I am going to bite the battery filled, vibrating bullet and say this….sex is messy. Metaphorically speaking and literally. It denotes all rational and redirects blood flow from the parts of our bodies that should be making decisions to the parts that just want to be filled. It is lustful and dirty, sometimes secretive and unlawful, often obligatory and routine. And I love it. And I am not ashamed of it. I partake in it like it’s a full time job that is going to generate a paycheck at the end of the week. You might as well slap me with a Jenna Jameson sticker and put me to bed….naked, of course. I love the smell of it, the thought of it, the feel of it and the endorphine boosting charge it generates. At least, this is how I used to be. Until the dreaded ‘M’ word crept in like a bad yeast infection and fucked up my day. Yes, at the ripe old age of 35 I am talking about MENOPAUSE. **Note the first three letters of this pain the ass word, which screws with our bodies and mind, spells the word MEN.**
When you are 18, and your hormones take control of your decision making, menopause is a foreign word reserved for gray haired ladies that smell like Bengay. You never think you will be in the sexual prime of your life experiencing hot flashes, mood swings, migraines, weight gain and wanting to beat the first person who looks at you crooked or breathes in your general direction. Yet, here I am wading my way through this mess, trying to find my way out of the other side of it.
On the plus side, no more “Aunt Flo” or cramps or carrying tampons with me on vacation. Bonus. Women my age and younger can’t begin to understand the angst behind my misery. The feeling that something is seriously missing. The loss of vital organs that genetically make me a woman is something that screws with my mind daily. I know in all reasoning they are only pieces of the puzzle, but they end up being the damned middle pieces that you don’t realize are missing until you have spent days putting it together. I don’t think I wanted to have more kids, but I would have liked to make that decision and not have it ripped from me. I would have been happy to spend my life never bleeding like a wounded deer during hunting season, but I would have liked to keep all my woman parts in tact while doing so.
And somedays, most days, I miss WANTING to have sex. I miss that lustful, passionate, can’t-keep-my-hands-off-you, feeling that I had when I was still the owner of my own estrogen. The kind that didn’t require pills, lubes, mood lighting and the occassional porno. I miss feeling like a woman. I can’t get the image out of my head that if you were to yell into my vagina, it would echo back like a child screaming “HELLO” into the mouth of the Grand Canyon. As you can imagine, that is not a thought that revs the engine, so to speak.
BUT….as time goes on, and my mind and body begin to adjust I am more comfortable with the phrase, “it is what it is”, because what else could it possibly be? I can’t go back in time and make the cancer NOT come, and I can’t go back and ask them to re-insert my uterus or my ovaries. I can’t change the past, but I can make a conscious decision to change the future and the way I will perceive it. So what if I have to find new ways to “find that lovin’ feeling" again? Maybe that will keep it interesting over the next 40 or 50 years. I will definitely take the ability to just do it less for granted than I ever did, and maybe that isn’t such a bad thing.
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