Woman-ness
The first 10 years of my life, I hated being a girl.
I had 6 male cousins, assorted ages, who would regularly line up at the end of the garden and hold "whocanpeethefurthest" contests. Guess who was always the referee that got beaten up?? Yep, me. Because guess who always won? Yep, the youngest.
The next few decades, I hated being a woman. Hated being the first to have to wear a bra in my class. First to start the bleeds and that teenage angst&crappolastuff. Being a tomboy didn't help the brand image either, and though I loved that the guys treated me like "one of the guys", sometimes I'd get miffed and none of us could figure why... not even me. That was also around the time we were all trying to get on first-name terms with our hormones.
The 20's whizzed by in a major serotonin rush punctuated with manic depressive cycles, self esteem issues, guys, university, the spaced-out alternative reality of smoking grass, first job, the evils of booze, second job... We were that lost generation between "stay-at-home moms" and "career women", still nameless because nobody had coined that term yet. We had stereotypes to break, and new paradigms to launch. We were The New Woman. Yayyy! (Gah!!!)
Around age 30, I grudgingly accepted the fact that unless I wanted drastic surgical intervention (which I didn't, I mean what would I do with my lifetime collection of party bras), nothing much was going to change so I had better start accepting my gender, never mind gracefully.
At age 40, I actually started to enjoy being a woman, in a tentative sort of way. And then they changed the rules again. Once more, I was first off the starting block and bang-splatt into the ChangeOfLife. Perimenopause, I learnt, is that long last sigh between bleeds where everything about you goes into reverse gear at 110mph. You get worse PMS than you did in your teens, which was so long ago you have no memories from there anyway. And headaches, which you now suspect might be an armada of aneurysms waiting to implode when you're not looking. And that's just the start.
You hear voices and it's nobody you know. You don't want to hug anyone because they'll think you forgot to towel off after your shower. You walk into a meeting where the temperature would make a polar bear frisky and you break into a hot flash. You start saying something and three words later, you forget what.
Wait, there's more. Your body smells like you borrowed it from a tennis ace when all the exercise you do is walk to the fridge. Your skin starts a slow crawl over your body and slips right off every so often. Joints you never knew you had, start screaming for mercy even when you're curled up in foetal position and barely breathing. Then your heart starts palpitating so fast you're sure it's going to trip some vital circuit inside you.
Finally, at 4 am, when you should be asleep but you're not because you're still canoodling with InSomNeah, you leap out of bed and dash into a cold shower to chase away the 59,800th hot flash of the day. This is the age when you really get socked into all your unknown body-parts and what they do. And sometimes wonder, in an intellectual sort of way, about what if they don't.
Now it's different for every woman, as all the books will hasten to tell you, but chances are you'll experience at least 50% to 80% of this stuff purely on the basis of your gender. A select few (possibly the same select few that got pregnant despite their IUD) will be unfortunate enough to actually experience every last symptom in all of those books... and then some.
Then they'll do a case-study on those few (statistics, you understand), and a whole new slew of books will have to be written. More trees will have to be cut down in virgin rainforests to produce the paper for those. Resulting, of course, in more illegal logging and greater ozone depletion and more global warming... so you see how they're going to pin that whole disaster on us women as well. But that's another story...