…and so things are happening to me, inside and outside of me, of which I feel like I have little control, and I wondered this morning if there is a rite of passage book for women of my age, like there were rites of passage books for girls of our age, back then when things were happening to us and inside us and outside of us, and we felt so confused and out of control???

March was a wonky month for me, for many reasons, specifically things started to go wonky with my insides that had not ever been wonky before.  Wonky, you might imagine, is NOT one of the words I learned from my excessive searching on Web-MD during the last several weeks.  I have found that when you are feeling uncertain about things and have symptoms that are unusual or new to you, if you are a person with disposable income and/or health insurance, you probably go to a doctor, a person who knows you and to whom you go when things are wonky…if you are like me, a person with neither disposable income nor health insurance who does not have a “regular” doctor of any sort, other than the dentist, you likely go to the internet and begin typing in questions and words and finding that, according to Google, you are VERY MUCH not the only one with these questions and these words, IN THAT ORDER…because guess what??!!  the questions you typed in, or the words you typed in that exact order, are the second and third match that shows up in Google!  Yay!!  Some other woman, likely of your age, has also typed in this search at some ridiculous hour of the night when she inexplicably wants to punch the lights out of the man sleeping beside her, who has done nothing wrong, and who can’t seem to stop the sweat from dripping down her neck, and who now wants to unreasonably burst into tears because when she gets up to pee, again, she discovers that one of the light-bulbs is out on her porch light…so you feel a little less wonky, and a little bit comforted that some other woman of your age has typed in these same words and has these same questions and probably much like yourself has no extra money, no health insurance, and no regular doctor to whom she can discuss these “unmentionable” wonky things…

So back when I was in 4th or 5th grade or so, LONG before there was the internet and long before girls felt comfortable to talk to their mothers about ANYthing, and mostly just had each other to talk with about wonky things happening of which we had no control…we had Judy Blume, in the privacy of our rooms…she talked to us about EVERYthing and made us feel like we were going to be just fine…all the confusion we had, all the wonky-ness going on in our bodies and in our brains turned out to be PERFECTLY normal and Judy Blume made what was scary and unsettling, fine, sometimes funny, and totally easy to understand…so I want to know…what’s the book I should read now??!!  Is there a rite of passage book a woman ought to be reading when she is confused about the ungodly large number of wonky symptoms she has inside, outside, and upside down??!!  If said book does not presently exist, I think that THAT is my clue…no more blogging about blah-blah-blah romance, love, blah-blah-blah relationships, couples…perhaps there is a book that wants to be written and I have got to write it??!!  In The Bell Jar, Sylvia Plath writes,  “Then I decided I would spend the summer writing a novel. That would fix a lot of people.”  …and now I think, no, not a novel, maybe what I want to write that might fix a lot of people would be a book about all this mid-life wonky business…maybe?  What would Judy Blume think?