female life ends at 47
Krikor
I can't believe the number of people who have never before heard the
argument that we are the first generation of women to outlive our
ovaries. I was given this information by three different gyns in Plano,
TX six years ago when I first began having symptoms of menopause. The
argument was presented as "if you want a life that's worth living you
must take hormones. Your grandmother didn't need them because she died at
your age." Any book or pamphlet on HRT makes this argument. That it is
totally erroneous hasn't stopped it, and we will continue to hear it for
many years to come. After all it represents the only justification for
"treating" something which has existed throughout human history and is
normal, natural, and universal.
Della Noche
I'm surprised you would have heard this from MD's. Don't know why I'm
surprised - but my early childhood programming re trusting them is hard
to overcome.
On the other hand, serious illness and physical injuries have been with
us forever. Does that mean we shouldn't treat them?
(No, ma'am - we're not going to prevent your tooth loss because people
have lost teeth for thousands of years.)
Arrrggghhh!! (gnash)
Sorry, Krikor - I don't mean to jump on you personally. I'm just tired
of people telling me I have to be in constant physical pain and suffer
enormous losses in my life due to mental and physical impairment just
because their granny lived to be 90.
What the heck does that have to do with me and my need for exogenous
hormones?
dn
Krikor <kakr...@erols.com> wrote:
snip
> The
>argument was presented as "if you want a life that's worth living you
>must take hormones. Your grandmother didn't need them because she died at
>your age."
snip
Joan Livingston
bon...@aol.com wrote:
: nobody ever talked to me about the change + what a drag it was/is. Just
: wondering why I am having such a hard time giving up my fertility +
: stamina + libido + nice skin + regular weight + energy + strength +
: pizazz.
Maybe your aged women relatives hated menopause too for its
duration. But a few years, 3-7 in the life of a 90 year old may not have
become their primary memory. Just speculating. One hears enough about
post-menopausal zest that that may become the primary feature of their
lives. Again just speculating.
So many of us are in the middle of this time that it is hard to
yet know what the other side will bring. The way I look at it is that we
can fight it and resent it forever, or else we finally accept it adapt
around it and move on. Maybe all those wonderful ladies you described made
individual decisions in their lives to get on with the best of it. Plus
since child bearing was less of an option and more an obligation for the
pre BCP generations, maybe menopause was a desired event? Just
speculating.
You know all old women still look old...skin..hair...etc. Some do
look better than others, but the same is true for any age. Maybe that is
the only thing that makes a difference. But the way I see it, the clock
does not stop forever at any certain point. I don't like giving all those
things either, but so many of the delightful older women I know glow from
within. They look "old" because they are, but some glow and others are
bitter and stuck somewhere on a broken record. I think after all this meno
stuff is over, the whole rest of it will all be about our inner, not our
outer choices. Just speculating.
Joan L. - Who has a mind/body bias
bon...@aol.com
I;m confused. I have many female relatives who lived well past 47 - granma
was 92, great aunt *is* 92 this year, mom is 73, aunt was 79, etc etc. To
my knowledge they not only did not use HRT but never heard of tofu. *HOW*
did they do it? I think they are/were living their lives in a useful +
satisfying way, at least independently not in rest homes. I remember
sitting at grandma;s dining table with her + her lady friends from the old
country, all laughing + talking in Czech + eating all kinds of cakes +
tea. It was not an old bitter ill scene. They were quite animated + happy
even if some had false teeth + babushkas (most were widows too maybe
that;s why ;-). It puzzles me bc I am finding relief on HRT + also bc
Pam Myers
Gee--strange how both my grandmothers lived past 80 years! They
seemed to be in pretty good shape too. When will the male chauvenism
crap end!
Krikor (kakr...@erols.com) writes:
> I can't believe the number of people who have never before heard the
> argument that we are the first generation of women to outlive our
> ovaries. I was given this information by three different gyns in Plano,
> TX six years ago when I first began having symptoms of menopause. The
> argument was presented as "if you want a life that's worth living you
> must take hormones. Your grandmother didn't need them because she died at
> your age." Any book or pamphlet on HRT makes this argument. That it is
> totally erroneous hasn't stopped it, and we will continue to hear it for
Morley
Joan Livingston wrote:
>
> bon...@aol.com wrote:
> : nobody ever talked to me about the change + what a drag it was/is. Just
> : wondering why I am having such a hard time giving up my fertility +
> : stamina + libido + nice skin + regular weight + energy + strength +
> : pizazz.
>
> duration. But a few years, 3-7 in the life of a 90 year old may not have
> become their primary memory. Just speculating. One hears enough about
> post-menopausal zest that that may become the primary feature of their
> lives. Again just speculating.
>
with Joan here! Only thing I'd query is 3-7 years. I seem to know many
women, including relatives who took around 10 or more.
> So many of us are in the middle of this time that it is hard to
> yet know what the other side will bring. The way I look at it is that we
> can fight it and resent it forever, or else we finally accept it adapt
> around it and move on. Maybe all those wonderful ladies you described made
> individual decisions in their lives to get on with the best of it.
No choices back then, which could be why so many old ladies are so
feisty, they had to make the best of things or go under.
Plus
> since child bearing was less of an option and more an obligation for the
> pre BCP generations, maybe menopause was a desired event? Just
> speculating.
I think if you lived in a "baby-a-year" situation, you might embrace
menopause as a welcome friend, despite all the other drawbacks.
> You know all old women still look old...skin..hair...etc. Some do
> look better than others, but the same is true for any age. Maybe that is
> the only thing that makes a difference. But the way I see it, the clock
> does not stop forever at any certain point. I don't like giving all those
> things either, but so many of the delightful older women I know glow from
> within. They look "old" because they are, but some glow and others are
> bitter and stuck somewhere on a broken record. I think after all this meno
> stuff is over, the whole rest of it will all be about our inner, not our
> outer choices. Just speculating.
>
> Joan L. - Who has a mind/body bias
There's still a lot to look forward to. The glow from within cannot be
manufactured by outside agencies IMHO. It comes from a satisfactory way
of life - not in the sense of smug - just rounded & I've met it in
many much older women. I had lunch with a 90 year old and met another on
Sunday. Both of them could knock spots off many women I know of my age
or younger because they're so interesting and have done so much with
their time, during marriage and widowhood. I think somebody once called
it "making your soul". Maybe our generation's problem is the youth
culture chucked atus from every direction, with 13 year old girls
modelling clothes made for 30-40 year old women as just one example,
making us feel we should look eternally young, plus we were given the
bcp and choices about what to do with our bodies and while choice can be
liberating, it can be bewildering and with it come responsibility...!
While nobody wants to think of a 40 year old woman as "old", it seems to
me that it's getting harder for women to be allowed to grow older
without feeling they're losing something or feeling guilty because they
don't look 25 any more. We were the generation they learned about the
"pill" on and now we're the HRT newbies. Big choices at 2 crucial times
of our lives. Ease of divorce and the "trophy wife" syndrome may have a
lot to do with that too. I do believe that every age has its interests
and compensations, some of which come from having had a really tough
time, learning from it, maybe helping others if they go through the same
thing. Morley.
da...@gate.net
>Gee--strange how both my grandmothers lived past 80 years! They
>seemed to be in pretty good shape too. When will the male chauvenism
>crap end!
Please see my response under the osteoporosis thread. The information
regarding the life expectancy of women (and men) in the early 1900s is
collected and reported by the US government, and I sincerely doubt it has
anything at all to do with "male chauvenism." The data I have shows that the
life expectancy of a white woman in 1900 was about age 50. Today it is almost
age 80.
Even though the life expectancy today is about 80 years old, we hear and read
about people who live longer than that, some into the 100s. Despite this, we
all know that living to be 100 is much more rare than living to be 80. I
think this pretty much explains the (nice) situation with your grandparents.
Thanks,
Ashley Hill
da...@gate.net
Orlando, FL
Lianne McNeil
bon...@aol.com wrote:
>
> I;m confused. I have many female relatives who lived well past 47 - granma
> was 92, great aunt *is* 92 this year, mom is 73, aunt was 79, etc etc. To
> my knowledge they not only did not use HRT but never heard of tofu. *HOW*
> did they do it? I think they are/were living their lives in a useful +
> satisfying way, at least independently not in rest homes.
I have been wondering the same thing. My mother is 64, my grandmother
is 99. My other grandmother was 85 when she died. My
great-grandmothers were 59, 92, 50+ (?) and 77. (I don't know the "50+
(?)"'s birthdate -- just that based on her children's birthdates, she
couldn't have been born later than about 1870, and she died in 1920.)
My female ancestors of the previous generation for which I have
information, lived to the ages of 81, 59, 49, 85, 71, and 82.* And I
could go on...
I remember
> sitting at grandma;s dining table with her + her lady friends from the old
> country, all laughing + talking in Czech + eating all kinds of cakes +
> tea. It was not an old bitter ill scene. They were quite animated + happy
> even if some had false teeth + babushkas (most were widows too maybe
> that;s why ;-). It puzzles me bc I am finding relief on HRT + also bc
> nobody ever talked to me about the change + what a drag it was/is. Just
> wondering why I am having such a hard time giving up my fertility +
> stamina + libido + nice skin + regular weight + energy + strength +
> pizazz.
This is completely unscientific... but I'm wondering if the difference
between them and us is due to changes in lifestyles over the
generations. Perhaps we have more stress in our lives, which might
exacerbate our menopause symptoms? Or maybe they were more stoic and
suffered in silence? Maybe our physiology has changed due to things in
our environment...? I don't know. (But since I'm early in
perimenopause I don't even know yet how it's going to be for me.)
Lianne
*(I'm an amateur genealogist, and have traced family lines back 10-15
generations... unfortunately, women were not recorded much in official
records in the past, so I don't have as much info on my female ancestors
as my male ancestors. One time I averaged all the known ages I had for
ancestors in each generation, then averaged the generations together and
came up with an average lifespan of 83 years. I have a hard time
believing that it was only my male ancestors that made the average that
high. :-)
--
Lianne or Jim McNeil jamesm@ hevanet.com
(Please note: address in headers is spoofed to foil e-mail spammers.
Remove extra vowel ("a") to reply.)
dro...@direct.ca
Lianne McNeil <jam...@Hevaanet.com> wrote:
>*(I'm an amateur genealogist, and have traced family lines back 10-15
>generations... unfortunately, women were not recorded much in official
>records in the past, so I don't have as much info on my female ancestors
>as my male ancestors. One time I averaged all the known ages I had for
>ancestors in each generation, then averaged the generations together and
>came up with an average lifespan of 83 years. I have a hard time
>believing that it was only my male ancestors that made the average that
>high. :-)
>--
>Lianne or Jim McNeil jamesm@ hevanet.com
>(Please note: address in headers is spoofed to foil e-mail spammers.
> Remove extra vowel ("a") to reply.)
I too have spent many an hour looking through microfilms for the
burial church records of my ancestors. The thing is, people who die
young do not tend to have many decendants. That is why when looking at
direct ancestors it is rare to find one who died younger then age 50.
Our life experiece with OUR grandmothers does not match the figures
in the life expectancy tables. [Sorry I no longer have Ashley Hill's
figures to put in here]. For one thing our grandmothers had to live at
least long enough to have one child otherwise we wouldn't be here.
That in itself would raise the average life expectancy age of our
grandmothers. But further to that it is likely that the women who
lived the longest had the most children and hence the most
grandchildren. Therefore the majority of us have grandmothers in the
upper range of the life expectancy spectrum. Do I make sense??
This collective experience of having elderly grandmothers makes it
very difficult to accept the idea that living to post menopause age
is new and not natural. No matter what the cold statistics say.
This all seemed much clearer in the early, early morning...
Kathryn
dro...@direct.ca
dro...@direct.ca
Della Noche
Could this be that post-meno zest everyone's looking for? You write
about how they are in their 70's and 90's - but what were they doing in
their 40's and 50's?
Also there is evidence for a "new peri" triggered by stress, diet and
pollutants. Dunno.
I really don't.
dn
bon...@aol.com wrote:
>I;m confused. I have many female relatives who lived well past 47 - granma
>was 92, great aunt *is* 92 this year, mom is 73, aunt was 79, etc etc. To
>my knowledge they not only did not use HRT but never heard of tofu. *HOW*
>did they do it? I think they are/were living their lives in a useful +
>satisfying way, at least independently not in rest homes. I remember
Della Noche
Hi, Kathryn! You make great sense about why our grandmothers would be
older than what would seem to synch with actuarial tables for those
years.
You wrote:
>This collective experience of having elderly grandmothers makes it
>very difficult to accept the idea that living to post menopause age
>is new and not natural.
Meno is a not a new experience for women but is a new experience for our
general culture. I think part of "what's new" with meno awareness is
that the *percentage* of the population going thru meno has greatly
increased. So has meno women's access to media and our willingness to
talk about it - i.e., making the non-meno population aware of that this
is an area of interest for a lot of people.
As far as being a new experience for women - no, it's not. At family
gatherings when I was a kid there was always a point when the older women
would withdraw into a circle of their own and I never could figure out
what they were talking about. Seems to me the subject was always
temporarily dropped when they were approached. What else could they have
been talking about? ;-)
Does anyone else remember anything like this?
Does anyone have an older female relative who's willing to talk about
this? Wonder if we should start going into nursing homes looking for
info. ??
dn
Joan Livingston
I remember my mother's friends in the 50's afraid to go to a local
GYN with any of their problems because he always did frontal lobotomies.
They sat and drank coffee and talked a lot, everyday. I remember that.
--
Joan L. - Menopause is a 3 million year old biologically adaptive process.
Joan Livingston
The cold statistic that says we were all dead by age 47 factored
in child hood deaths which were very high up until the early part of this
century. Sanitation improvements, not anti-biotics, started making the
difference along with immunizations. So with all the childhood deaths
included, the "average" age was 47. However, if one survived the child hood
diseases, then one lived just about as long as those do today.
The long term Framington (Framingham ?) study published a few
years ago now that it was now into the second generation of deaths. And
that the second generation was dying pretty much of the same diseases and
at the same ages as their parents. Even after all the "advances" in
medical care over this last few decades. The only difference noted is
that the new generation was dying far more expensively. (Dr. Dean Edell -
Radio MD)
--
Joan L. - Who believes menopause is a 3 million year old, biologically
adaptive, natural process.
Victoria Neff
In article <32af0...@news.wclynx.com>,
Della Noche <Della...@wclynx.com> wrote:
>Meno is a not a new experience for women but is a new experience for our
>general culture. I think part of "what's new" with meno awareness is
>that the *percentage* of the population going thru meno has greatly
>increased. So has meno women's access to media and our willingness to
>talk about it - i.e., making the non-meno population aware of that this
>is an area of interest for a lot of people.
ANother aspect of this being new to our general culture is that "women
things" were NOT discussed.
Remember the whole thing about "confinement" when pregnant women
began to "show"? It just wasn't ok for people to even *notice* this
stuff, let alone openly discuss it. It's hard to hide the *whole*
process, when the process is pregnancy and has the usual result, but
menopause? No baby produced.... So Mabel (or Jane, or Mary) secludes
herself for a while.... Only the women are going to draw any conclusions,
and they're not telling the men who are writing the medical books or
the history books....
I would be interested in seeing the average age-of-death of women in
the past who made it past menopause. I'm clear that infant mortality
was a lot higher, childhood mortality was a lot higher, death from
child birth a lot more likely. But of the women who survived all that,
how long did they live?
I look at my Grandma's family. Eight daughters lived to adulthood (and
at least one died as a baby or small child). One of these had a weak
heart and died (childless) in her 40s. The rest all lived into at
least their 70s, and several into their 90s. Only 3 of them had any
children, and those three were not the most longevous.
Can't draw any conclusions from any of this.....
-- Victoria Neff
BonBace
{{{Joan L wrote: I remember my mother's friends in the 50's afraid to go
to a local
GYN with any of their problems because he always did frontal lobotomies.
They sat and drank coffee and talked a lot, everyday. I remember that}}}
For some reason thats one of the funniest things I can see in my mind! LOL
- is *that* what was used instead of estrogen or tofu? Hey gets the job
done!
But seriously I just really read the subject line *FEMALE* life ends at
47. Thats about right for reproductive or female life, maybe not life per
se. As far as biology once you are unable to contribute to gene pool
you;re dead meat. Notice I said biology not social or cultural.
Jorge Omar@Pls.see.sig.below.tks
Definition of a statistician (Sp?):
"Someone that has the feet in a hot owen, the head in a freezer but
says average temperature is very pleasant"
((-:
Jorge
My employer agrees with all my opinions (-:
Della Noche
Oh, no!! There was a lot of that (frontal lobotomies) then, wasn't
there! Hmm - never connected it with meno tho. Uh, oh!!
dn
joa...@rain.org (Joan Livingston) wrote:
> I remember my mother's friends in the 50's afraid to go to a local
>GYN with any of their problems because he always did frontal lobotomies.
>They sat and drank coffee and talked a lot, everyday. I remember that.
>
>--
>Joan L. - Menopause is a 3 million year old biologically adaptive process.
>
>
BonBace
{{{Reproductive and female life are not synonyms. There
is a hell of a lot more to being female than reproduction.}}}
Like what
Della Noche
Thanks for this!! Love it!
dn
HomemakerJ
Hi BonBace,
BonBace <bon...@aol.com> wrote in article
<19961212174...@ladder01.news.aol.com>...
> {{{Reproductive and female life are not synonyms. There
> is a hell of a lot more to being female than reproduction.}}}
>
> Like what
Well, like making love for the sheer pleasure of it. Or like hugging your
children and giving them the sensation of sinking into safe warm pillows.
Plus, all the stuff that men always get to do. And then there's the stuff
that we women tend to do better, like making a room seem inviting or warm
and cozy, or rolling out a pie crust, or understanding someone's feelings.
Cool Runnings,
HomemakerJ
Della Noche
And don't forget ragging those turkeys!! We can get on someone's case
better than almost anyone else in the human race.
dn
Della Noche
From: v...@wolf.icpsr.umich.edu (Victoria Neff)
snip
> ANother aspect of this being new to our general culture is that "women
> things" were NOT discussed.
>
> Remember the whole thing about "confinement" when pregnant women
> began to "show"? It just wasn't ok for people to even *notice* this
> stuff, let alone openly discuss it. It's hard to hide the *whole*
> process, when the process is pregnancy and has the usual result, but
> menopause? No baby produced.... So Mabel (or Jane, or Mary) secludes
> herself for a while.... Only the women are going to draw any conclusions,
> and they're not telling the men who are writing the medical books or
> the history books....
-- Victoria Neff
RIGHT!! I'd forgotten about pregnant women hiding away from "decent"
folk. When I was in jr. high my favorite English teacher wore all kinds
of funny clothes to prolong her working - turned out that Wash.,
D.C. teachers could not appear in classrooms when pregnancies began to
"show" or require maternity clothes - and that was in 1962!!!
Oh, my!! So, yes - I think you're right that this stuff was more secret
than I remembered. Well that answers a few questions about why we don't
know more about this "process".
Thanks!
dn
BonBace
like making love for the sheer pleasure of it
nothing like years of infertility treatments to completely destroy THAT
rolling out pie crust
THAT;S what the hole in my soul is. yeah that;s it :-)
st...@wordwrite.com
BonBace (bon...@aol.com) wrote:
: like making love for the sheer pleasure of it
: nothing like years of infertility treatments to completely destroy THAT
Then maybe you should start masturbating more often, to dissociate sex
from fertility?
--
Karen
Lianne McNeil
dro...@direct.ca wrote:
> Lianne McNeil <jam...@Hevaanet.com> wrote:
>
> >*(I'm an amateur genealogist, and have traced family lines back 10-15
> >generations... unfortunately, women were not recorded much in official
> >records in the past, so I don't have as much info on my female ancestors
> >as my male ancestors. One time I averaged all the known ages I had for
> >ancestors in each generation, then averaged the generations together and
> >came up with an average lifespan of 83 years. I have a hard time
> >believing that it was only my male ancestors that made the average that
> >high. :-)
> I too have spent many an hour looking through microfilms for the
> burial church records of my ancestors. The thing is, people who die
> young do not tend to have many decendants. That is why when looking at
> direct ancestors it is rare to find one who died younger then age 50.
>
> Our life experiece with OUR grandmothers does not match the figures
> in the life expectancy tables. [Sorry I no longer have Ashley Hill's
> figures to put in here]. For one thing our grandmothers had to live at
> least long enough to have one child otherwise we wouldn't be here.
> That in itself would raise the average life expectancy age of our
> grandmothers. But further to that it is likely that the women who
> lived the longest had the most children and hence the most
> grandchildren. Therefore the majority of us have grandmothers in the
> upper range of the life expectancy spectrum. Do I make sense??
Yes! I was thinking the same thing myself -- only I didn't know
if my conclusion was correct or not.
I had also heard that, in the past, if a person lived to
adulthood, then their life expectancy rose significantly.
> This collective experience of having elderly grandmothers makes it
> very difficult to accept the idea that living to post menopause age
> is new and not natural. No matter what the cold statistics say.
Statistics can be, and often are, used to distort fact. While I
don't disagree with the statistics that Dr. Hill quoted, I am
certain that the idea that 'only recently have women lived long
enough to experience menopause' is a MYTH, created by
misinterpretation of statistics. (I'm talking about published
reports, not Dr. Hill -- who was just quoting the facts, as far
as I could see (in the posts of his that I saw).)
If it was RARE for a woman to live past age 50 until recently,
that "myth" might seem more reasonable. But there have been
too many women who survived into their 70's and 80's in the past
many generations to credibly state that recent generations are
the first to live through menopause. A more accurate statement
would be that 'more women are living through menopause now than
previously.' In general, people are living longer, now.
> This all seemed much clearer in the early, early morning...
Oh, it seems clear enough to me now... :-)
Thanks for your comments.
Lianne
HomemakerJ
> >HomemakerJ wrote:
BonBace <bon...@aol.com> wrote in article
<19961213225...@ladder01.news.aol.com>...
> > like making love for the sheer pleasure of it
> nothing like years of infertility treatments to completely destroy THAT
I had 11 years of infertility treatments, too. You certainly have a point.
It turns fun into science. But now that you're finished with the
treatments, throw out the damn thermometers and charts, lay back, blast
that rock and roll and try to remember what got you interested in making
babies in the first place. Really, Bon, it'll come back. 'Course I
changed husbands, too! ; )
> > rolling out pie crust
> THAT;S what the hole in my soul is. yeah that;s it :-)
HomemakerJ's surefire recipe for fool-proof pie crust:
Preheat oven to 450 degrees F. Sift, then measure 2 C. flour. Resift into
a bowwl with 1 tsp. salt. Measure 1/2 cupful of this mixture and place it
in a small bowl. Stir into it, to form a smooth paste 1/4 C. water. Cut
intto the flour mixture in the first bowwl, with a pastry blender or fork
2/3 C. shortening until the grain in it is the size of small peas. Sit
down to do this and put the bowl between your legs. Shake out your hand
from time to time and mutter about how young you used to be. Stir the
flour paste into the dough. Work it with your hand (keep one hand clean),
pretending it is your husband's brains until it is well incorporated and
the dough forms a ball. Divide the dough in half. Place 1/4 C. flour on
board or counter where you are going to roll out. Keep that rolling pin
floured up. Everytime it sticks a little stop and flour some more. Roll
out into a circle, threatening anybody who comes near you with the rolling
pin, until you have a crust big enough to fit in the pie pan and overlap
the edge. Fold in half and carefully place in pan. Do the same thing with
the the top crust, but don't put it on until you've filled the pie with
something. Dirty socks, anything handy.
Cool Runnings,
HomemakerJ
Della Noche
I haven't been able to have a clitoral orgasm from masturbating since
about my second week of using progesterone USP - my "libido" has become
completely vaginal.
My body hasn't (recently, any way!) been thru anything like the ups and
downs that BonBace's been thru in the last few years. So if my body's
changed this much (temporarily? what happens if I stop the
progesterone?) then how much might BonBace's body/physiological reactions
have changed?
And will again.
dn
st...@wordwrite.com wrote:
>BonBace (bon...@aol.com) wrote:
that somebody wrote
{{{maybe you should start masturbating more often, to dissociate sex
>: from fertility?}}}
>
>: been there done that doesnt work.
>
>You can't orgasm from it, or the mental association doesn't work? If
>you can't orgasm from it, there are books and classes. As for the
>other, I don't know.
>
>--
>Karen
BonBace
{{{: like making love for the sheer pleasure of it
: nothing like years of infertility treatments to completely destroy THAT
Then maybe you should start masturbating more often, to dissociate sex
Della Noche
bon...@aol.com (BonBace) wrote
that somebody wrote -
>{{{: like making love for the sheer pleasure of it
snip
>Then maybe you should start masturbating more often, to dissociate sex
>from fertility?}}}
>
>been there done that doesnt work.
And the progesterone and testosterone don't work either? (Am I
remembering that correctly?)
Hmm - this is a **toughie**.
dn
ni...@aol.com
In article <19961210002...@ladder01.news.aol.com>,
bon...@aol.com writes:
> I remember
>sitting at grandma;s dining table with her + her lady friends from the
old
>country, all laughing + talking in Czech + eating all kinds of cakes +
>tea. It was not an old bitter ill scene. They were quite animated + happy
Bon - Do you do this now? Not the Czech part, but the sitting at the table
with friends laughing part. It sounds so healthy, yet it is hard to find
time for this in today's world. We have replaced sitting at the table with
friends with sitting at the computer with friends. It's better than
nothing, but I wonder if it's as healthy. There is healing in that kind
of relating.
Regards, Cheryl
Ni...@AOL.com (Cheryl A. Snider)
ni...@aol.com
Becky Pyle
Krikor <kakr...@erols.com> wrote:
The >argument was presented as "if you want a life that's worth
living you >must take hormones. Your grandmother didn't need them
because she died at >your age
What a crock!!! I've been researching my family tree for a number of
years and have found that a large number of my female ancestors lived
to ripe old ages, well beyond menopause!!!
Becky Pyle
Wendy Brown
The question of why we aren't as tough as our foremothers is an
interesting one. I have been musing about several possible answers.
1. It isn't true - some of them suffered terribly and just had to put up
with menopausal symptoms, or be locked in the attic.
2. Our lives are somehow different, because of increased exposure to
chemicals and pollution; increased population pressure; changing social
roles; some other reason(s)...
A lot of things are different now than they used to be, for example, the
incidence of childhood asthma, which is up dramatically. Epidemiologists
suspect pollution, but according to a long article in the LA Times a few
weeks ago, they don't really know.
We do know that chemicals that mimic estrogen are causing some problems in
parts of our ecosystem (abnormal development of testes in alligators in
Florida, for instance).
We also discuss in many areas the possible effects that changes in
perceptions have on the reporting of certain crimes, such as child abuse
and rape.
Why should we be different from the rest of the population? I know my own
perceptions have changed over the years, ditto my tolerance for discomfort
and my willingness to suffer in silence. My environment has changed also.
So -- my own take is this: I am wanting to celebrate my middle years and
consciously make my life different than it has been in the past. I also
want to stop peeing when I laugh. (Actually I have. DHEA and ProGest.) For
me, a combination of herbs, vitamins, exercise, self-assertion/absorbtion,
rx progesterone, and whatever else works seems to be just the ticket. I
don't know how any of us can prescribe an answer for anyone else, but we
can celebrate the search.
Have decided that 1997 will be great.
Wendy Brown