Bloody Hell

Bloody Hell!

I am angry. So angry I can taste it. I don’t get angry often, I cannot think of the last time I was this angry, honestly. Which is a newish emotion for me.

When I first got out of the hospital, I was grateful to be alive. Every day was a blessing, and everything was wonderful. It was like when I first stopped drinking all those years ago, and I had my first glass of orange juice without vodka in it, amazed how wonderful orange juice really tasted.

Now the bloom has gone off the rose. Part of me wishes I had died, questioning why I didn’t. Guardian angel perhaps? Nine lives?

I like the nine lives analog I have had nine lives from the first time where I almost died in delivery, until this past November when I had problems with my kidneys failing.

As a cat owner, I don’t believe I will be lucky the next time.

Going back to anger- what angers me- is this med cocktail- drugs to help my kidneys and bladder, lower my blood pressure- Amlodipine, Bethanechol, and Clonidine. I was on seven in January, so three is doable.

What has happened, either from the experience, the dialysis, the med cocktail, is this (men might want to stop here)… is I haven’t had had my period since Christmas. My mother mentions to me over lunch last Friday that menopause is wonderful, and think of all the money you will save by not buying napkins and tampons anymore.

But I don’t know. I have had Auntie Flo visit since 7^th grade. My entire life, practically. I don’t have any friends in real life who have gone through this, just friends’ mothers. In my mothers generation they would automatically remove organs if they had painful periods and heavy bleeding, bringing on an early menopause. I have told my gynecologist over and over again, I would not go through that. Let it be the way nature intends.

I can’t help thinking it’s too early. I am not 50; it’s a while before I hit that milestone. I was still clinging to the hope I would be able to have a baby some day.

It’s a silly thought. No boyfriend, not in the way to do it myself, raising it as a single mom. Not now. Maybe 10 years ago I could have done that, but now.

When I first started therapy, back as a grad student when I was 21, the therapist worked out I needed to have a baby to make closure for the fact I was adopted, and spent the first seven months of my life in an over crowded system in NY. I was fostered out to a woman who had many other babies, and would lie in neglect, diapers wouldn’t be changed immediately, and I wouldn’t be cuddled like my friends did with their infants.

I recall something from a basic psychology class my freshman year in college. About a monkey and it’s mother, they had one monkey baby that stayed with it’s mother, and another one who was given a stuffed plush monkey mother, and bottles could be attached to her so the monkey could feed. The first baby monkey did fine, because his mother loved him and held him and fed him. The other baby monkey eventually died, because he was getting no love, even though his basic needs (food, someone to clean his wastes) were done. I was like that second monkey.

I suppose it could have been worse, when I became sexually active. I could have had one-night stands looking in vain for someone to love me, and never finding it. I’m lucky that by the time I was sexually active, AIDS was the big word on campus, and all of a sudden you had more to fear by a one-night stand besides accidentally getting pregnant, or getting VD. You could get AIDS. It was brand new; no one understood it, and all we knew is you would die. Horribly.

And I was selfish, spending the days as a librarian, bored out of my mind, and three nights a week working in a mom and pop bookstore. Weekends were spent getting drunk on Friday night with a pile of VHS movies freshly rented from Blockbuster, and I would stay on the couch the entire weekend, until Sunday night when it was time to stop drinking and get sober. I didn’t really date and it was lonely. I never minded being alone, it’s being lonely that’s difficult.

You know those  chick flicks movies aimed at women where there is always the pretty young, executive woman in her 20s or 30s that falls in love with the guy, and has the cute but not pretty BFF, who is usually smarter than her friend but never gets the guy. The guys always think of her as “one of them”. A friend but not a girl friend. Harry might have ended up with Sally but in my universe, it never happened.

And I longed for it. I even managed to save up 2000 dollars to go to a matchmaker in Staten Island who promised I would have a ring on my finger within two years. A real Yenta. I took an extensive questionnaire, talked to her for a bit, and gave her my hard earned money, and left her singing “Matchmaker, Matchmaker”, on the ride home.

I had two dates before she gave me my money back. There wasn’t anything wrong with me, it’s just the two men she hooked me up with thought I wasn’t Jewish enough or too Jewish, which was silly because I was non-practicing.  I was smart and witty, and they wanted – someone dumber. She said she couldn’t find someone for me, and gave me back the money. I took the money back, put it in the savings account, eventually buying some stocks with it. I dated a few guys for a years or so, but when push came to shove, I was a nice girl but they still wanted to “sow their wild oats”, or there wasn’t anything holding together other than sexual chemistry. Meanwhile I kept getting wedding invitations and baby shower invitations and it was like a dagger to my heart.

But I stayed optimistic, there is a lid for every pot, so they say, and my soul mate would be out there.

I never found him. Maybe I was looking too hard. It’s Ok; there are worse things in life than being single. But the baby! How I longed for the baby. I always thought it would happen.

Now it looks like Mother Nature is taking that option away from me and I want to cry. I want to scream. How dare you? Destroy my dream? My dream, my beautiful dream is dying like a raisin in the sun.

Do I go to a therapist and hash this out? No. It’s futile. Life is all about you can’t always get what you want. It is what it is, and I cannot change it no matter how my heart is breaking for what could have been. 

I just need to figure out, what does a woman do with her life if she cannot have a regular career, and is not a mother? What is my purpose?

I wish my guardian angel would tell me.