked him what he was trying to say.

“They’re saggy. You really should wear a bra.”

Oh, yeah, he did.

“Are you kidding me?” was the only retort I managed to sputter.

Red-faced, disbelieving, stunned, stung, shamed at the criticism, invaded, humiliated, and self-conscious in a way that only a woman who has had her breasts publicly evaluated without asking for it can understand, I went to the other side of the kitchen and finished my shift under a pall of embarrassment.

Even today, I want to deny the charge of saggy breasts, even though whether they were or were not saggy does not truly even matter. It was the idea that someone else thought it appropriate to look closely at my breasts, evaluate them, and then pass that evaluation on to me in the form of unsolicited advice. That does matter, that Tim thought my breasts were ANY of his business.

Would I feel differently if he had said, “Nice rack!”?  

Honestly, yes, my indignity would have a different feeling, more like the all too familiar reaction most females are acquainted with-- unwanted sexual attention. That he was criticizing me for part of my body, one of the quintessentially “female” parts, is partly why this memory has stayed with me so long. He was telling me I was flawed.

Even though Ashley Judd was criticized for her face, an arguably slightly less embarrassing feature to have scrutinized, this experience from over 30 years ago was what immediately popped into my head when she asked other women to tell their moment.

My moment was in 1981. Ashley Judd’s was in 2012. Is anyone else as utterly sick of it and as ready for change as I am? Pervasive negativity about women and their looks has got to stop.

One way we can promote change is to avoid casual negative comments about a woman’s appearance, no matter whether we "like" the woman or not. JUST DON’T DO IT. I’ll be the first to admit that this is not as easy as it sounds, but I’m re-committing myself to this goal.

Will you join me in making an effort to change the way we talk about women?

Feel free to tell your “Ashley Judd” moment below.

Stalking Steve, My "Primal Grill" Crush

The recent alleged stalking of Alec Baldwin got me thinking. Uh-oh.  Very dangereuse, me, thinking.

Alec Baldwin? Pphht. Come on.

If I were a stalker, I could do waayyy better than Alec Baldwin. Geeze Louise with squeeze cheese on top.

If I were a stalker, I would stalk Steve Raichlen. (Note to FBI: this is completely hypothetical and represents no intent to commit an illegal act.)

Yes, the award winning Barbeque University founder and Primal Grill cooking show guy. Wrote the best sellers The Barbeque Bible and How to Grill along with 26 other books.  Trained in Paris at Cordon Bleu and La Varenne cooking schools.

Now, with Steve we have some serious stalking potential. He grills. He travels the world. He’s handsome, smart, and he GRILLS.

Have you seen his TV show, Primal Grill, on PBS? The man has at least three barbecues full of food going at once, with a few more smoking in the background for ambience. Hubba-hubba.  

He grills with gas, charcoal, hickory wood, apple wood, rotisserie style, in a brick oven, with skewers, on rosemary twigs, with rubs, marinades, brines, AND he always cleans his grill both before AND after cooking.

This is a man a girl can pin her midlife daydreams on. Hmmn. Would it be completely sexist to add him as a Pin on Pinterest? What category? For the home?

I assure you, my affection for Steve is not mere lust. No, these are feelings not only of attraction but of genuine admiration.

He’s perhaps the foremost authority on grilling habits of cultures around the globe. He’s the kind of smart that I find, well, sexy. He’s absolutely brainy. He had a Fulbright scholarship, for Pete’s sake.

He projects an air of calm, even when the game hens flare up. He never panics; he is fearless at the Weber kettle. He voice is strong, slow, and quietly confident.  In fact, Primal Grill is on in the background as I write.

He just said “What really turns me on…” and my breath caught in my throat. “Is finding a barbeque recipe that exists nowhere else in the world,” in that silky, smooth voice of his.

Now he’s wrapping a Columbian-style beef tenderloin Lomo al Trapo in a cloth with salt crust enlivened by a mix of herbs. He’s tying it up with string; his hands are masterful and dexterous. Oh, Steve has mad skills. He puts the beefy bundle in a bed of wood coals. He adds sweet potatoes, in their naked skins, to roast beside the meat. 

Just think of the anti-oxidants. 

Is anyone else feeling rather warm?

He’s wearing a natural linen button-down shirt, untucked, and his round, John Lennon glasses. Garlic-cilantro butter gets basted on the now roasted-to-perfection sweet potatoes. Steve rolls his “r” when he says “cilantro.” 

“Looks like we nailed it,” he says as he’s carving the tenderloin. “Smoky and succulent,” he adds.

Oh, Steve. Tell me more.

P.S. In case you got worried, I love my husband and he loves me! His fantasy girl is Anne Burrell, who stars on Food Network's Secrets of a Restaurant Chef. Sometimes, if I use extra hair gel, and he squints, he says I look like her!