My New Best Friend; AKA, When You Get Tired of Being a Green Extremist

Green extremists, take note! What follows is an email I just sent to a friend. Before you read it, you need a little background about my home.

It does not have plumbing. 

No pipes, no tap water, no flush toilet, no (GULP!) shower.

No automatic washing machine.

Yeah, I know. But it sounded like a good idea at the time, ten years ago when I was all idealist about saving the planet. And saving money on our energy bills.

Then there was my husband, who was, like I, not happy with all the plumbing bills our suburban house had incurred during our seven years there. Also, knowing that it would be tantamount to pulling teeth to get a repair person out to where we live, he didn't want to take any risks.

We've adapted well to our semi-primitive lifestyle, except for one thing.

The laundry. Which the following copy of the email elucidates. Enjoy.

***** 

I wisheth to introduce to thou my new best friend.

His name be Mr. Spin Dryer. Before he came into my life, I despised mornings, for the washing of laundry was a daily chore. Why didst I torture myself so, you asketh? Alas, I had to wring everything by hand, and, not wanting to incur Carpal Tunnel Syndrome or other injuries to my hands, I therefore had resigned myself to doing a small load of laundry every day. 

Yea, by "small" I thus includeth large items, such as sheets and sweat pants.

Then, one day, I could bear the torture no more. Yearning to return to the love of mornings which I had abandoned in my youth, and knowing that my hands were slowly turning toward the sunset of their years, I desired to beset a change to the horrendous morning routine.

And so, I acquired Mr. Spin Dryer, who had, most ironically, been awaiting a new home and companion. Now, I washeth the laundry a mere three days per week, as sane people are wont to do, and nevermore shall it be required of my poor and weary hands to wring sheets and sweat pants until they are dry. For lo! Mr. Spin Dryer squeezeth out much more water than my hands ever could, drastically reducing the line-drying time of every item.

Rejoiceth with me, my dear reader, on this happy change of circumstance which God hath so wonderfully wrought. 

The Saddest Thing A Novelist Ever Has To Do

 Once upon a time, I read an article wherein the author, a novelist, described her experience with having to abandon a novel completely. I can’t remember how much of it she’d written; somewhere past half, I think, because the story made me wince with empathy.

Sort of. Because it also made me judge her. Just a little. Surely there was some change she could have made to save the story, regardless of how much rewriting it would have entailed.

It also made me glad that I’m the kind of author who can sit down and write a story straight through without a ton of editing and revising afterward.

Well. Guess God thought I needed to eat a bit of humble pie, because this past fall, I encountered a situation similar to that of my colleague. I had written two novels in my new series, “Crazy Quilt Cabins Christmas,” and written about half of the third one when it just.

Wouldn’t.

Go.

Any.

Further.

Hitting a block about halfway through was nothing new to me, so when it first happened, I did what I always do when that happens: set it aside for a couple of days. Then, I sat down and tried to move the plot forward.

No dice.

I did this several more times, each time the duration of the break longer than the previous. The story wouldn’t budge. I began to question whether I was supposed to cease writing novels altogether. Or to stop writing for self-publication. At the very least, I realized that there was no sense in trying to continue that novel, because I couldn’t figure out what came next. Not even given my partial outline.

It worked out, because December came, and with it, an unusually strong urge to declutter, clean, and redecorate our home. I spent the entire month doing so. The huge task completed, I once again sat down with the novel.

Nothing.

By that time, the itch to wax artistic had grown to annoying proportions. I began drawing and coloring some evenings. That helped, but I really wanted to write stories. I began working on something I’ve thought about doing off and on for years; that is, to create fun educational materials for young children.

That was better, but I still longed to write a lengthy work of fiction.

I finally arrived at the place where I could revisit the half-finished novel without wanting to completely delete it. I took a close look. A critical look.

And understood.

There were three glaring problems with the story. The reason I wasn’t able to make it work was that it would have ended up being abysmally boring.

Another way to see it: it wasn’t working, because I was bored with it, because it was boring.

The answer? Sit down and write out the good things and the bad things about what I’d written so far.

Most were bad.

Then, write down how to fix everything so that all would be good. The result?

I am now happily and enthusiastically writing two thousand words a day. I finally love my characters and have a general storyline that ignites me. I am, as I type out this blog post, almost a quarter of the way through the novel again.

I hope I’ll never write half – or more – of a novel, then realize it is unredeemable. But even if I don’t, I can honestly say that I’m no longer judging the novelist who had to scrap her entire work. And, forevermore I’ll be able to much better empathize with my colleagues who experience a block so big and hard that it causes them to question their calling.

UPDATE NOT TWO WEEKS LATER: I wrote over half of the novel in question, and quit. I'm not sure why, except right now I'm struggling with writing fiction. Click here for a more detailed explanation.

Men, Middle-Age, And Marriage

“I don’t know you anymore.”

Since the inception of the modern age, this phrase has meant the beginning of the end for many marriages. In this article regarding menopause and divorce, I offered a real life example of a time when a husband said these words to his wife. I discussed how “The Change” can cause much more than the simple shutdown of the female reproductive system, and how those changes often lead to divorce.

But it takes two to Tango; or, in this case, two to ruin what used to be a wonderful relationship.

Man-o-pause is real.

All right, so to an extent, the effects of dropping testosterone levels in men aren’t nearly what they are for women. As it tends to do, the natural health world has exaggerated the incidence and ramifications of the male side of things.

Nevertheless, the drop does happen, and in some men, testosterone levels drop to the extent that they experience mood swings, fatigue, muscle loss, hot flashes, and/or the dreaded erectile dysfunction. They may even, as a consequence, develop estrogen dominance, which can exacerbate and add to the variety of unwanted physical and psychological problems. Just as low estrogen and progesterone levels in women can cause a skewed perspective on life, so can low testosterone levels in men.

Even if those levels are within the normal range, medically speaking, a guy can still feel the physiological shift. And regardless of testosterone, no one can argue that between the ages of forty and fifty, men begin to experience the aging process, which can lead to both physical discomforts and emotional issues.

Therefore, while middle-aged husbands need to have some understanding and empathy toward the difficulties their middle-aged wives are going through, so do the wives toward their husbands. If you’re a man experiencing symptoms such as those I mentioned above, I encourage you to research how you might remedy the situation. Either way, I beg both husband and wife who have hit the particular time of life in question not to give up on each other.

Let’s talk about how and why.

How to train the (middle-age) dragon

How To Train Your Dragon has to be my favorite movie of all time. Yes, even before Forrest Gump, the previous winner. In the movie, dragon-fighter-in-training Hiccup encounters one of the rarest dragons known to the Viking clan of which he is a part. Instead of killing the Night Fury, he becomes the dragon-whisperer, studying Toothless (as he names his new friend) to learn what the dragon likes and hates, and how to be its friend.

Menopause can turn a previously mellow, kind woman into a dragon. Same for men experiencing a drop in testosterone. Hormonal changes affect brain chemistry, and that can turn you into a wild creature who constantly reacts with instinctive fear to the slightest of threats, whether real or imagined. Or it can turn a previously active, fun-loving person into a depressed couch potato.

Such changes can precipitate the frustration-born observation, “I don’t know you anymore,” which can precipitate the end of a marriage.

It doesn’t have to be that way.

Instead, the frustrated spouse in question can choose gentle communication. They can choose to ask, with genuine love and care, how they can help their partner. They can choose to surreptitiously and carefully study their unhappy spouse to figure out what activities or rituals or words now ground them and bring them a sense of calm and balance. They can choose, together with their spouse, to research ways to conquer the root problem, the low hormone levels, the messed-up brain chemistry.

But, it’s not always about hormones.

In my last blog post, I revealed that a memoir audiobook inspired my thoughts about menopause and divorce. Having now completed listening to the memoir, I know that while perimenopause might have been at the root of the struggles of the author, her husband’s struggles may have had another cause.

Basically, he’d been fed a lie about the place where he, his wife, and their young daughter went to live on the other side of the globe. The owners of the private school who’d hired him to teach in a jungle had deceived not only him, but also all the other teachers. Long story short, the author’s husband became physically and psychologically exhausted within a relatively short period of time. The situation was nothing like the panacea of education they’d been told it would be.

And so, for a time, the husband took his frustrations out on his wife. It was an easy cop-out because of how she’d been behaving for months before they made the move. Toward the end of the memoir, he admits as much. When you’re feeling beat down every day, it’s next to impossible to have the right perspective on anything. Easy to cast the blame on other people.

And this is where a lot of marriages that might have otherwise gone on, end.

A third reason I believe a lot of marriages end when the couple is between the ages of forty and fifty: people change. Not completely. But over the period of twenty years, a person is going to develop different goals, create a bucket list, change religions, quit religion, try a new career, become more passionate about a certain issue, and so on. The way each person changes is as unique as each individual. And if a spouse changes in a particular way that competes with or clashes against how the other half of the couple has changed – or not changed – this can cause conflict.

Many couples decide that a no-fault divorce is in order in such cases, but that’s not the case. A couple can stay married, have a strong marriage, despite differences that crop up between them.

How? The answer is simple, but not easy.

Commitment.

I’m not talking about sticking with an abuser or adulterer. I’m talking about the typical struggles of life that bring people down, as well as the changing I just discussed. None of it has to signal the end of a marriage. In fact, sticking to the person you made vows to could end up being by far the better option. Why?

Working through hard times forces you to grow. 

It also brings you closer to the person you’re taking the life journey with. Working through the challenges of marriage might actually help you become a much better person than you would have had you just thrown in the towel.

Communicate. Express what you’re feeling, your concerns. Ask what your spouse is feeling, their concerns. Talk and think and talk some more until you both have come upon a plan of action to improve things.

If it’s about change, compromise will be in order. Say she loves to travel, but he’s a homebody. Maybe they agree that twice a year, he’ll go on a short trip with her, but once or twice a year she can take a longer trip by herself.

Focus on and nurture those things you still have in common.

My mother was born, raised, and remains, in her late eighties, Democrat. Her second late husband was a dyed-in-the-wool Republican.

BUT. They were both Catholic.

So. They talked about spiritual things, and mostly left political things alone. They had other things in common, as well: they were both parents and grandparents. Both had lost their first spouse. They were born and raised in the same general region of the U.S., a mere state apart.

Remember the things you have in common with your spouse. Remember the unchangeable aspects of their core that contributed to your attraction to them in the first place.

Unless your spouse has decided to engage in illicit or morally gray behavior that is simply unconscionable to you, stark differences in dreams, goals, beliefs, and desires do not need to mean the end of a marriage. Neither do emotional struggles. 

The latter are usually temporary, the pain of which can be mitigated when the non-suffering spouse is supportive. If they have an organic cause, they can be treated with diet, supplements, and/or medication.

Commitment. Communication. The ability to accept your spouse where they are on life’s journey. These are the stuff that strong marriages are made of.

The ingredients that divorce-proof any marriage.

A Question All Middle-Aged Women (and men!) Need To Address

 

“I don’t know you anymore.”

These were the ominous words of a husband to his wife after they’d had one of their worst fights during their fourteen years of marriage. Over the past year, she’d grown increasingly negative, expressing that negativity with more frequency and intensity until he was near the breaking point. 

When he’d proposed marriage to her a decade and a half earlier, he’d told her that he wanted to wake up every morning to her smile, that she made him laugh every day. By the morning of that fight, she must have, indeed, seemed like a completely different person to him.

The story comes from a memoir I’m currently reading, and it’s got my mind back on a train of thought that it’s been bouncing on and off of for several years. It’s a question, really, a question that occurred to me primarily because of my own experiences, and also because of the snippets of other people’s stories that I’ve heard.

It relates to the terrible, horrible, no good, very bad symptoms leading up – and persisting through – menopause. Specifically, the symptoms that cause a mentally stable woman to suddenly suffer from depression, anxiety, panic attacks, and paranoia.

The question is this: Does menopause cause divorce?

Why this is an important question.

The symptoms I just mention can convince a woman that life is meaningless, that there is nothing to look forward to after life on earth, that her entire life has been a sham, void of purpose, a mere game of survival, that there is no reason for going on because everything is dreary and gray and nothing matters because everything eventually dies.

If she doesn’t quite get to the bottom of that pit, then she wakes up one day completely discontented with her life for no reason other than her perspective has suddenly and (ostensibly) unaccountably shifted. Her husband isn’t romantic enough, doesn’t make enough money, doesn’t have enough self-motivation. Her job is joyless and pointless. Her home is ugly, and so is she. Regardless of how much weight she loses, or what kind of makeup she uses, or how fashionable she dresses, she knows she’ll never look thirty again and she. Can’t. Stand it. She’s tired of having to keep house, wishes her teenage or young adult children would just grow up already and leave her alone.

Any woman over the age of forty-five knows exactly what I’m talking about. Even if she didn’t experience this dramatic shift in thinking, she likely knows someone who did. However, most have never wondered about a connection between menopause and divorce.

It’s time to get our heads out of the sand. Because the first scenario, if it doesn’t lead to the woman’s suicide, could provoke her husband to leave. In the second scenario, it’ll be the wife leaving because she’s convinced she needs a new life.

Understanding what’s going on in a woman’s brain during perimenopause and beyond could be a gamechanger and marriage-saver. I’m going to get to that in a few moments. But first, let’s remember: I only have a theory, based on a question. What do the facts say?

Do divorce statistics support my belief?

The other day, spurred on by the memoir and the author’s poignant story, I did some digging on divorce statistics. I was somewhat surprised to find that the lion’s share of divorces are initiated by women. As several of the most common reasons for divorce include infidelity, domestic violence, and addiction, that makes sense. Not that women aren’t unfaithful, or suffer with addictions. I know, in rare occasions, wives have even physically abused their husbands.

But it could be that men commit such sins more often. I’m confident, as well, that men are better at turning a blind eye to such issues. Because, let’s face it, sisters – men lose a lot when a woman walks out of the house. Translation: they end up with a lot more work to do.

Also, men generally are more chill. Not as emotionally reactive, they tend, even in the midst of pain and heartache, not to take extreme actions when their wives have done wrong.

Back to reasons for divorce. Menopause was not listed as one. Of course not. Because the forty-plus women asking for “no-fault” divorces, or claiming that their husbands aren’t “meeting their needs” don’t have a clue as to the root cause of why they suddenly hate their lives.

However.

HOWEVER.

In the 2010’s, the percent of divorces between couples who were between forty and sixty years old skyrocketed. The divorce rate at that age used to be low; today, it’s the opposite.

One reason is that many members of Generation X have eschewed the faith traditions of their parents and grandparents. Life is about being happy, not about pleasing God; therefore, if you are no longer happy with the person you promised “death till you part” with, you don’t have to wait until death to part from them.

I’m not talking abuse or adultery here. I’m talking, he wants to live on the East Coast, she wants to live on the West. No agreement, so the obvious course of action is divorce.

Or.

OR.

Menopause literally messes with a woman’s head.

In the years leading up to menopause, a woman’s estrogen and progesterone levels bounce all over the place. The overall direction of both hormones, however, is down.

Ever heard of serotonin? It’s the happy chemical. It is THE reason anybody ever feels happy. Upbeat. Positive. It’s what keeps you from getting depressed, anxious, and angry.

Well, guess what other chemicals are essential not only for the production of serotonin, but for proper functioning of neural pathways in the brain?

Yep. Estrogen and progesterone. Take those out of the picture, and you get mood swings, depression, paranoia, anxiety, and panic attacks. You get women who used to be full of vivacity and a strong sense of purpose, suddenly wondering why they were even born. You get women who used to find contentment with ease, suddenly thinking that every decision they’ve ever made has been the wrong one.

Lower estrogen and progesterone levels leads to reduced serotonin production leads to despair, depression, and a chronic sense of impending doom.

Leads to… divorce?

I think it’s worth a look.

If you’re a middle-aged woman reading this article and you recognize yourself in the above descriptions, especially if these new and unwanted character traits are causing problems between you and your husband, may I encourage you that there is hope. You can get your old self back (the inside, not the outside, sorry). You can feel contented, even happy, again. You can fall back in love with your man… or at least see him once again as the friend and support that you always used to see him as.

There is hormone replacement therapy, or HRT.

If you don’t want to take that, or can’t afford it, I have two free books that will help most women. The first, So Long, Stress! takes you down a spiritual path. It’s a biblically based method of releasing emotions which has transformed my life. Clickhere to check out that book.

The second, From Suffering To Singing, addresses how to ameliorate the physiological effects of low hormone and serotonin levels with diet and supplements, including progesterone cream. Click here, or  the book image in the sidebar, to download it from Amazon.

Remember, both books are free. If you don’t want to obtain them from Amazon, they are available everywhere else, too, including Hoopla, Overdrive, and Everand.

It takes two to Tango.

As I finish up this blog post, I have reached the part of the memoir where the author reveals a little more about her husband. Enough so that I can see that she wasn’t the only one committing acts that put a strain on their marriage. Yes, menopause can change a woman in unhappy ways. And sometimes, the man remains the same and is doing his best with this strange and unfamiliar creature he used to know.

But as they age, men, too, go through hormonal changes. They are equally vulnerable to developing a skewed perspective on life, on themselves, on their wives, which can eventually lead to problems. I’ll be talking about that in the next post.

In the meantime, ladies, seek help. Seek healing. You don’t have to feel miserable for the rest of your life,

Or lose your decades-long marriage because of that misery.