I'm With Her

 Amy Welborn writes:

The blogosphere is full of Mommybloggers.  Pregnant, homeschooling, crafting, lactating, birthing, monetizing…mommybloggers!

You know what I don’t see out there?

Catholic Menopausebloggers!

Yeah, well.

Indeed. Here we are. But then, here most of us were already, which is kind of the story of menopause:  same old, same old, only older. And is it just me, or is it warm in here?

I suppose one reason you don't see the Menopausebloggers so much  is that there's not much to write about what's not happening. Or, you do see them, but you see them being those homeschooling mommy-types, because that's what they were doing when they became hormonal changelings, and being a changeling means only that you change. Everything else stays the same. The only difference is that now you're not pregnant, birthing, or lactating any more (even at the height of my fertile glory, I never crafted), and you're maybe a little more taken up with weight-loss, because after all, there is something to say about some things that don't happen.

Or maybe the reason you don't see the Menopausebloggers is that they're the tired bloggers. They're the ones putting up seven YouTube videos in one blog post, because that's easier than trying to think. It's easier than confronting the fact that sometimes your mind . . . won't . . . work, and you can't think of the name for that thing . . . you know, that ordinary household item which has a name, and you knew it until the moment when you tried to ask for it, and then -- gone. Yeah, that thing.

Or it's that they're busy attending to all the ways in which the body presents itself as a metaphor:  a clock unwinding, a well going dry, a tree whose leaves make a brittle sound in the wind. You find yourself on this downward slope, gravity pulling you forward, all the things which were you for so long, and which you felt would go on forever -- the babies, the little children, the kneeling in church that didn't hurt -- vanished behind you. Still you walk on, but sometimes that's all you're up to doing. 

I am a sunset person. I don't mean that figuratively.  I mean, I really like sunsets, even non-spectacular ones. In our town they happen behind the water tower:  the sky draining of color, so that the clouds stand out on it, slate-blue. The darkness washing down, the warm light still radiating from the hearth of the horizon. Every clear night of the world it happens, and I never tire of it or find it, in itself, all that sad. Even the end of a good day isn't a melancholy thing, though I know that just as I'll never be four, or twenty-five, or forty again, I'll never live that day again, either. The ending's just inevitable -- I'd be alarmed if it didn't happen, because then the universe would be out of joint. And, as long as the universe isn't out of joint, you know there'll be another day, which is why a sunset is never tragic. At least, it's never as tragic as it might be.

Anyway, I'm with Amy. If there's going to be a tribe of Menopausebloggers, I'd like to join. But things around here will probably look just the . . . what was that word?