Tag Archives: menopause

what we pay attention to matters & grows.

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I’ve wasted some time not understanding (or maybe believing) this simple concept.  Every day we wake up with a choice to be made, even when it doesn’t feel like a choice.

choices and attention lisa lillibridgeWho wants to wake up in the morning highly attuned to the things that make them feel like crap?  I honestly don’t, and yet, sometimes I do that to myself.

I want my anger and resentment some days.  I really want to hang out in the house of pain and suffering on occasion.  In the last few years though, I’ve increasingly become aware of the toll those days take on me and everyone in my orbit. My dark days will obviously never go away completely, but thankfully, by noticing where my attention is directed, those days are finally getting to be fewer and far between.

Once I noticed my habits and patterns I couldn’t possibly un-notice them. 

Damnit, I tried pretty hard.  Trust me, I gave it a really good shot.

I love that knowledge can be brilliantly sneaky that way.

Good luck noticing, folks.

A NOTE OF COMPASSION:  Many people suffer with devastating, lasting sadness that requires way more than just noticing habits and patterns.  I don’t mean to diminish anyone’s experience.  I’m only sharing what’s been helpful to me.  I struggle with the blues, not prolonged clinical depression.

elusive sleep & alien identity theft

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Sometimes I’m unable to sleep because I’m so jazzed about something I’m working on that sleep seems like a waste of time.  However, this time it’s something else.  I’m pretty sure it has to do with closing in on fifty-one, hormones, grief, puzzling rage, extraordinary joy, occasional alien identity theft and letting go.

Sometimes it all actually feels this alien to me and I barely recognize myself.  I know that non middle-aged women tend to believe (at least from my experience) that menopause is an excuse to explain away shitty behavior, lack of energy or out of the blue tears.  It’s really not an excuse and it’s often as confusing to me as it is to my poor family.

A generation ago, it was less frequent that Moms would be going through menopause with teenagers still in the house.  Not that it didn’t happen, but it was less common.  I feel sort of sorry for my twin daughters right now.   My relationship was different with their brother.  He was not twins.  He was never a 17-year-old girl.  He’s not living at home right now.  He was not a mirror to me the way my girls are.

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My girls are living with the Many Faces of Mom during their stressful last year of high school.  Sometimes I freak out thinking that I haven’t taught them what they need to know before they head off to college in a year. I have to trust that I have and allow them to learn the rest on their own.  It’s time to let go a little bit more.

However, I feel like after going through pregnancies, nursing and giving up my sense of self to care for these little monsters (that I heart breakingly love) that I’m due a little break now.  Is that so wrong?  Isn’t that what menopause is?  Transition from one stage to another.

Nothing in my life has been as dramatic of a shift as becoming a Mom…and now in some weird way, when my girls are a year away from leaving home, my body is making me feel like I’m in the first trimester of my pregnancy.

Fatigue. Uncertainty.  Cravings.  More fatigue.  Headaches and more even uncertainty.

Nature’s cruel joke or a reminder of how tied to them I am on a cellular level?