The Ramblings of a Menopausal Woman

I wrote this on September 3, 2014 and I think it’s time for an updated version. I wanted you to know the background story. You could say it’s a part of my origin story. Honestly, the struggle of being a woman has gotten so much harder in this country recently, this post reads differently to me this time.

Side note, the picture is from 2014 when we took a train to Scotland. It’s one of my favorite pictures and from the year I wrote this.

Here we go:

As a woman there are always battles we have with our self confidence. We compare our appearance to a unrealistic standard of beauty portrayed in magazines and television. We struggle with our identity as a woman. These expectations begin to take its toll in our teens, and it can take years to feel comfortable in your own skin. At least this is the case for me.
What you may not know about me is I have always struggled with my weight. When I was about 15, I sprouted up to 5’10” and weighed 110 pounds. My boobs were classified as  “Nearly A”. That’s when I stopped growing. Try as I might, I couldn’t gain weight. My mom would order these nutrition shakes for me to drink with every meal, in hopes to put some weight on me. It didn’t work. People called me Olive Oyl, and made jokes about me being anorexic or bulimic. Nothing I tried worked, so I hid behind baggy clothes and made friends with group of people that didn’t give two shits how someone looked. That was my saving grace at the time. I think by the time I was 20 I had made it to 115 pounds. I was still stuck with a pre-pubescent body. I always felt like a girl, never a woman. People would always say “Enjoy it while you can, when you’re 30 your metabolism will change”. I couldn’t wait for that day. It’s amazing how many people think it’s okay to make fun of your weight when you are skinny. It’s an assumption that everyone that is skinny must be by choice, therefore that makes it okay for them to put their two cents in on the matter. 
When I was 19, I packed up everything I owned and headed to California. I landed in San Francisco. It was the first place I felt normal. Not because everyone was skinny like me, but because nobody cared. Everyone looked different, it was melting pot of people from all kinds of backgrounds. It was refreshing. I still had issues from time to time. There was on instance when I went for physical with a new doctor. He asked me three times in 5 minutes if I did intravenous drugs. I told him, “If you can find out why I’m so damned skinny I would be ecstatic, but you have obviously already formed an opinion about me and I don’t think this is going to work” and walked out. It was awful, I felt degraded and stuck in a body I hated.
After six years I moved to Los Angeles. I was 25 and 115 pounds, still grossly underweight. This time it was different. I wasn’t like any of the people I met in Los Angeles as far as personality went. I had no desire to be famous, I did not come to L.A. to be an actor or model. The difference is, there were so many people the same size as me. It was the first place where my weight did not cause anyone to immediately think I had an eating disorder. I could also finally find clothes in my size. Long and lean was the norm. For that reason alone, I loved L.A.. The rest of the city drove me insane. I couldn’t stand the “Don’t you know who I am?” attitude. But I really enjoyed shopping for the first time in my life. 
When I was 32, I ended up leaving Los Angeles after my divorce. Now I was at point where I questioned what lay ahead. Where was my life going? I was working at a very stressful job and I began gaining weight. I hit 120, then 130, and kept going. I figured everyone was right, I was over 30 and my metabolism was beginning to change. I actually had to buy bras for daily wear, something I had never done. I spent most of my adult life braless, so this was very new to me. Imagine feeling like a teenager buying your first bra at 32 years old. I went for my annual physical and I was 150 pounds. I had a new doctor because the one I usually saw had moved. My doctor looked at me and said he could see my thyroid gland from across the room. I had a “goiter”. That was weird. He started asking me about symptoms. Was I tired? Yes, all the time. Have I gained weight? Dear God yes, but I loved it! I was normal for the first time in my life. Any memory loss? Yes, but I’ve been stressed out at work. How about hair loss? Yes, it’s coming out in handfuls! I was sure I was going to be bald. Wait a second, all of this is connected to my thyroid? He ran some blood work and when he got the results, he said he wasn’t sure how I had been able to function. I told him I had been stressed out and just figured all my symptoms were because of that. Now I was facing a possible diagnosis of thyroid cancer (because of a mass on my thyroid). I had biopsies and more tests, no cancer. With some time they got the right dose of medication to have me function normally. One of the first questions I asked was if I was going to lose all the weight I had gained. I didn’t, thankfully.
Finally at 35 I was finally a healthy weight and feeling pretty good about myself. I was in a wonderful relationship with an amazing man. We decided to start trying to have a family. Months went by, and no baby. Finally I ended up back at the doctor to see why we weren’t getting pregnant. They couldn’t figure out why. We fell in to that dreaded category of “unexplained infertility” F@*king great. I was finally at a point when I looked at my body I felt like a woman, and now this. 
Nothing makes you feel like less of a woman than the inability to have a child. Little did I know what road this would lead us down. It’s one of those things people don’t want to publicly talk about. Through message boards, I met wonderful women undergoing the same struggle. It was nice to have them to talk to, and I made some wonderful friends along the way. We tried some basic fertility treatments that didn’t work. Then through some unexpected miracle we were able to try IVF. It worked! I was finally pregnant! We were elated! Then I ended up losing the baby. My dreams were crushed, my heart broken. I decided to go public (within my group of friends) with our loss. What happened next was amazing. So many people reached out to me telling their own stories of loss, or struggles of conceiving a child. It felt good to not be alone in the most devastating time of my life. We weren’t sure where we were going to go from here. Was that it? Did we lose our chance?
After a change in jobs, I got the insurance coverage to try fertility treatments one more go around. We changed our clinic. Something had to be done differently. We decided to go the IUI route. It was emotionally difficult, because our first try fell around Mother’s and Father’s Day. When you battle infertility those are the worst holidays. You see all the pictures of friends posing happily with their kids, and it sucks. Don’t get me wrong I am happy for every single one of my friends that have been able to have a child while we’ve been trying, but sometimes you get sad. So I hold my head up high and power through.
It may not seem like I’m saying this, but I’m incredibly lucky. I have the most amazing friends, and a wonderful man I will get to spend the rest of my life with. He and I have so much fun in life, we both smile and laugh a lot when we are together. We get to travel, I love going on adventures with him. We decided we would accept any outcome of our last try at fertility treatments, and be grateful for the life we have. Our doctor asked us what we would do if this didn’t work. We replied “Nothing. We have a wonderful life together, and if it’s meant to be just the two of us we’re okay with that. We’ll continue on, and let life happen as it may.”
My point is, the norms of society do not define me as a woman. My breast size does not define me, my ability to bear children does not define me, I define what it is to be a woman. At 40 years old, I have decided that I am okay with who I am. I am happy with the size and shape of my body. I have accepted that I may never be a mother. I have come to terms with the woman I am, and that is beautiful.”