Excuse Me While I Disappear: Tales of Midlife Mayhem

by Laurie Notaro

Expert Tip: “The day will come when you fervently wish that you are only as fat as you were the FIRST time you thought you were fat.”—Michelle Loyet, MAW, whom I’ve been on vacation with numerous times

splintered into shards of ocher plastic and clattered to the floor in a tumble of what looked like picnic knives.

“You know that’s to carry around your diapers, don’t you?” I asked him. “It’s not for snacks.” “It . . . could be for snacks,” he said quietly.

Not middle-aged women. They get up from a bed they’ve never slept in, put on an underwire and some mascara, and do it all over again. And no one knows.

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

We are liberated and free! We delight in passing that liberation on to others by telling everyone else exactly how to live.

DO have a Prius! Now that’s a car I don’t mind driving in front of my house. Very quiet. Very quiet. Sometimes it’s so quiet that I have to stop and yell at squirrels to get out of the way. Priuses

But I am a different breed, and I had shed almost all of my fear coat. I

People act poorly because other people have let them act poorly, and they have been able to get away with it for a lifetime.

Sometimes it takes an invisible woman to get something done.

leave it to an invisible woman to yell so loud when it counts that no force can drown her out.

There was no way in hell I had ever seen a wiener, and if I had, I’m sure my mother would have told me that it was a birth defect and to stop staring.

I’m like a Barbie now; my joints just don’t go that way anymore. Forcing the issue is likely to have the same results as a rotisserie chicken asked to do the same thing. Chances

have had a husband for twenty-five years, which is way longer than most successful dictatorships, and my marriage is more complicated and has more moving parts, as you can probably guess.

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.