House is decorated for Halloween! Always makes me happy. I’ll even be home for Halloween night this year, for the first time in a couple of years.
I’m over at What the Cat Read today, with a variety of quotes about writers and cats.
The post ahead might be a bit TMI. Fair Warning.
I’ve been hitting a funny place in my life lately. Now that I’m in my late 40s, I’m looking at the whole menopause thing, though I’ve had blessedly few symptoms. More in the radar sites right now is dealing with my blood pressure. It’s just a little high. “Pre-Hypertension,” they call it. Not high enough to medicate, but high enough to be of concern. So far, I’ve been doing about everything I can. My diet is good – low fat, veggies, no fast food. I exercise. With the treadmill desk I’m walking 7-8 miles/day. No caffeine. Trying various herbs.
I recently switched practitioners and she suggested that I should go off the birth control pills, as a next step. It’s funny because I’ve been on the pill for over 30 years. I started on it when I was 16 and had met the guy I wanted to lose my virginity to. And I’ve never looked back. Taking the pill every night has acted as a calendar for my adult life. Likely what I’ll do is get a copper IUD. I still have my biases left over from the IUD horror stories of the 80s, but apparently they’re tons better now. Funny to me that I never tracked those changes.
For the time being, however, we’re using condoms. The other day, I went to the pharmacy and bought a box – for the first time in my whole entire life.
Because, back in my youthful, non-monogamous days, STDs weren’t emphasized so much. AIDS really became a major concern by my junior year in college. But even then, we tended to think in terms of exposure and whether or not we’d been tested. Because I was on the pill and reasonably discriminating in my lovers, we just didn’t use condoms. In fact, I never had sex with a condom until I met David and I was on antibiotics at one point, that could interfere with the efficacy of the pill.
So I never had that rite of passage until just the other day. And yes, I felt totally like a teenager. Plus, with my ovaries and uterus waking up from their long sleep and positively throbbing, I feel like I did when I first started getting my period when I was 12. Also, “they” seem to be right that the pill suppresses desire. While I never felt like I didn’t want sex, now… let’s just say I’m feeling teenagerish that way, also.
Not really what I thought I’d experience in my late 40s, but also cool in many ways, to revisit my youthful feelings. I feel like I’ve come full circle.
And that’s a nice place to be.