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    Mentalpause and Other Midlife Laughs
    Mentalpause and Other Midlife Laughs
    Mentalpause and Other Midlife Laughs
    Ebook137 pages1 hour

    Mentalpause and Other Midlife Laughs

    By Laura Jensen Walker and Martha Bolton

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    About this ebook

    Do you often forget the words for common things, like "husband" or "bathtub"? Have you suddenly found sub-zero temperatures pleasant? Do you survive on chocolate supplements? Ask these questions of any woman who has been through menopause, is going through it, or is soon to hit it, and she'll say yes (and then, most likely, cry).

    Laura Jensen Walker went into early menopause after her bout with cancer and can sympathize with other "mentalpause" sufferers and survivors. As in Thanks for the Mammogram!, she uses hilarious vignettes and a delightful mix of wit and wisdom to connect with her readers. With chapters about how "All Varicose Veins Lead to Rome" and "PMS Is a Picnic in the Park," this book helps women dealing with "mentalpause" and those around them gain a better understanding--and certainly a lighter attitude--about this passage of life.

    Mentalpause . . . and Other Midlife Laughs will get readers laughing at themselves as they hear Laura lightheartedly describe her age spots, lament her sagging everything, and look anew at love after forty.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherBaker Publishing Group
    Release dateApr 1, 2012
    ISBN9781441238566
    Mentalpause and Other Midlife Laughs
    Author

    Laura Jensen Walker

    Laura Jensen Walker is an award-winning writer and popular national speaker. Her previous novels include Daring Chloe, Turning the Paige, and Reconstructing Natalie, chosen as the first-ever Novel of the Year for Women of Faith® conferences. The author of several non-fiction humor books, Laura lives in Northern California with her husband, Michael, and their canine daughter Gracie.

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    • 2/5
      A whole book trying to be funny about menopause. Either I've been in it too long, or the author's humor doesn't sync with mine, because it sounds more whiny and complainy than funny. I applaud her for trying, but this wasn't for me. To think of finishing this makes me ill, so I quit, but your mileage may vary.

    Book preview

    Mentalpause and Other Midlife Laughs - Laura Jensen Walker

    it.

    introduction

    There is a fountain of youth: it is your mind, your talents, the creativity you bring to your life and the lives of people you love. When you learn to tap this source, you will have truly defeated age.

    Sophia Loren

    Today I turned fifty. How did that happen?

    I still feel thirtysomething. And I don’t even live in Philadelphia. (If you’re under forty, you probably don’t remember the late ’80s show with neurotic thirtysomething yuppies filled with baby boomer angst—including Gary, the hot English professor.)

    Don’t get me wrong. I’m not complaining about my age. After all, fifty is the new thirty. Someone famous said so (Oprah, maybe?). Works for me. It’s just that having that actual number pass my lips in reference to myself is like saying something in Greek or Chinese. It’s so foreign to my ears.

    Or as Yul Brynner said in The King and I, tis a puzzlement.

    Unlike some women, I’m not freaked out or upset about this milestone number. Honestly? As a fifteen-year breast cancer survivor, I’m grateful to have made it to fifty. Bring on the wrinkles, gray hair, and sagging body parts!

    Speaking of sagging body parts . . .

    When I had my mastectomy at thirty-five, I followed it with reconstructive surgery and a saline implant. I didn’t want a daily reminder of the disease—the way my mother had, and always regretted.

    My saline implant served me well for more than thirteen years, but more than a year ago when I was helping my husband put away the Christmas decorations—lifting a heavy box and bracing it against my chest—it gave up the ghost.

    Pop goes the implant.

    Not to worry. It didn’t hurt. In fact, I didn’t feel a thing. The first clue I had that the implant had even ruptured was when I went to take a shower. I peeled off my sweatshirt and when I happened to glance in the mirror, I noticed something strange.

    My breast had suddenly gone south in a big way. Deflated. Like a flat tire.

    Whoa. How weird was that?

    Good thing I’d chosen saline rather than silicone, so it was just harmless salt water that leaked into my body from the ruptured implant. Good thing, too, that my boobs have never been a big deal to me.

    Pamela Anderson I’m not.

    I’d always said that if my implant ever gave me any trouble, I’d simply have it removed and not replace it. And I did. My decision was helped along by the fact that in all of Sacramento, not one plastic surgeon accepted my medical insurance. It was a three-month wait and nearly an hour’s drive to get to the lone plastic surgeon in the area just to remove my deflated implant. Never mind having a new one inserted.

    Today I have the normal fifty-year-old sag on one side of my chest and a flat tire on the other.

    And that’s okay. It doesn’t bother me in the least. (My husband either. He’s just happy to still have his wife.)

    I’m not my breasts. Or my thighs. Or my gray hairs. Or my crow’s feet. Or even my upper arms.

    What I am is a child of God.

    A child of God who’s grateful to be alive. With or without a breast. And a woman who agrees wholeheartedly with actress Rosalind Russell who said, Taking joy in life is a woman’s best cosmetic.

    Preach it, sister!

    Please don’t retouch my wrinkles. It took me so long to earn them.

    Anna Magnani

    ONE

    mentalpause

    They say the mind is the first thing to go . . . at least, I think that’s what they say.

    My memory is so bad that many times I forget my own name.

    Cervantes

    I’m forty-two and having hot flashes.

    What’s up with that? I mean, forty-two??? C’mon! I thought that wasn’t supposed to happen until I was around sixty-two.

    My husband, Michael, who is three and a half years younger than I am, likes to joke, I’m not even forty yet, and my wife is going through menopause.

    But it’s not just menopause, it’s mentalpause.

    My memory is gone.

    I’ll be in the middle of an important conversation, start to begin a new sentence, and poof, it’s vanished. Lost forever in the Bermuda triangle of mentalpause.

    Or I can’t remember names of common things around the house.

    Like door.

    Sink.

    Husband.

    I’ll be explaining something to whatshisname, perhaps discussing a project that needs to get done, and the name of the item I’m discussing simply eludes me (although the project doesn’t, much to my husband’s dismay).

    Finally, I point at the offending object in frustration and say, "Whatever that thing is called. You know what I’m talking about!"

    Pointing has become my latest aerobic activity, and whatchamacallit is my noun of choice these days.

    It’s not as if my memory’s ever been my greatest attribute. I’ve always had what my family would call selective memory.

    Or a vivid imagination.

    My remembrances of those halcyon days of childhood in Wisconsin are never quite the same as the rest of my family’s.

    When my older sister Lisa and I were about seven and eight we took swimming classes at the Y downtown.

    I can still recall the scent of chlorine and the sound of twelve pairs of bare little-girl feet slip-slapping on the wet hardwood floor alongside the pool as we made our way to the dreaded diving

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