Last night, after a full day of work and laundry and physical-therapy exercises and cleaning up after dinner, I drew what was to be a perfectly delightful bath, and prepared for it lovingly. By which I mean that I had disconnected from my insulin pump and actually used the little insertion caps for each end. This always makes me feel impossibly well-bred and calm, as though I am one of those genteel types that don’t rush through things because they have all the time in the world and things always just turn out the right way for them. I was poised to walk down the hall for said bath—delayed gratification is an acquired taste, I’m told—when my husband entered the room to inform me that our ancient clothes dryer, out in the garage, had gone on to its reward.
Good thing I had a double load of laundry in there, I said, in a tone more calm than I actually felt (and if you know me, feel free to congratulate me on said tone the next time we’re in one another’s company). Gathering as many empty hangers as I could find, I left the softly-scented, bubbly tub sans occupant and set about removing my son’s jeans from the dryer first. They were nearly dry. In fact, along with multiple pairs of underthings and socks, they had been perfectly dry until I’d dumped a big load of clean, wet laundry right over top and hit the IT’S GETTIN DRY IN HURR button.
(Maybe you overloaded it and that’s why it stopped, my husband had offered up, in his genuinely rational and non-judgmental way. No, that can’t be it, I’ve done that before, I’d said, and got on with my life.)
Panic-sweating, because the floor of my life has recently fallen out from under me in ways I will not go into here, and laundry well done was something I’d been very much counting on, as I was slowly coming to realize, I put the newly-damp clothes in a pile. Then I hung as many of the socks, underpants, soft pants, hard pants, tank tops, t-shirts, polo shirts, and dresses as I could, about the garage, and lumbered back into the house with the rest of it. (About 80% of it.) Panic-sweat leaping from my face and neck like the little stink lines that surround Charlie Brown’s friend Pig-Pen, I found a handful of places from which to hang some of that 80%, and cleverly invented myriad others for the rest of the items. Then I sat down to research our best options for replacing the dryer.
Thanks to the proximity of Labor Day, a holiday created by the American government to goose the economy, Wirecutter’s top pick was on offer for many hundreds of dollars less than its usual price. Lucky us! Panic-sweat having subsided, if not yet thoroughly evaporated, I made sure to pause and note that while the death of the dryer wasn’t convenient (Convenient? Ha! That wasn’t a thing when I was growing up!) it was, somewhat miraculously, not a terrible imposition. We would pay the money, and then more money would show up within a reasonable time frame. (I made sure to note, too, that this line of thinking was most assuredly how the fall of Rome began. “Watch out for that first step—it’s a doozy,” as that one man spake in the movie Groundhog Day.)
Because a year ago this would have been, while not exactly a household emergency, a Very Big Deal. We’d have had to save up for months and months, in the meantime making things work by hanging clothes everywhere we could and many places where we couldn’t. (Why is there always so much laundry?) I marveled yet again at the difference a single year can make in an ordinary life. And then I heard it: The jeering of my ancestors, along with some still-with-us family members. Oh no! Imagine, being inconvenienced! ¡Ay, amá, me muero!
And, okay: Point to the Olds and the Deads. But did they have to work faster and faster and harder every day to stay relevant in a world that no longer valued their previously extremely prized skills, that wanted nothing to do with their perimenopausal selves, in order to be able to pay the exorbitant cost of living in this decade, making money that would have meant actual wealth just 20 years earlier? And then still have to spend hours hanging laundry? I submit, gentle folk of the family tree, that your world is not the one you left to me.
How many midlives must a white-presenting woman survive before she’s earned the crisis? The answer, my friends, is blowing all throughout the shitty marketing emails that clog my inbox every day, no matter how many times I unsubscribe. In the incessant noise that screeches at me to the tune of my personalized internet preferences. In the all-singing, all-dancing crap of the world that all the world seems to have become (and yes, apologies to Chuck Palahniuk).
Put more simply, the answer is zero midlives. Or: One midlife. Possibly a few, or several. It might be many midlives, though. The answer is everyone knows, and also no one knows. Or! Or. Most probable of all: The answer is you’re using the wrong rubric, dummy. Try this one weird trick instead.
I’ve long thought of myself as someone who knows things because I’m always seeking out things to learn. Someone who understands both the big picture and its nuances, and can translate each into any language at any scale. I was reading my parents’ psych and philosophy text books in grade school, for the love of God. I had a Rolling Stone subscription from age 12 on! I spent my life actively working to understand more and more and more. In my fifth decade, I am watching those former mysteries become unknowable once again by virtue of neglect as well as active destruction.
Now? I find myself not only disenfranchised (which, if I’m honest, is kind of comfy; shout-out to my fellow Gen-Xers) but also greatly—injuriously, let us say—irked.
But I digress. The bath didn’t happen. Too tired now to fathom getting into the tub, out of the tub, dry, and into pajamas, I drained the tub like someone with a spray tan draining a swamp. (That is to say: I flipped a switch and then left the room and didn’t go back in until I had to.) The ancestors quieted down. That fucking floor is still nowhere to be found, though. In an effort to report this thoroughly, I will add that it seems probable now that the dryer simply requires a new belt. A young Ukrainian man named Alex will come by tomorrow to inspect it. Fingers crossed.
And on we go! If perimenopause is reverse puberty, then perhaps this, too shall pass. If it doesn’t, and you find yourself in need of someone with a few pioneer-level skills as well as a working knowledge of Kierkegaard, Jung, and Fromm? I’m your girl. Call me. (Don’t slide into my DMs. I am so behind on those.)
