Excuse Me While I Disappear: Tales of Midlife Mayhem

by Laurie Notaro

That was it, I finally understood. I was not really invisible, but I was now the ghost of who I used to be. Someone whom society valued, saw potential in, and considered vibrant and young and worthwhile. I was the ghost of someone who mattered.

Hello, you. Or what used to be you, I should say. Because at a certain point in life, things start getting a little weird.

I woke up and my inner thighs were stuck together like two raw chicken breasts. Prying them apart took a good deal of effort and involved a lot of whimpering. I nearly required skin grafts to repair the resulting damage. Your body is slowly melting, and it will continue to do so until the day you die. It is losing its ability to remain upright, and, like plastic wrap, will cling to the closest object. But it’s fine. Like raw chicken, you must simply dredge yourself in flour. All areas of contact will need a hearty dusting twice daily—especially after showering.

After age forty, when you are sleeping, your ass moves, fat cell by fat cell, traveling over treacherous terrain, like penguins, and claims its new territory in your abdomen.

To conquer these foes (because they are not just gray hairs by this time—they are translucent, like creatures from the deepest depths of the ocean), you need a dependable pair of tweezers (forget Revlon; think something that surgeons use to remove shrapnel) and one of the following: a good husband with at least +4.00 readers, a secluded and sunny parking spot, and a clean rearview mirror, or someone who owes you a lot of money.

My point is: the problem is not that we are losing our memory. It’s that we are at capacity, and if new stuff wants to come in, we have to start throwing old stuff overboard.

The brilliance of growing older is that with each passing day, you lose an equivalent amount of fear.

So, yeah, dude. “Not so bad.” Is that also how you’d describe my annual Pap, in which a lady I do know puts a freezing cold metal gun in my cooter, cranks it open like she’s using a friggin’ car jack, and then takes a swab and pokes it at my cervix like it’s an arrow looking for the bull’s-eye? “Now just a pinch.” If someone pinched me like that at work, at the movies, or at a restaurant, they’d be leaving with a black eye,

Women get pinched, poked, pressed. Phallic symbols disguised as medical devices pop out of nowhere, and we just say, “Okay. Fine. Come on in. Do what you want.

We are not born old. We worked to get there. And it is such a surprise when you realize that your new body has been absorbed by a different one; freckles aren’t where they used to be, and parts that were visible are now obstructed. It’s a jarring moment, full of terror, anger, and wonder. It happens to every single one of us who stays alive long enough.

I’ve found that the real empowerment comes from menopause, not periods. There were white sheets in my future, and I could finally buy a nice pair of underwear.

I entered into a contract over a quarter of a century ago to marry this man and to spend the rest of my life choosing not to kill him.