...Came a Bubbling Pool

I woke up this morning with a bubbling, hot pool of magma sitting right behind my sternum.  No, it was not indigestion, but rather the epicenter of hormonal insanity brewing and bubbling itself into volcanic proportions.  A smart woman would have gone back to bed, but I nurtured this lava in my chest by feeding it coffee.  Half a cup in and I was sweating through my shirt while doing a crossword puzzle.  I am not talking about glistening or glowing or perspiring, I am talking full on sweat.  Sadly, I don’t even sweat like this when I work out.  The news annoyed me, nothing tasted good to eat so I ate a lot of nothing that tasted good and I sweated.  The boy came downstairs and started his incessant plea for video anything but I made him eat first and sit with me while I sweated at the table.  He is too young to recognize the signs of Mom about to go crazy and kept poking me with the video stick.   Bill wisely retreats when I say that I feel hot inside and the girls recognize and understand the signs and keep small.  Not the boy.  Poke, poke, and poke.  Thirty minutes later we were having it out over Plants vs. Zombies and he stomped upstairs and I stomped downstairs accomplishing my mission to share the lava-like anger inside. 

KRAKATOA! (yes, Spongebob reference)

I am at this wonderful stage in my life where my body that has wanted to make babies for the last twenty plus years is now slowing shutting down the baby making machinery.  What a mess of hormones this turns out to be!  Did you know that this whole heading towards menopause can take upwards of ten years or so? Decade of fun!   Perimenopause they call it.  Peri – makes it sound flowery, delightful, quiet and soft.  No.   It is hot lava behind your chest, it is crying HUGE wet tears at commercials on TV, and it is like feeling like you have the rest of your life and no time left at all at the exact same minute.  It is shedding the hair on your head like a dog while growing it in new places all over your face.   It is flying into a rage over something small and apologizing profusely the next minute.  It is working out like a fiend and then having to stretch just to take the garbage out the next day.  It is a mess.  A hot, hot mess.

I figure that at forty, I am probably down to ten viable eggs and every time one is released, I know it.  I am bringing my A game on a Wednesday night because my body is screaming “THAT’S IT, WE ARE DOWN TO NINE GOOD EGGS!”   These eggs are also competitive: they find it necessary to compete with young women in my house and there is no rhyme or reason or pattern to craziness like there used to be.  I am afraid I am going to wind up being one of those women on the hormone replacement commercials that they only show between 5 and 7am and not care that I am one of those women on the hormone replacement commercials.

 

I should have known something was amiss in the dollar spot at Target yesterday when the plethora of Hello Kitty started a rant inside that wouldn’t stop.  I don’t understand Hello Kitty: is she a cartoon or anime or the gateway drug to anime?  Usually I don’t give her much thought at all but this time I was hopped up and starting to get hot inside. I seriously could have punched something I felt so annoyed by being surrounded by that stupid somewhat cat face. Which, by the way, is missing eyes or a nose or something INTEGRAL to a face.

I did go and work out and that helped, but the kids came with me and that did not help.  And now I am sore from working out so I need to stretch.  And then as long as I am already on the floor, I will curl up in the fetal position and weep while declaring that really, nothing is wrong.  Good times, good times.