It’s my sixtieth birthday. I’m getting a tattoo of puckered lips done on my ass, painting my nails purple, and doing my first sky dive. If not now, when? On my fiftieth birthday, I became “Don’t-Fuck-With-Me-Fifty” and celebrated by giving myself the gift of never taking any crap from anyone ever again. When I turned forty, I entered an early menopause. Not that anyone could tell from my mood swings. I’d always been a bitch. At thirty I became one of “those people” nobody in my generation was supposed to trust. I got drunk and stayed in bed all day. My twentieth I don’t even remember. It was the late sixties. It was San Francisco. There’s a whole decade missing.
I recently received one of those emails that touts the wisdom and gifts of age and asks if you’d trade those for the taut body, smooth skin, and turkey-free neck of youth. The correct answer is supposed to be no. Bullshit. I’d give it all up for just a functioning vagina.
I came of age in the late ’60s, about the same time as the sexual revolution. I had just graduated from high school and turned eighteen. To mark the occasion, my mother took me to the doctor and had me put on the pill. Some of my peers received luggage. I took this as her blessing to screw my way deep into the double-digits and, over the next two decades, that’s exactly what I did. It was a time of bra-burning and free love and although I never actually burned my bra, a series of disastrous relationships over the years taught me that the guys were definitely getting a far better deal than I was on the “free love” end. This realization kicked in right around the same time as my hormones, and hence libido, took a nosedive. Too bad. Now, almost twenty years later, I sometimes think I might like to try again. Unfortunately, the pipes are rusted out at this point. Apparently, you have to fire up the engine every so often in order to keep things running. Who knew? Sure, I could have taken hormone replacement therapy, but we all know how that turned out. Would it really be asking so much for those parts to just come with a warning label? Use it or lose it.
