My Body Myself: Living in the Over 35 Body
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3. It is somehow sexier to be a redhead. People think, “Wow, red means passion. She must be passionate.” I would have had no trouble getting dates with my long, flowing mane of red hair.
I know you’re thinking there’s all sorts of down sides to being a redhead. I realize that many redheads are a tad nerdy in high school, but that was already true for me. So no big loss there. I see only the upsides to being redheaded. Fair skin, light hair all over my body (the tweezers could get tossed), and a reputation that precedes me. Further, I would have been the only redhead in my family, which would have made me stand out from the start. No one would have expected me to turn out just like my mother, grandmother, or for that matter, any of the dead grandmothers I never met.
Everyone would have thought, “Wow, she’s different. Who knows what will happen for her. The world is her Oyster.” But looking like an Italian, everyone expected me to get married, spit out a load of children and cook pasta dishes all day long. Nobody expects any of that from a redhead. I’d be like Nicole Kidman’s character Gillian in Practical Magic. In case you failed to see that hit movie, Gillian is a sexy redheaded witch. As it is, I’m stuck looking like Sandra Bullock’s Goody-Two-Shoes character, Sally. I’ve been spending my entire life with the looks of Sally and the personality of Gillian.
That’s it, today I’m going out to buy some hair dye. It’s all I can think to do. And besides, I have two gray hairs now right in front, and I’m just not ready to face that.
Chapter 5: My Body at Work - AKA brain cell death
It may shock you to discover that your brain is a legitimate part of your body, as are your teeth. We humans are always separating things and then finding out years later that the things we separated actually needed to stay together in the first place. When I began working as a coordinator at a dental insurance company, I learned that teeth were part of the body. This, apparently, was news to most Americans, as there was quite a bit of hype about this discovery.
Whenever humans put something back together that they pulled apart, they rename it as something new by putting the word or root word of “whole” in front of it: Whole Language, Whole Body, Whole Foods, Holistic health, Holistic Approach, Holistic Learning, etc. I learned, at the aforementioned dental insurance company, that health insurance companies wanted teeth to be separate so they wouldn’t have to pay to have them fixed.
As an English education student, I learned that learning phonics does not make one a good reader – students have to read real books to learn how to read. I could go on, but I’m sure you get the picture. After working for several years in a small gray box called a “cubicle,” I began to have what can only be called “brain cell death.” I read that scientists have evidence that dull, lifeless environments (like a cubicle) cause the brain to stop building new neurons, a form of brain death.
This could explain the coworkers I had – people who were as alive as the fake plants that were rotated each season. Some of them would sit in their ergonomic chair the entire day, even eating lunch at their computer. I learned that if I wanted to have a whole body and not just hands that typed on a computer, I would have to leave the cubicle. Offices are not holistic. I am not sure they are made for any part of the human body at all.
Chapter 6: Children
I know it isn’t my place to meddle, but I have another suggestion: please have children before you are 35. After that, you’re just not going to want to deal with it. As I’ve reviewed, your body is going to be doing strange things. On top of that, given the toxic sludge we basically live in, who knows if your body could provide sustenance to a small human.
Forgetting the toxic sludge that has turned our ovaries into mud, having kids in your later 30s is a pain. Your whole life has been set up around not having kids. I say have them before 25 so that they might move out of the house while you still have some life left in you. Otherwise, you’ll be retiring when they’re going to college. I’ve also told you about the reset button that can only be pushed by having children. If you don’t hit the reset button, you’ll be stuck with hormones overrunning your body.
And you’ll have a pouchy stomach because of the period that never comes, and people will keep asking you when you are due. Yes, Dear Reader, strangers come up to me all the time the week before my period to ask about my baby. This has been happening to me for the past fifteen years, and the baby has still not arrived. That is because it is not a baby. It is a period. And I don’t want to disappoint them, so I usually just say, “It should be soon.” And this is true. My period is due soon.
If you ever see a woman who looks pouchy, please do not ask her when her baby is due. Maybe she’s just late in getting her period. Or for all you know, she had the baby two months ago and still hasn’t lost the weight. Why don’t you just mind your own abdomen? There is no need to bother ours.
For those people who feel the need to ask me why I never had children, I ask, “Why did you have children?” Especially those of you who buy your children undue amounts of video games, I-pads and other devices so that you can avoid their children as much as possible. I can only assume those of you who do this knew about the reset button in your uterus. If you don’t like the children, donate them along with a generous monthly stipend to women like me who forgot to have them.
Chapter 7: Being a Late Bloomer
When you are a girl but almost a woman and it seems like your body should be doing something, and it clearly is not doing a damn thing: that is called being a “late bloomer.” I know what you are thinking: this book is for adult women, why is she writing about how late blooming 13-year-old girls feel? That is because any grown woman who was a late bloomer, is still to this day, secretly amazed she actually grew breasts. I waited until I was 26 years old to get them, and I want to declare to the world that I truly, truly appreciate having them. I am still in shock that they are here.
Sometimes after a shower, I double-check. Yes! They are really here and they are real! No more stuffing my training bra with tissues. Since I’m only 38, I’ve actually spent much more of my life not having them than having them. Oh, sure at 12, these little bumps grew on my chest and stayed the exact same way for the next 14 years, but they wouldn’t exactly qualify as breasts. The boys in my class who were classified as husky had more going on than I did.
I admit, I only take a B cup. But a B cup is a valid size. It’s not like a training bra, a size AA or A10 or whatever the hell I took until 26. I think I deserve some kind of special pass or mark on my driver’s license because of the lateness of my womanhood arriving. It took until the middle of freshman year of high school to get a period, and then it didn’t come back until sophomore year. Then it took until I was sixteen to stop wearing children’s sizes.
What do you think this does to one’s psyche? Then, all of the sudden at 26, I started to look somewhat like an adult woman, and people were surprised I kept acting like I was 12. It is very difficult to act like an adult when people think you are in junior high.
When I was a teacher and another teacher would walk into my room, I’d always hear: “Where is the teacher?” It’s only in the past few years that people now recognize me as the teacher.
To make matters worse, we 30-something and 40-something women did not have the Internet growing up. Do you have any clue what it is like growing up in a Catholic school Catholic family with no Internet? I had to learn about sex from some old pornographic playing cards I found in my uncle’s cabinet. Well, that and Judy Blume. If it weren’t for Judy Blume, I’m sure I would have joined a convent and just given up.
Chapter 8: Getting in Shape
I have been trying to get into shape for the past decade. I feel that before solving a problem, it sometimes helps to take a step back and look at the overall situation so as to come up with a holistic approach to solving it. I have thoroughly analyzed the situ
ation and deduced the following as possible major ongoing obstacles to my getting in
shape:
1. My extreme like of food
2. The fact that every time I start a fitness program, I break something that was previously working just fine.
3. Did I mention that I like food?
I have no more chance of getting in shape than a round peg does of getting into a square hole. Dear Reader, there truly are two types of people in the world when it comes to being in shape: normal human beings that like food and those that would be perfectly happy surviving on stale wheat thins and protein pellets.
I was one married to one of these protein pellet types who actually followed the serving instructions on packages. When we had guests, he would dole out the exact amount of each item to each party-goer. For instance, if twelve people were coming to breakfast, there would be twelve bagels exactly, twelve tiny sausage links, and a pot of coffee made with just the two tablespoons of coffee as indicated on the canister. But who am I to scoff? He is still thin, and I am working on getting in shape.
Let me tell you about the reality of getting in shape. Thin people who do nothing always say that us out-of-shape people just need to work out and “eat healthy.” If you are one of these Get-In-Shapers, let me tell you what life for us round peg people is really like. We begin the day by getting out of bed. I know you Get-In-Shapers do this too, but trust me, it is not the same for us.
First of all, everything hurts. I learned from one of my entourage of doctors that I don’t make enough cortisol, which, besides being an anti-inflammatory, gives you energy to get out of bed. We briefly think about doing something physical, but opt instead to take a hot shower, or better, a hot bath then get a coffee with plenty of cream. Chances are, we head off to our job, which entails sitting around all day.
As an Out-of-Shaper, we never considered those “active jobs” when we were scanning the majors in college. After four hours in in our seat, we consider running on a treadmill, but all we want to do is escape our chair. After working in an office for four years, I managed to not only gain 20 pounds, but lose a significant amount of brain cells. I am not only less fit, but also less intelligent after those four gray years.
During the four years, I tried numerous things to get in shape. I won’t bore you with the diets, fitness programs and herbal tea ingredients I tried. After assessing the problem, I determined one and only one solution to it: become a fitness instructor. Something that the many, many (oh so many) jobs I’ve had over the years has instilled in me is this: to learn something well, one must teach it.
Thus, I did the most logical thing to get in shape. I figured between my insanely busy schedule of rushing off to teach six to ten fitness classes a week and practicing choreography for the six to ten classes, I wouldn’t have time to snack and I’d also be burning calories. One would think getting certified to be a fitness instructor would be difficult. It mostly entailed going to a boot-camp for dummies learning experience through a major fitness certification venue and taking a test. The real trouble was not the certification, so much as I had no idea what I was doing.
I decided to take specialty certifications and workshops. For $100 to $500 you can be certified or licensed to teach all sorts of things – Piloxing, Zumba, Pilates in the water and more. You could easily spend several thousand dollars getting all these certifications, which entail driving hours from your home and spending the night at hotels near major airports. Getting hired was not difficult. I simply went to every club in a 15-mile radius of my home and gave them my resume. It helped that I once taught aqua aerobics at the YMCA. I was a participant in the class, and when they couldn’t find a regular teacher, I offered to teach.
I’m not sure how brand new teachers break in. Once one club hired you, you then tell the other clubs you are teaching somewhere. It, like most things in life, is about being at the right place at the right time. I realize that I only make between $20 and $40 a class, but getting paid to work out is better than paying to work out. Teaching fitness turned out to be more difficult than I anticipated.
Not only do I need to memorize an hour of choreography, I need to watch my students doing everything awkwardly and not let that get me off track. One woman I teach dances as though she had a stroke right down the middle of her body. I know that’s impossible, but it is the only diagnosis I can come up with at the moment. Her sides do not seem attached together.
I’m sure you’ll all be happy to know that my fitness plan is working out. I have not only lost ten pounds, I have a colorful collection of spandex, and I can now make it through a full hour of Zumba without passing out. More importantly, I’m learning to speak Spanish by memorizing my Zumba lyrics. Unfortunately, I can only say phrases like, “I’ll meet you at the club,” “Call me on my cell phone, Baby,” and “Look at the pretty butt, Yo, Yo!”
Epilogue
I should have known with my clumsiness, that I should never use a cervical cap. First of all, I just learned what a cervix is. I swear, it sounds like a punctuation mark. Can’t you see it in the list: ellipses, period, cervix, exclamation.
See?
Well, it’s a real thing. Putting it in wasn’t so bad.
Second of all, I’m not good at getting out of things. Once time I got stuck in the back seat of my car. I should add that I’m not obese or disabled. I just couldn’t figure out how to get out of my own backseat of a two-door Honda.
So it shouldn’t have surprised me that the cap got stuck too. I wandered the condo in a panic. I went back into the bathroom for try three.
The directions say, “poke your finger to break the suction.” Either I have a long body or short fingers because it was never reaching. It was stuck. (Reader Note: weeks later I find out from my doctor that I have some rare "faraway cervix"). I run into the bedroom where my boyfriend is relaxing and listening to his usual New Age tunes. “It’s stuck!” I scream. “It is never coming out!”
“Do you want me to help you?” he asks.
Ughhhh. Help me? What is he going to do?
He follows me into the bathroom. “Okay, tell me what to do,” he says.
I think about the picture on the pamphlet of a woman hunching down in a pooping position. How unromantic. There is no way he is seeing me like that. We’ll never need to use birth control again.
“Nevermind,” I say. “Get out of here!”
“Should I call someone?” He pulls out his cell phone.
“Who are we going to call? And what will they do? I can’t have my friends fishing around in there. This is absurd!”
I decide to try to focus on something else. The pancakes are still frying on the stove.
“I just need a tool to get it out. Something long that won’t hurt me,” I say, pulling out a spatula for the pancakes.
“No!” He yells. “Not that!” He grabs the spatula for me.
“It’s for the pancakes! I’m not that crazy!”
“Oh.”
“I’ll try again. I just need to breathe.”
“I”ll flip the pancakes.”
“Okay,” I say. I walk into the bathroom. I somehow figure out that I have to push this thing out, like I’m giving birth to it. This is quite a price to pay for the “convenience” of the FemCap.
***
Six Weeks Later: Five pregnancy tests reveal I am PREGNANT.
About the Author
Carey RavenStar Robin is a writer and teacher living just outside Chicago. You can find her lost in her own neighborhood, or at www.careyrobin.com where she also blogs about parenting, books she reads, and info on her book promos and contests. She has been published in Chicago Parent and in the Oak Park Journal. She also published her own novel when no one else would. Her comedic novel Naked in the Garden of the Serpent is available on Amazon. Soon, she will release Jane Austen Never Earned Minimum Wage, a book of essays about surviving bad jobs after majoring in English.
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