Say What Now? Peri-who?

So, after the epic showdown from New Year’s Day I swore I wouldn’t read another dang parenting book this year.

Nope.  Nope. Nope.

The last parenting book–which I refuse to name here–at least helped me figure out where a couple of my non-negotiables are. ( A clean room is a non-negotiable at Casa d’ABM.)  But beyond that, that book was a set up for failure and fail I did.

So no more parenting books for a minute.

So, recently I turned to podcasts on parenting.  Hey, I do a podcast with Complicated Melodi’s Mimi every two weeks (Add Water and Stir — #shamelessplug for tonight’s episode!), and Mimi often mentions her love of podcasts during her daily commute.  So, I figured why not; it seemed a bit more passive than the whole book thing.

So, as luck would have it, @MomCasts starting following me on Twitter. I clicked follow, downloaded a new podcast app and started searching for something to listen to.  I chose a couple of podcasts for subscription and started listening this morning.

For reals, I’m going to quit taking in information at all at this rate. So in my feels…sigh.

So I tuned into Power Your Parenting this morning…episode 008 to be exact.  I listened to a snippets of others before settling into this one. The episode is about hormones.  (In defense of the podcast, it was really interesting.  I will keep listening)

Oh yeah, I was all settled to into hear about Hope’s brain chemistry and how that has made my kid bat schnit cray.

Whomp! Whomp!

The episode is about how mom’s are often experiencing perimenopause as their daughters slide into adolescence.

Peri-who?  Pause-what?

Ahhh hells naw.

By the time I got to my office parking garage,I was coming undone.  I started to think about our last podcast, during which Mimi raised the issue of Advanced Maternal Age, at which I sniffed my “all kinds of in denial” nose.

So this morning, I couldn’t help having the following revelations:

1. There is a deep part of me that still mourns not having biological children.  Man, it’s deep and this perimenopause thing got right up in that space, quick. It’s funny, because I don’t even think I would ever want to try to have a child at this point, but the notion that the choice to do so is clearly, unequivocally slipping away is hard to swallow. Jeesch this cuts right to the core of my womanhood, and I did not take that ish well at all.
2. We might turn into WWE at Casa d’ABM.  Hope and I have serious tempers, and the few times it’s really, really, really gone down between us it’s like we are spitting hot grease in hell.  It is sooo not pretty. You mean to tell me that it’s not just my temper, but hormonally I can’t keep my ish together?  Oh, sweet hey-zeus…I cannot. Oh we work on lots of strategies for positive conflict resolution and anger management, but it’s almost like a valve has to be released ever so often.  #messy
3. I started really thinking about my own mortality and being….old.  Ugh.  Now, I usually tell folks that I like being my age because the alternative of being my age is to not exist.  I am usually unbothered by the notion of growing older.  I gave up dying my hair; Elihu affectionately calls me his silver fox.  I think myself still pretty hip and fly.  And even though I intellectually know that I’m getting older and that perimenopause isn’t that big of a deal, um, well, it kinda is.  Me no likey.

So this knowledge is something else for me to consider and ruminate on as I try to figure out how to navigate this teen thing. It’s easy to think that problems are extrinsic and need external solutions.  I guess I need to look even more inward…of course I think I’ll be doing that on the homeopathic remedy aisle of the local Whole Paycheck.