I Can Do Humour ( Pishposh, my inner woman snorted)
So…
I was reading the work of a new friend recently, a piece that had me blushing and giggling like the coy young woman I once was, long, long ago… and thought to myself woman, you are just too damn serious… when did you get so darn serious…
You use to be full of sassy witticism and wordplay…
I grew up, I told myself,
pishposh my inner woman snorted, you grew old, old and dull…
no way, I protested rather vigorously I still do funny…
go on, my inner woman taunted, make me laugh…
I can’t, I pouted, you put me on the spot…
take your time, chuckled my inner woman…I’m not going anywhere…
I can do funny I muttered to myself quietly… I heard my inner woman yawn sarcastically from wherever she had retreated, chuckling quietly at my miffed reaction…
I CAN do funny, I’ll show her…
*
What about this menopause thing, I tried to redirect her, my inner me… let me say this, it’s not what I expected at all, it’s nice not having to endure the monthly curse, but these hot flushes are a killer… it starts, I have noticed, with a hot creeping feeling across the back of my neck, a bit like walking down an empty lane at night, and quickly spreads to the rest of my body and I’m left feeling hot, sticky, clammy and ‘airless’…. it’s a case of cardigan off…fan on…window open…wet cloth… then…within the space of 5–10 minutes it’s a cold chilling ‘flush’ that has me tossing the wet cloth, grabbing my cardigan, turning fan off… then ten minutes later it starts all over again, with me hunting for the previously mentioned and hastily thrown wash-cloth… then if I’m lucky it goes away for an hour… it’s all rather exhausting.
Mind you, I may have a found a weapon in this whole ‘change of life’ thing…
I explained to my boys the process of menopause in excruciating detail…
the hot flushes…the chills…the mood swings… the lethargy… the tears… maybe now they will finally move out of home…
…amusing , my inner woman commented dryly, but hardly humorous…
I wasn’t trying to be amusing, I retorted (to the voice in my head) and I wouldn’t be so smug if I were you, your going through menopause too…
…silence…
That shut her up, I thought, with a hint of malicious menopausal delight…
*
So in an effort to find some humorous inspirations to liven up my reflective monologues I took a good look at myself… a good hard honest look… and what I found could perhaps be amusing in an aging-gracefully kind of way…
I have gone gray in recent years, not completely gray just a liberal sprinkling of long silver threads that sparkle in amongst the natural mix of brown and auburn that hang in waves to my waist… but certainly enough to notice… and no one can miss the concentrated mass of gray that sweeps down either side of my face; to be honest I don’t mind the gray, in fact I rather like it in a way like a badge of honour, it denotes my seniority and livens up my usually ordinary layers of brown… but I’ve shrunk too,like I can afford to lose even a smidgen of height… despite all the bending and stretching , regular checks on my height proved that I never made it to 5 foot…four feet, eleven & three quarters of an inch to be exact…and now I am four feet, eleven & a half inches… what am I going to be like at 70…80…
…and I’ve lost weight too… more then I would have liked… so much in fact that for a while I no longer looked or felt healthy… and along with the weight went my once ample bust… my voluptuous full-bosomed bod is now as scrawny as a de-feathered chook
(that’s an old boiler, not one of those plump butter-ball ones) …
I want my old body back, the one made curvaceous by four pregnancies
and years of breast feeding… the one that was a tad on the heavy side and had a weakness for Aussie rum and bbq’s and Queensland prawns as long as a ruler…
But I’m not that woman any more… I don’t have her body or her spirit, I don’t have her appetite or zest for life… and I certainly don’t have her spontaneous good humour… the best I can come up with is a sort of wry self- criticism…
So my inner woman may have been right… but she doesn’t seem inclined to gloat over it at present… she’s still sulking over my crack about her being in menopause too.
Sharon Goodhand