The Age of Aging

All KINDS of fun things happening!

(That may be true in someone's life, but not so much in mine.)

Okay, first, I have to get this out of the way: I have been having a period for TWELVE DAYS. It is getting on my last goddamned, frayed nerve. I went nearly three months without one, and apparently my uterus decided to go ahead and save it up. If there's a goddess I can propitiate, let me know and I will make a shrine of menstrual paraphernalia for her. The thing that's annoying--other than the obvious--is that, on some level, this is perfectly normal: one of the things that happens to women around my age, as hormonal production tapers off. It's not particularly pathological, unless the bleeding is really excessive and/or one becomes anemic. but it takes a certain amount of digging around to figure that out. Annoying, yes, believe me, it is definitely that; my point, though, is that it's not caused by something being wrong or broken.

So while I would definitely appreciate something that would modulate this a bit, I don't particularly want to perform some major intervention. If you try to ask the google about it, though, you learn that the only "treatment" for it is--you guessed it--hormones. Which I do regard as a major intervention, and not at all what I had in mind. What I am going to do, however, is find an acupuncturist again, preferably the one i saw before, but someone else otherwise.

I don't know what I think about it overall, either, but really, it's not like we have a choice in this matter. Honesty compels me to note that there are times when I have my regrets, but even those are ambiguous in some ways. The obvious one is kids: I don't have any. I always said--from the time I was in my teens--that I would like to have kids if I found someone who would be a partner in raising them. I didn't want to be a single parent, either intentionally (like one very good friend of mine) or de facto (by way of reproducing with someone who regarded his part as "helping" rather than "parenting"). (Yes, I understand shit can happen and one may end up being a single parent anyway, but you know what I mean.) That didn't happen. And while I'd occasionally think about doing it myself anyway, the circumstances never seemed right--either I was in grad school, or unemployed, or not making much money plus deeply in debt, or whatever. When I met Chuck I was 40: already at the far edge of fertility, realistically speaking, and, given the fibroids that were likely already growing, actually getting pregnant might have been difficult. And given how that turned out, I'm seriously glad we didn't reproduce together. So, yeah, it might have been nice to have kids, but I can't look at a time/place nexus in my life (or a time/place/person nexus) where that could have happened. I suppose if I had made it a priority somehow I could have done it, but it always seemed to me that several things needed to be in place.

So I don't see the point of getting too wrapped up in this particular regret. I'm trying to acknowledge the bits that are there, give them their due, but I don't know what else I could or should do about it, you know? The path of regret never seems like a good choice to me; I've been down it, and it just isn't useful. I can't go back and change things. Going down the path just makes me miserable, but doesn't actually change anything.

And I'm seeing a certain flip side to it all at my current job. Some things just aren't getting me as wrapped around the axle as they might have when I was younger. Yesterday, one of the directors for whom I'm writing these proposals--but not my boss--called and asked to see what I'm presenting at the board meeting today. Now, my boss had said that that director, NOT me, would be doing the presenting, that I was just there to observe, basically. So I communicated all that. He stopped by, and my boss and he all met for a few minutes, and I said, well, look, I can talk about the proposal process, but the proposal is not ready now. And it will not be ready by tomorrow (!). What he's trying to avoid is a second board meeting, but that's obviously not possible (they'll approve the budget tomorrow, so we can submit the forms for Monday's deadline).

The upshot is that I probably will present something to the board today--what we're doing, how we're doing it, blah blah blah. I'll spend today putting that together, plus filling out the forms for Monday. My current plan is to go in tomorrow and submit the forms, under the presumption that the government's servers will be less busy tomorrow than Monday. But I can't bring myself to get seriously upset about it.