Are You There, Judy Blume?

I was fourteen when I got my period, which was on the older side in my friends’ group. I’d read Are You There God, It’s Me, Margaret, when I was twelve, and thought the moment would be sacred somehow, that maybe I would feel a sense of womanly wisdom as it started coursing through my veins. I didn’t expect Fecunditas to appear before me in a flash of red light or anything, I just thought I’d feel special.

Instead, I’d felt funny during my ballet class that afternoon, a little lightheaded and fatigued, and also crampy. When I got home and told my mom, she went and got me a box of tampons from her bathroom. She told me there were directions inside. I won’t go into much detail, I’ll just let you know when you’re fourteen and you’ve never had your period before, you might not be able to manage the directions on your own. They weren’t great directions, and I was nervous and uncomfortable.

Maybe you’re thinking there’s no way to mess it up, though, and I’m here to tell you there absolutely is a way, and it has to do with imagining the entire tampon — including the cardboard applicator — stays inside you. I left the bathroom in a lot of pain. My mom looked at me with no discernible sympathy and said I’d get used to it. I spent a few hours in agony, wondering how women possibly did this, until a friend of hers came over and saw me perched on the edge of the couch. I was unable to sit in any comfortable way. She asked me to take her through exactly what I’d done.

She was horrified and asked my mom why she didn’t go into the bathroom with me. My mother got annoyed, shrugged and said, “She can read!” I went back to the bathroom to rectify my mistake, feeling embarrassed and ashamed.

I cursed Judy Blume with all my heart. It was easier than cursing my mother.

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Today I went to the pharmacy to pick up my first estrogen patches and progesterone pills. I met with a doctor yesterday, and I have seven of the ten symptoms of perimenopause which include things like never knowing when or if you’ll get your period, hot flashes, insomnia, fatigue (because, insomnia), worsening migraines, increase in ADHD symptoms, anxiety, depression, mood swings, not an ounce of energy left for Mansplainese, and the urge to go live in a cliffside cottage in the Irish moors.

Near here, somewhere. Photo by Andy Carne on Unsplash

The thing about perimenopause is that it tends to coincide with huge life changes. If you have children, they probably hit puberty when you hit perimenopause, which means an adventure for the whole family. At the same time, if your parents are alive, they will likely start to need you in different and alarming ways. Maybe there’s a concurrent global pandemic for good measure. Maybe your mother — who has never been sick a day in her life — is suddenly diagnosed with ALS and decides you are to blame. Anything can happen.

How are any of us supposed to know if the changes we’re feeling are due to grief or hormones? I certainly couldn’t figure it out. At one point, about six months after my mother died, which was also six months after I had the first panic attack of my life, I went to my then-physician. I told him I’d been feeling exceptionally down — which wasn’t like me at all — but that I’d also lost my mother. I asked if we could check my hormones because my period was a little irregular and I was trying to figure out if any of what I was feeling was due to perimenopause, or if it was all grief. If it was all grief, I’d let it run its course, but if it was hormones, I wanted to know.

He smiled and nodded, then casually asked, “Would your family say you’re unpleasant to be around?” I didn’t understand his question and thought I’d misheard. I asked him to clarify. “If I asked your kids,” he said slowly, “would they say you’re unpleasant to be around?” I thought about it, and burst into tears. He said he could put me on a low-level anti-depressant. I said I just wanted a hormone panel.

In the end, I left and never went back, but that moment stayed with me. How his first concern was not for me, but for everyone around me. Was my grief an inconvenience for my family? Was I being unpleasant? My god. My mother had died in the most horrific way imaginable and there hadn’t been a thing I could do to stop it. Was I not allowed to not be okay?

I thought about women going to see him who might really be in trouble.

What are women to men like him? What is the point of us? Are we to be useful caretakers, drugged like Stepford wives if necessary? Must we be pleasant at all times? Do we matter at all as people in our own right?

I have a new doctor now, a woman. I love her. The first time I went to see her I went with a list I whipped out, because I was afraid I’d forget to ask something and I expected she’d be rushing. Then I realized she was listening. Not in a, “I know how to look as though I’m listening” way — genuinely listening. Leaning forward. Pausing. Asking questions. A doctor hadn’t listened to me like that in years. I said that to her, and suddenly there were tears all over my face. She wasn’t bothered by it, she just nodded, and handed me a tissue. She’s the one who referred me to the OB/GYN I spoke to yesterday. She also listened. There’s a common denominator here somewhere.

When I picked up the new meds at the pharmacy, I asked for a consult. The pharmacist didn’t tell me anything the doctor hadn’t, though. I should pick a place for the patch — there were options laid out in the directions — and use alcohol to wipe down my skin before I pressed it on. Change the patch once a week at the same time. Progesterone pills at night. Cool.

I got home and thought I’d put the patch on right away. Lately I sleep every other night, and you might think I’m kidding, but I’d be funnier than that if I were. I get a decent night of sleep one night, then the next night I’m up until 5 or 6am. Then I take a “morning nap” for a couple of hours and do my day. Then I sleep for a night, and so it goes. So I’m kinda over it, even though the sunrises are beautiful. I need sleep.

I looked at the directions as one does.

If you look at Step 3, do you see where it says there’s the patch, and it’s attached to a thick, hard-plastic adhesive liner, covered by a clear plastic film? And then they start talking about the silver foil-sticker? Yeah. Okay so the silver foil-sticker has no business in the conversation. It’s just there as this thing to throw you off, like we’re doing an Escape Room. And the part where it says: “You will see that Climara is an oval shaped clear patch….covered by a clear plastic film”…? Even in the figure it looks like you peel off a top layer and the patch is underneath. Nah. The patch is the clear plastic film. So if you try to remove a clear plastic film because you assume the patch is underneath it and they are giving you directions they want you to follow as if they’re…y’know, directions? That won’t go well.

I got furious, which is not a thing that happens often. You really have to work at it if you want to see me lose it. One thing that will do it are things that should be easy but are not. They could just say, “The patch sits on top of the hard plastic shell. Peel it off and slap it on, bitches.” But nooooooo. So I texted my bff and she FaceTimed me back. She’d just had a core biopsy of a lump in her breast hours earlier. It is nonstop fun being a woman, let me tell you.

I tried to position my phone so she could see the patch while I read the directions to her, because not every patch is the same. Then she assured me the thing sitting on top of the oval was the patch, so I peeled it off and stuck it on and positioned my phone again so she could see where I put it.

We discussed the merit of placement in all of this. She told me she currently has a “seventies bush” and doesn’t worry about shaving or waxing. We’re letting it all hang out today, friends. This is what women do when they’ve known each other forever. I went from being furious to laughing my ass off. Eventually we talked about feeling like everyone is hurting right now. No one feels safe.

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I guess my expectations of people must be too high. Not all people, haha. We have to qualify everything these days, right? Thankfully, there are a handful of people who exceed my expectations all the time, and when I tell you I treasure them, you can take that to the bank. Maybe don’t take it to the literal bank, though, because banks don’t care about us.

You know those bank commercials with the smiling young guy in khakis or the young professional woman? They’re always in the middle of some scenario that would never happen — a couple and the banker sitting around a desk nodding with excitement as they look at pictures of the couple’s first home.

Or if it isn’t the young couple (and she’s usually pregnant, because of course that’s when you go to buy a house) then it’s a small business owner outside her bakery talking about how her bank was there with a line of credit when she needed it.

Maybe I should do a commercial about Citibank! They were my bank of over 25 years when they sent me a letter during the pandemic to let me know they were converting my line of credit into a standard loan … because they could. It was in the very fine print when I opened my business in 2009. In my “other life” I have a yoga website, I’ve been teaching for 30+ years. I’d used some of my line of credit a few times when there were projects I wanted to pursue to expand, but I’d always done them with bank approval, and always put the money back. My credit score is good. I work my ass off.

I begged them not to do it. I sent an email to the guy in charge of those decisions at my local branch, and told him it gave me a tiny bit of peace and relief to know that line of credit was there if I needed it. I reminded him I had two kids he’d met many times, and said they were home doing zoom school like everyone’s kids. I was working 60 hours a week. My mom had a terminal diagnosis on the east coast. Could we get on a call or zoom to discuss? He didn’t even answer, I just got a statement in the mail informing me my line of credit was now a loan and the first payment was due. So, I paid it back.

That would be some commercial, wouldn’t it?

Banks do what’s good for banks. There was a pandemic, they didn’t want to take a chance that businesses would go under, so they converted lines of credit into loans and leaned on small businesses to pony up. Nothing personal. It was silly of me to think they’d care about my kids or my mom, or that they meant it when they said they liked to support small, woman-owned businesses. That’s just a thing that sounds good to say.

Why am I talking about banks? Because banks and billionaires go hand-in-hand. We know this, or I hope we do, but half the voting public seems to think the guy turning the Oval Office into Vegas, D.C. is not a massive, outright grifter, and they continue to think that as he’s trying to steal taxpayer dollars for tacky-ass vanity projects, and to… what was it, again? Oh yeah. Reward insurrectionists right before the midterms. It’s all so insane it’s hard to keep sorted.

I wish we could get through to the people who still think woke libs with their woke tears are the problem, or immigrants are the reason things aren’t good, or it’s women with their “toxic empathy” who shouldn’t be voting, or feminists who have ruined everything, or queer people or Black people, or “men on women’s sports teams” or pick your marginalized group.

If I could stomach Faux News I would have turned it on, because I just cannot fathom how they’re presenting the things that are happening right now in any way that could make sense to anyone. How can this level of blinding corruption be confusing?

Charles Edward Littlejohn leaked the president’s tax returns. Littlejohn was an independent contractor who worked for the IRS, and he stole the returns (along with the tax returns of 405,000 other business entities) and leaked them to The New York Times and ProPublica because he thought he was serving the public interest by revealing how the wealthy avoid paying taxes — and because every president in the history of ever — except the current one — has voluntarily turned over their tax returns so the voting public can see they have nothing to hide, and to avoid accusations of conflicts of interest.

Littlejohn was convicted and sentenced in 2024 to five years in prison — the maximum sentence allowable by law. Justice has been and is being served, full stop. Nonetheless, the president decided to sue his own IRS for $10 billion dollars of taxpayer money. Pause and think about that. The man who committed the crime is in jail, he’s been punished — but that’s not enough for this president. He is willing to take $10 billion dollars from the American people he’s supposed to serve because he’s angry. But why should we pay? We didn’t steal his tax returns. What kind of president would take $10 billion dollars from hardworking Americans for a crime that had nothing to do with them?

It was an insane amount of damages to go after in any case — and it never would have stood up in court — because the case never would have made it to court.

Article III, Section 2 of the U.S. Constitution includes the “Case or Controversy” clause. In a federal case, there must be a plaintiff with a claim against an “adverse party.” In other words, two distinct litigants who want different things. When the president of the U.S. sues the IRS, an agency of the government he’s in charge of, demanding they pay him money from the Treasury he also controls — even the president himself knows he’s playing games:

“And they do say that, you know, it’s never been a case like this,” the president said at a rally this December, taking on the animated voice of a newscaster. “‘Donald Trump sues the United States of America. Donald Trump becomes president. And now Donald Trump has to settle the suit.’”

The judge, Judge Kathleen M. Williams of the Southern District of Florida, appointed independent attorneys (court-appointed amici) to argue whether this lawsuit met the “adverse party” requirement. The deadline for their briefs was last week.

Before that deadline arrived, Todd Blanche, Acting Attorney General — and Don Donnie’s longtime personal lawyer — filed a Notice of Voluntary Dismissal with Prejudice under Federal Rule of Civil Procedure — which means, essentially, the case is dropped instantly. The court no longer has any jurisdiction, the judge doesn’t sign anything nor does she rule on anything. The case is withdrawn, over, dismissed — done before it’s heard. Todd Blanche knew they would not win.

I’m going to guess Faux News is not mentioning that part. Todd Blanche pulled the case himself and announced a “Settlement Agreement.”

I don’t know about you, but when I hear “settlement agreement” and something about the IRS case and the other lawsuit the president has against his own DOJ, I’m thinking it’s a legal agreement. I’m thinking a judge weighed in. That’s what I thought at first and I was stunned.

You know about the other lawsuit, the $230 million dollar case he brought against the DOJ? That’s the one where the president is suing because they had the audacity to investigate him over obstruction of justice when he refused to return classified documents he was hiding in a bathroom, ballroom, and office at Mar-a-Lago, and because they investigated him for Russian interference in the 2016 election, and then of course, there was the whole insurrection thing!

So basically, he sued his own Department of Justice for doing its job under the previous administration, and the takeaway is, if you don’t want to be investigated, don’t do illegal shit. But that isn’t the takeaway, because we live in a simulation.

(Also, let me save myself time just in case we encounter people who like to talk about Biden, who also had classified documents in his home. He sure did! He took his personal notebooks just like this other president…let me think. Oh! Ronald Reagan, that’s right. Anyway, here’s the whole-ass report about it, including the part about how Biden cooperated with investigators, invited them into his home, and returned any materials they wanted, instantly — whereas the current guy lied, obstructed justice, enlisted others to destroy evidence, and hid the records. Not the same! Yikes.)

The IRS case has nothing to do with the DOJ case, but they’re presenting them like they’re connected. A little smoke-and-mirrors, flood-the-zone, sleight-of-hand weave if you will. A settlement agreement makes it sound as though the IRS is trying to “settle” with the president, like they thought he might win this $10 billion dollar lawsuit. As if his case had merit.

My guess is they think his supporters are blindly loyal and they’ll believe whatever he says, so it doesn’t really matter. If he tells them he decided to drop the IRS case and agree to a much smaller settlement to make up for the “longstanding harm he’s suffered at the hands of the DOJ and the way it was ‘weaponized’ against him under the Biden Administration” — their answer will likely be, “Take my money!”

I don’t know how to get past January 6th, though. I don’t understand how anyone with any kind of integrity or love for this country can pretend that day was not horrific, heart wrenching and unconscionable. The man refused to accept the results of a free and fair election, and he incited an insurrection. We all saw it. Now he wants $1.776 billion dollars of taxpayer money to reward the “loyal patriots” who were willing to hang Mike Pence on his behalf? Are y’all serious? I’m no fan of Mike Pence, but I don’t want him hanged from a noose, and I don’t want to reward the people who would have made him swing, thanks.

I’d rather have affordable healthcare, groceries, free lunches for kids who need them, gas that isn’t $6 dollars a gallon, and a world where we aren’t allowing children to be casualties of our selfishness, violence, stupidity, and rampant greed — at home and abroad. I’d rather have my tax dollars spent on education — hiring more teachers, and paying all of our teachers well, so they aren’t exhausted and stressed out and spending the little money they have on supplies and snacks for hungry kids whose families were THROWN OFF SNAP BENEFITS.

I’d rather have my tax dollars spent making sure no one is sleeping on the streets. I’d like tax money to be spent on pediatric cancer research, and all cancer research, because I am tired of losing people, aren’t you? I’d like it to go toward green energy initiatives and every other way we can think of protecting this gorgeous planet and all the animals who share it with us.

I’d love for more funding, not less, to go toward women’s health in every area, because I slept like a baby last night, and I might have tried HRT a lot sooner if we all hadn’t been told we shouldn’t, because of one study twenty-four years ago.

Maybe there’d even be a little money left over to improve the directions on the box.

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