Acting my age

 Last week I was at my best friends lake house and we sat in the sun room at the end of the day drinking the brandy old fashioned's that I adopted from my years in Wisconsin.

It was a delight. Two women who met in 1993 as newly engaged, bright eyed young women who were in some kind of misguided internal race to become married, now sat at 55 and 56 remembering. Neighbors in a place where neighbors got you through the long stretches of winter when you were practically snowed under, or with whom you sat on the porch during the summer lobster BBQ on the front lawn and laughed your drunk assess off as people ran from the rain. 

She and I have long decided that it was we who were the prizes to be won and not the men  we had married. To be sure, we love them - but we are the bedrock of our families.  We were the prizes. We just didn't know it at 21 and 22. 

We try to spend a week together, relatively alone with one another. I spent my week working on the Fat fish rug. It's a present for her and I was hoping to finish while I was there. Its cold in the mornings on Bow Lake in September. I would wake up late - 9:30 or 10:30am, all cuddled up in my blankets. She would have already started working and I could hear her but it never bothered me.

I'd wander down, brush teeth, wash face, and get my small breakfast. I'd head out to the sun porch to see the lake, greeting an old friend. This lake where I was a new bride and a new mom. This lake where I dipped a new born Emily's feet, and later taught her to swim - and to be calm and collected around water, just in case.  Living with a lake outside of your front door means you don't fuck around in teaching your child water safety. No child proof fences  on the shore. 

Some days I'd lay on the dock and dangle my feet in the water.  It's quiet on the water this time of year. Sometimes the loons call, but mostly it's water, wind and lapping waves.  I like to think that the lake tastes my skin and remembers me. 

I would make bohemian lunches - cut vegetables, cheese, a fresh peach and crackers and hand them through her office door while I would meander some more satisfying my own strange and inexplicable eating jags.  She doesn't even question it anymore. Before I get there she will say "Anything I need to buy?". I never let her. I am so particular about foods, and also not fussy at all.  I am my own odd waterfowl. 

In the afternoon, I yell upstairs and ask when she wants dinner ready as I know my friend has work hours that do not match mine at all. That being said, I am entirely content in silence, or watching my Korean dramas. Given my job, I crave silence in the not at work times. 

Later, drinks in hand, we talk about life, and children, and work, and spouses, and extended family.  With a friendship this long, there is frequently no preamble needed. We know the characters, we have the shorthand.  We laugh. We tell each other things we would only ever tell each other.  We will take those things to the grave. We may cry a little as we talk about caring for our aging parents and the things we never knew we would have to do. We both picture those 21 and 22 year old women and what we couldn't know. 

I tell her that sometimes I wish I could go back to that Dawn and Jess and tell them how beautiful and amazing they are.  Tell them how they will be comfortable, middle aged women who spend weeks in beach houses and lake houses and drink brandy old fashioneds.

 I want to go to Dawn and have the body I had at 21 - absolutely gorgeous and free from health bullshit. Yeah, there were some glimmers of the mental health challenges coming - but nothing beyond some mild depression. She did not see the big trains in the distance. She could not imagine that her organs would fail her, literally.

I want to go to that Dawn, but have my 56 year old brain. I want to give absolute no fucks about worrying if I was pretty enough, thin enough, worthy enough. I want to walk into spaces and know that I am the shit. I want to tell her that yes, catastrophe will come and the world will fall apart but she will always eventually stand back up. She will hate the man she married, and then she will fall back in love with him. She will hate motherhood, but always love her daughter, even as her daughter forces her to grapple with her own mothering. That daughter will make her laugh and also read her for filth later in life. 

The absolute gift of being menopausal and 56 is deciding to live my life as I want.

I say to Jess "Yes, I would like to be 21, but with my brain now."

"Would you though?"

Maybe not. This body was hard won and this brain was even harder. This brain knows the impossibility of the gray in life, of love that is not romantic, and of the longevity of a friendship in which you can tell something that you would never tell anyone else. This body knows the birth of a child, health problems that knocked her off her feet, and the joy of menopause. Seriously. I love it.

At night I listen to the loons calling to each other, staring up at the post and beam ceiling of the very old lake house. I wink at 21 year old Dawn. She looks at me and sees an older lady who can't tell her fuck-all. I wink at her again, and hold up my brandy old fashioned in salute.

Spiderweb

 My urge to write is returning. It is so strange to read through the Past-Dawn and wonder how she was so funny. SO brilliant. How did she do those things and write those words?

Some is youth; She was young and running after a child , and  in  school, and working full time.  I can feel those days, far away, brushing up against my skin. The urge to write, to get it out of my jumbly head, to find people who thought I was smart and funny on this crazy newfangled thing called the internet was unstoppable. No one can know what those days were like when so many of us threw these small digital lines out into the universe not knowing what we may find.

Once I became a professor my jumbly thoughts slowed down. I had students to entertain and words to say all day, every day. My desire to write anything faded. I would leave work a little after 6 p.m. and just crave silence. Luckily I live in a relatively quiet family and a fair amount of space is given. Like a houseful of cats, we can be in the same room, but not really doing the same thing. 

Once Emily began college in 2016, our house got blessedly Quiet. Like Quiet x2. Terrance and I walked around for the first month just absorbing the silence. The lack of mess. The decrease in our electric bill. The cessation of the demand for meals cooked. Did I mention the absolute lack of laundry? Maybe two loads a week! It was astounding. We regarded each other with no child in the middle of us, and found that we liked each other. 

Parenting - for us - was a marathon of grit and tenacity. Emily was so MUCH, and needed so MUCH, that the tether between Terrance and I became the finest of spider webs. Nearly invisible. I spent much of the 2000's and part of the 2010's waiting for our inevitable divorce. 

It was terrible. 0/10, do not recommend. 

And then she went to college. Don't get me wrong. She was still A LOT. Phone calls, texts - millions of texts - all day every day. As the parent who does 99.99% of the emotional labor I was still a living battery in service to my child. Her awkward, anxious, weird self did not have the sort of free wheeling, social experiences that her mother, or her father, had in college. As she was 1200 mile away, it prevented her from running home and crawling back into my uterus. (Yes, I planned for her to be away, away from home for college. She was too much of an only child and needed distance to keep her in school)

For all of that emotional labor in service to her, through high school, through undergrad, through grad school, and then "real world" jobs and apartments and breakups and new relationships, my relationship with her father has continued to grow stronger. 

Occasionally we fight about her. However, those fights feature far more hindsight and distance. We fight about her  personality, common sense, and understanding of the real world. We juxtapose what our lives were like at her age and how she just assumes how things work at that same age. I remind him that we protected her from all of those realities and so it is ridiculous for him to get worked up. I do it gently because I also get worked up (She had no idea what a car loan was, people. NO IDEA. Because her parents have given her two cars : / )

I will touch him on the shoulder or hold his hand and say "I am so glad we stayed together. I am so glad we made it through parenting her." He will murmur and kiss my hand. 

I can't speak to the marriages of others.  As our 30th wedding anniversary looms in October, I have learned that I don't know shit about other peoples marriages. I do know that our decision to have a child, and the reality of who that child is, was nearly the cutting of the cord between he and I.  We both love her, fiercely, but Jesus Christ.

(When someone broke up with her I immediately asked where that person lived so I could go cut her tires.  My sister asked the same thing. Emily said "Why did you both ask the same question". My response "You don't come from a line of sane rational women. We are going to fuck shit up.")

My love for Terrance has changed, as it should. It has grown less urgent, quieter. What I previously interpreted as controlling was his anxiety.  I am not an easy partner to live with - with my continuing stack of health issues, and mental health diagnoses...oh, and menopause.  I've really pushed the "in sickness and health" part of the marriage vows to the limit. 

However, we've found our way. 

My Body Electric

(March 31, 2019)

I was 35 when I began writing this blog. I am 48, soon to be 49, now.

At 35, my body underwent what I can only assume to be some bizarro hormonal change. My deodorant stopped working and I moved into the "perpetual hot" phase of my life.  I've mentioned before that I have the windows wide open year round in my room.

At work, in lecture, I start to fan myself as I meander, gesticulating wildly.  I climb up on counters to open the windows that should never be open but god damn it, I am a woman of a certain age and woe betide the human male who tells me to close the window.

I had always imagined myself sailing gracefully through the end of my fertility, having started this when I was 12. I would do it all natural!

Um, fuck no.

Last summer, I'd finally had enough of the bullshit. I was having two periods a MONTH. Two full fucking periods a month. What was this fuckery? I was supposed to be slowing DOWN, not ramping up.  I would wake up drenched, despite my frigid room.  My boobs hurt. Like puberty hurt and all the time because I was constantly having periods. I also was having month long cramping. Like the first day of your period, but all month long.  The amount of ibuprofen and naproxen I was taking was, frankly, terrifying.  I could clear out a 180 liqui-gels out every month.

I finally went to my doctor and said "I am over this shit". Now, remember, in 2005 I'd vowed to be hormone/birth control free mainly because we suspected it had contributed to my depressions.  Now in 2019, I was all "give me the pills". What the fuck did I know then? Nothing.

They helped. Oh, and CDB oil helped too. Non-THC version, but completely controls the cramps with only minor ( like three) ibuprofen help.

I am still peri-menopausal so there is more to come, but it is more bearable. Ladies, for those of you not at this stage of life? Think back  to the emotional and physical tumult of puberty. It's like that, but you have a fully adult brain and still can't stop the emotion flowing out of you. It's a treat.

I also had a bipolar episode from August to late November. Wheeeeee! That's really fucking inconvenient. Once I'd acknowledged that something was wrong and gotten myself to a new psychiatrist, we started a new medication that slowly brought me to center. I still have little flares, but I recover from them much faster.

Of course, when you are in a bipolar episode your attention to your blood sugars is shit. So there is that. I am slowly trying to bring all of this together. In January I told my GP "Yeah, I know I've gained weight and my Blood sugars are kind of shit, but I just can't manage everything right now."

Then there was the endless snow from January until mid March.  We had snow drifts up to my tits.  Not cool.

The amount of pills I take morning and night have become a running joke in our house. I have a GIANT pill organizer to keep track of the various medications that keep me from becoming a diabetic hormonal monster.

Can you believe this behemoth?

Terrance, this morning, was moaning about aches in his fingers. He held his hands out for me to inspect. I said, "That's what happens when you think that you are invincible in your 20's!" 

I may have added in a "motherfucker" because he has a wife who swears like Samuel Jackson.

One strange and unexpected side effect of being with the same partner for 28 years is that you get to watch your own body, and that of your partner change.  I don't need to be a 25 year old woman. I like this aging body I inhabit. I am rounder. I gain weight, I lose weight.  The male gaze slides over me, which is delightful. 

I am coming to terms with this body. My body electric.

Update: October 2025

I finally made it through! Menopause! Woot! A year ago, after not sleeping (Danger! Danger!) and forgetting so many things and the occasional horrid period, I went to an OB/GYN who specialized in Menopause.  Did I mention the sweating? Not just hot flashes but all night sweating? Good god. Waking up drenched does not improve ones outlook on the day.  I was not above begging the aforementioned OB. DO SOMETHING!

While estrogen was no recommended due to the heart thing, I could have progesterone. It helped. I do  not think I am so special as to have no effects of menopause but I just didn't need so...many. The memory thing was what was maddening. I have always had an incredible memory so to forget what I was doing seconds after I stood up was a unique torture. 

The progesterone helped. Not a 100% fix but a little better.  At this point I take what I can get.

Annoying Child (Gimlet Eye August 2007)

This was what Terrance began to sing to Emily this evening, in response to one of her bazillion questions.

School starts on Thursday and it, frankly, can't get here soon enough. I mean the mood swings, the weeping, the snappishness....and then there is Emily's behavior.

Hah!

Upon describing my daughters overall persona to my mother this weekend, she shared that the two weeks before school started again was the time of year she seriously considered running away.

I completely know how she feels. It was a relief to go to work today simply to disentangle myself from my daughter.

For instance, a little vignette from my weekend....

I needed to rest on Friday. I had been awake for-evah and needed to just close my eyes. I announced that I was taking an hour to do this. Under no uncertain terms I declared this to be an hour Free of Child. Eye contact was made. Clarity of intent was communicated.

For good measure, I went to Emily's room and placed myself upon her bed. I closed my eyes. I breathed deeply. I know that she has no intention of coming into her OWN room. Oh no. She wants to be in MY room. I listen to the birds. I relax.

With a sixth sense which is uncanny, Emily senses the change in my brain waves.  She creeps into the room. I am not quite asleep and can hear her approach. She assess the situation. I can feel her making a decision. Her hand shoots out and rubs my leg.

I don't move.

She rubs a little harder.

I don't move.

She pauses and stares at me. She is watching me breathe.

She makes her decision.

Unzipping her ViewMaster slide case ( but muffled - so I won't hear it), she removes the slides and begins to line them up the side of my body starting at my feet. One by one - edge to edge, she lines up the round disks on my body. She gets to my chest and shoves a couple into my yoga top, then covers my arm.

She steps back and assess her handiwork. She is pleased.

I consider leaping up and scaring the crap out of her. That would be funny. But I don't.

Instead I say from under my pillow:

"What exactly are you doing to my body?"

She starts to laugh. She is totally busted. She tries to pretend she is not in the bedroom TRYING to wake me up.

After several attempts at some lame story, she finally confesses. It was too quiet. She wanted me awake.

Yes. The realm of "annoying child" has been reached.

August 27, 2007 Gimlet Eye

Healthy

 For the first full year in recent memory I have been healthy the whole year.  

FAFO

This is on the corner of my computer.  In fact I have stickers all over my computer, which doesn't seem to be the culture of the State of Vermont...but meh. I am supremely unbothered. Until the Commissioner strolls up and directs me to start peeling them all off they stay. My Deputy Commissioner sees me a billion times a day and she is also unbothered. Emily tells me it is an "academic" thing. 

These five words ground me during meetings where I am annoyed, but trying to seem neutral. Meetings in which something that I want is being denied by the people I (State of Vermont) am paying. Quick note - If I (or any funder) is paying you two million dollars to exist and we want to implement something that is within the scope of your agreement telling me no is a surefire way to fuck around and find out.  I told a colleague that they ignore me "at their peril".

The position that I hold gives me an interesting space in which to move policy and practice. Many of these things are slow - gentle and persistent pressure applied systemically. Early Childhood people are patient and persistent by nature. Seriously, you wrangle a group of sixteen 4-year-olds for a day, or 8 infants.  Patient and Persistent. 

I thought my career pinnacle was being a tenured professor. While I absolutely loved my students and the process of teaching them to become kind and caring teachers who knew that the child is always at the center of the curriculum, the cost of that job outweighed that joy.  The energy that I had to expend was too much for me. My desire to take care of and support my students was at a steep cost to myself.  Dying in front of them for three years in a row gave them collective PTSD with every cough or every time I needed to be out.  Not a good fucking model of work life balance.

There is life after academia. A much happier life it turns out. One with actual boundaries and a real work life balance. A life in which I can effect a lot of change for child care in a small state that I love and in which I feel "normal". Wisconsin always left me feeling like I was an odd and brightly coloured bird that was misunderstood. I was too blunt, too direct, too Dawn. Too fuck around and find out.

I am back in a place where Dawn-ness is understood - maybe not all the time - but it is also not looked at askew. In Wisconsin I was told by an Associate Dean that I didn't realize how I came across and I stared in amazement. Bitch, I have lived with me for 50+ years. Do you think I have not had intimate knowledge about how I come across?

Then I quit my job.

Fuck Around and Find Out.

Flood

 I am truly trying to write here more.

My brain is wholly quieter now that the constant-ness of a child at home, and a job that was killing me has subsided. 

It's nice. 

I drive to work two days a week and it gives me time to sing to my favorite Sirius stations, or Spotify playlists all while thinking through my day ahead or day behind. I still marvel at the beauty of my home state with early morning mist coming off the intense green of late June.  I marvel at the deep blue of the afternoon sky reflecting onto the trees as I drive by now-quiet streams on small back roads. 

We all watch those streams now. The PTSD of last years flooding remains close to our skin.  I find myself holding a bit of breath when rain is forecast for multiple days. There are no guarantees that your town or city or house will not suffer next.

I was re-reading some of my older writing here and find myself marveling at that person who wrote so well, so witty.  She was fucking brilliant and hysterical. Since this blog started in 2006 it can feel like looking back into distant memories that snap back into crystal clear focus with re-reading.  It brings me back to having a seven year old and feeling the exhaustion of mothering both both ways - into her past and into her future.  As I write today, I can feel that exhaustion but it is far away and fuzzy. I am not sad about that. I have said before and will continue to say that Motherhood was terrible for my mental health. It nearly broke me and despite my fierce I-will-cut-a-bitch-while-you catch-these-fucking-hands protectiveness - it cost me.

My body continues its slowest fucking meander into Menopause ever. 54, ya'll. I am 54 and my body is not particularly ready to give up the fertility ghost. I am at the doorstep waiting to hand it over but the UPS driver never arrives. I got my first period when I was 12. I think I've donated to the cause long enough.  That being said, the symptoms of menopause do not wait at the door. 

While I can abide a lot of symptoms, it's the not sleeping through the night that gets me.  No  sleep = Dawn can easily spiral into a manic episode! I take two sleeping meds, with Ambien on stand by if I have haven't slept in 4 days. 

(As an aside, the lectures I have gotten about my Ativan and Ambien by doctors who are not my psychiatrist. YES, I know they can be addictive. No, I am not abusing them. I got lots of issues but substance abuse isn't one. Well, maybe the ibuprofen liquigels but that is in the past)

*********************************************************************************

If you've read to here you will think "Did she say June up there in the third paragraph"

Yep. Sorry. Who knows how I got distracted or by what - one of those eternal mysteries that I just live with it seems. Perimenopause has fucked with my memory in ways that I find intolerable. I would find myself forgetting words in lectures that I had given for 11 years. I stand up and walk away from something and immediately forget what I was going to get and why. Mostly it just pisses me off.  I hear that it is not uncommon.

Vermont did flood again in July on the anniversary of the 2023 flood. This followed with a flood two weeks later and then more damage a week or so later. Every time rain is forecast we all, collectively, hold our breath to see if it is just a little or it is going to turn into some destructive force. If you don't believe in climate change come to Vermont. We can show you the effects all across our state. Emily can take you on her field visits assessing damage to historic infrastructure that has simply disappeared. We can't even rebuild yet because the ground is so saturated that it simply collapses inward. Rebuilding a culvert or road to only watch it disappear with the next heavy rain is worse than the initial damage.

Let us not even discuss the amount of farmland being swept away and the yearly loss of crops in the middle of the growing season.  One farmer I know has lost ten acres between the July 2023 and July 2024 floods. 

I didn't intend to make the end of this some kind of climate change flood rant but Vermonters, while hella strong, are tired. The FEMA relief has not yet come through from 2023. The houses they said they would buy out have not been bought out and continue to flood. People have nowhere else to live because there is no housing here (insert my feelings about hedge funds buying the real estate and air bnb profiteers)- so they live in flood damaged homes or apartments with mold and the knowledge that the next flood will also come for them again.

Terrance, Emily and I are fine. We are privileged and fortunate. The inconvenience of not finding a house or land ( that is not on a newly designated flood zone) on which to build is a small discomfort compared to fellow Vermonters.

Spare them a thought.

Take to the Sea

 This time of year finds me contented. The beginning of summer with it's softness and greenness stirs something inside me that holds forth a type of promise that things will be good.

Our family tradition has become meeting in Maine for three weeks and living in the beach house at Moody Beach. My sister comes from Florida, my nephew comes from Detroit, my mother in law from Arizona. My brother and his family come from outside of Boston. It has become, for me, a time outside of time.  

The ocean rolls in and out and I look at it all day perpetually fascinated by the immensity of the sea. It is hard, when confronted by an ancient force, to focus on small problems.  I love the ocean and not in a charming way. It is terrifying and beautiful. There are nights when the tide is so high and so strong that it hits the sea wall and moves the boulders.  All of this reminds you that you, human, are so small and inconsequential that your anxieties are misplaced. 

I walk the beach after those tides and see fish, lobsters and crabs torn apart by the force of the waves. I wade up to my knees, even though the water is ice cold. I walk out on the rocks to the tide pools. I haunt the edge of the tide. I am uniquely at ease.