I miss 'Miss'

I don't know when it happened but I'm officially a 'ma'am.' I guess I've been one for a while but in my fervent desire to ignore any indication of aging, I lied to myself time and time again. "Oh, that sweet young checker must be speaking to someone else" had become my mantra of youth preservation. And it's been working, quite well too I might add. Until a couple of months ago, just shy of my 50th birthday, when I was visiting my 14-year-old niece.

I took Hayley to Buffalo Exchange, a hip, second-hand vintage clothing store I covet, even as the term "age-appropriate" worms its way into my consciousness. The sales girl (note to self: the fact that I refer to retail employees as 'girls' now instead of women should've been a big red flag) came over to us as we were pawing through a rack of sexy Juicy Couture tees and said, "Excuse me, miss, can I help you find anything?" and looked straight at my niece.

Then she turned to me and said, "Ma'am, we have a waiting area if you'd like to rest while your daughter shops." The nerve! I was about to tell her just what I thought about her assumptions when the mountain of slinky tanks and tight t-shirts I had precariously balanced on my arm slid to the ground.

"Jeez!" the sales girl exclaimed, as she tried to catch the falling merchandise. "Why don't I put these in a dressing room for your daughter to try on when she's ready?"

"They're for me," I said dryly.

"Okaaaaay," she drawled, looking right past me, perfectly shaped eyebrows arched, to her coworker who was smirking in the corner. "Of course they are!" she added, each word slow and meticulous as if speaking to a child. I swear she winked.

"Nevermind," I sighed, handing over the remaining items still drapped on my arm. "I'll be out in the car," I told Hayley and marched out of the store in mature indignation.

That's when I realized that if being a 'ma'am' meant I had to start thinking about clothes as age-appropriate, I'd rather be called 'sir.'

The Shower Squirrel (or Hair Today, Gone Tomorrow)

This morning while I was washing my hair, I noticed a small furry creature peering at me from the shower drain. I tried to ignore its presence as I squeegee’d the extra water from my scalp, being careful to not let it run into my ear, because for some reason, in the last year my ears have become super sensitive to external influences like water, fingers, q-tips, air.

When I finished towel-drying my hair I took a deep breath and bent down to investigate the critter inhabiting our shower. It didn't seem frightened by my advances. On the contrary, the fuzzy beast stood its ground, smirking at me at me in smug satisfaction. Incensed by this unwanted visitor's lack of respectable fear, I grabbed the little fucker by the neck and flung it out of the shower where it came to rest on a piece of chipped tile. There it sat, brown and stringy and wet and dead. I gingerly picked up the massive hair rat between by thumb and forefinger and disposed of it once and for all.

As the toilet gurgled its disapproval of having to gulp down this offending gnarl of hair I ran my hand across my still-wet head. I pondered the future of my once-lustrous locks, which could now be found more and more often gathered together around the drain like escaped follicles liberated from my scalp--hirsute casualties of my ongoing battle with the big 'M'.

I sat down on the side of the tub and stared at my hair brush. One word, just one word, and through the mirror you go, I warned. The brush wisely declined to comment.

You know you're grown up when...

a) You can't wait for your brand new crimson Maytag washer and dryer to be delivered;and b) You find yourself ironing place mats and napkins.

It's all true. If you had told me 20 years ago that the highlight of my month would be the arrival of new appliances, I would've denied it vehemently. A trip to Disneyland? Yes. A weekend in Vegas? Absolutely. Madonna's new CD? Sure, why not. But for a washer and dryer to elicit such pure joy that they actually brought tears to the eye is just downright old.

Choking on Hormones

I took a blogging course early this year with the hope of resurrecting this blog. One of the assignments was to reference something I'd written before. My busy brain hard at work, I tried to imagine how I could work menopause into a quick piece I'd created for Associated Content a few years back. Because, really, isn't it all about me anyway?

Here's a link to the Noise in My Head blog. Tennis players or other athletes may get an added bonus from this read. Ha.

Skin Stuff

I've noticed moles getting bigger, one in particular that's on my leg, right on the front of the shin for all to see when I dare to wear shorts. Anymore, I shy away from showing my gams because I've been blessed with varicose legs.

I inherited some great qualities from my mother, like excellent skin tone and a nice mouth, but also some things that are not so wonderful, including (but not limited to) big, ugly, raised, blue-gray veins that crisscross my legs like a deranged road map. I don't get those cute little pink spidery ones--mine are 8-lane interstates, and they're everywhere.

Back to the mole. So I have this mole on my shin and while it's still nice and round, it seems to be growing. Maybe it's just that my skin is stretching to accommodate my late 40s fat gain, but it's still concerning me just a bit. I got online and did some research like a dutiful little hypochondriac, and on one site it said that if your mole is bigger than a pencil eraser, you might want to have it checked out. So there I was at my office, my leg hitched up on my desk, my jeans rolled up, pressing the wrong end of a pencil into my leg. Sure enough, it's bigger.

The reason for all this paranoi is that someone very close to me has been diagnosed with skin cancer. Fortunately it's not melanoma, but unfortunately it's not basal cell variety either. It's a little more serious but with a 98 percent success rate when treated early. And I'm very confident it's early enough, but still a scare. I guess that's one more health concern we have to look forward to as we age.

Skin stuff. Please keep an eye on your epidermis, folks. It could save your life.

No more flipping of the finger

It's happened. I can't flip anyone off anymore. At least not first thing in the morning. Not that there's anyone I really need to flip off first thing in the morning, save for the poolman peering in the window before I've put on my 'face' or the trash guys who clatter down the street before god-fearin' folks are even awake. But it's nice to know you can give someone the bird on command.

Problem is my hands don't want to work in the mornings. Not sure if it's arthritis or too much salt or not enough salt or a hormonal imbalance or some rare Nubian disease I picked up telepathically while watching the National Geographic channel, but my fingers don't want to do what I want them to do. They just don't.

The other morning my right hand was completely numb, kind of like when your foot falls asleep, but this time it took about half an hour to come back to life. No joke. And after it did, I couldn't make a fist or even pick up a cup of coffee for another half. I ask you, WTF? I'm waaaay too young for these shenanigans. I'm also too young to be using the word 'shenanigans.'

The point is I'm barely pushing 50. My doctor father will tell you it's because I do too much with my hands between typing all day,knitting at night, playing tennis in the mornings, and the bare knuckle cage fighting on weekends.

I've decided he might be on to something, so I'm giving up the knitting.

The Musty Mother of Invention

Once again, my sleep, which is restless anyway since beginning perimenopause, was interrupted by a dream. In my dream, I was running a marathon and I was just about to cross the finish line--alone, because I had left everyone else stumbling in my wake--I slipped in a pool of my own perspiration. Humiliated, I writhed on the dirty asphalt of some random city street where they have such silly things as marathons, the sweat pouring off me in rivulets, which became streams, which became a river that swept up all the other marathon participants sending them crashing into buildings and traffic lights. I could see their heads and numbered bibs bobbing as they briskly flowed into a dirty ocean created by the fervent pumping of my sweat glands.

I screamed out, "Please forgive me, for I know not what I've done!" for ruining the race and quite possibly drowning a few of the runners, but my apologies were lost in a gust of rancid wind. I awoke in a panic, my sheets soaked from what are becoming regular bouts of night sweats, and my skin prickling from the soft whir of the air purifier.

I whispered to my partner, "Are you sleeping?" She obviously didn't hear me so I added a gentle nudge and asked a little louder.

"Hey, are you asleep?" "Wha?" she responded.

"Oh good, I was afraid maybe I woke you up with my sweating. I had this really weird dream..." I proceeded to tell her all about it, and even made her touch the damp sheets on my side of the bed.

"Sorry 'bout that," she said with a yawn. "Too bad they can't make sheets like diapers."

"Go back to sleep, you're not making any sense," I said, and got up to get a towel to place over the wettest part of the sheet so I could try to finish out the night without catching pneumonia. As I laid in bed, I started to think about what she said about sheets as diapers, and suddenly the proverbial light bulb went off in my dusty brain, singing away the cobwebs and other assorted debris that had gathered there since my hormones made concentration a periodic and very tedious activity.

Moisture-wicking linen! They make athletic clothing out of moisture-wicking material, why not sheets? What a great idea! I shook LB. "You're a genius!"

"Wha?" she groaned. "That thing about diapers; It's brilliant!"

"S'good. Night now."

I decided to let her sleep while I lay awake preparing a marketing plan for our new invention that was sure to make us millionaires, nay, trillionaires! With the female portion of the boomer generation securely anchored in menopause and the Gen Xers not far behind, the timing was perfect. I got as far as the first line of the jingle, "Keeping Dry is No Sweat"... when I realized we were out of toothpaste and this took me right into a shopping list, which then led me to having to drive to Costco and the fact that my car needed an alignment, which made me look at the fact that Costco gas is cheaper than Shell, which got me thinking about the economy, which made me so depressed I thought what's the point of inventing moisture-wicking sheets since no one can afford to buy anything, which made me anxious so I started sweating all over again.

Such is the circle of insanity at three o'clock in the morning.