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This is where it all started. Please excuse how plain it looks. In 1997 I didn't know how to do anything but type and push the button, and I've left it that way so you can see how far I've come. (Not very.)
Erin and I went to see Titanic on Friday night, opening night, because she's been counting the days since the summer. Three hours and change. The theater out on the highway was packed with girls her age and younger, all of them in love with that blond boy, and there I was in the middle of them with my coat off, my sweater off, and my scarf going like a fan.
When the ship finally went down and all those poor people were in that freezing black water, every woman in the place was sobbing, and I was sobbing too, but I have to be honest with you: there was a tiny part of me thinking, that water looks nice.
Erin cried all the way to the car and then said, "Ma, you were fanning yourself during the iceberg." She doesn't miss much. I haven't told her about any of this yet. She's getting married next fall. She has enough on her mind without her mother's thermostat.
Merry Christmas to the eleven of you who've written me since June. Eleven! I've printed every one of your letters out and put them in a folder.
Twenty-two pounds of turkey, one oven set at 325, one woman standing in front of it with the door open basting, and in the middle of it all, a flash. I basted the turkey and the turkey basted me. Jim came in to ask about the gravy and found me with my head in the freezer. He didn't say a word. He got the gravy boat down, took the baster out of my hand and did the last two rounds himself. Twenty-six years married and that man has never once basted a turkey. It was a Thanksgiving miracle.
BIG NEWS. Erin is engaged! Tommy DeLuca asked her Friday night on the little bridge in Elm Park, the old-fashioned way, on one knee, on the wet leaves, and then he came over Saturday morning and asked Jim, which was backwards but sweet. Jim shook his hand and then went out to the garage for twenty minutes. When he came back his eyes were red and he said it was the leaf mold. My husband has been a letter carrier for twenty-four years and he's never been allergic to a leaf in his life.
The wedding will be next October. I'm going to be the mother of the bride. In a dress. With sleeves, God help me, if Erin has her way.
Third week of school. I was reading aloud to a class of seventh graders on Tuesday, the first chapter of Hatchet, which I have read to seventh graders maybe forty times, and right when the pilot has his heart attack, it hit me. Up from my chest into my face like somebody opened an oven door. I kept reading. My voice didn't even change. I'm a professional.
But when I got to the end of the chapter a girl in the front row, a quiet one who always sits with her sleeves pulled over her hands, raised her hand and said, "Mrs. Callahan, are you okay? You're all red."
And I said, "It's warm in here, honey," which it wasn't. It was sixty-four degrees. The whole class had their jackets on.
Twenty-six faces looking at me. I wanted to say: Girls, someday this will happen to you, and when it does I hope somebody tells you what it is. But you can't say that to twelve-year-olds in a public school library in 1997, so I closed the book and gave them five minutes of free reading and went and stood by the window.
I went over to Ma's at a quarter to five yesterday morning so we could watch Princess Diana's funeral together. She'd asked me to. Ma has kept a scrapbook of Diana since the wedding in 1981. She made tea and put out the good cups and we sat on her couch in our bathrobes and watched those two boys walk behind the coffin, and Ma cried like I haven't seen her cry since my father died.
And Mother Teresa died on Friday on top of everything else. Ma says it's a terrible week for women.
Here is what I was thinking, sitting there on the couch next to her, and it's not very charitable. My mother can cry for a princess she never met. She can talk about Diana's marriage and Diana's eating troubles and Diana's sons like they were her own cousins. But when I asked her in July about her own body, the one she's lived in for seventy-seven years, she changed the subject to the price of tomatoes.
I held her hand during the part with the song. Her hand was cold and dry and small. Mine was hot. Of course.
Home from three days at Hampton Beach. We rented the same cottage we've rented since Erin was in diapers. Brendan, who is sixteen now, spent the entire time pretending he'd arrived separately.
Thursday afternoon, in the worst of the heat, I got up off my towel, walked straight down the beach and into the ocean in my shorts and my T-shirt, up to my waist, and just stood there. The water up there is freezing even in August. It was the best I've felt all summer. People looked. A little boy with a bucket stared at me the whole time. I stood there anyway, like a woman in a painting, until my legs went numb. When I came back Jim handed me a towel and said, "Better?" and I said, "Much," and that was the whole conversation, and it was enough.
Awake again. That's four nights this week. I go to sleep fine, and then at two or three I'm wide awake with the sheets kicked off and my heart going and the pillow damp, and that's it, I'm up for the day, whether the day likes it or not.
So I'm down here at the computer in the den in my nightgown with the window open and the crickets going. The only other sounds are the refrigerator and Jim, upstairs, snoring like a man with nothing whatsoever on his conscience. I'm not bitter. Well. I'm a little bitter.
If anybody else out there is up at 3 a.m. for this same reason, hello. Put the kettle on. No, don't. Get some ice.
I asked my mother.
We were in her kitchen after Mass, and I just came out with it. "Ma, when you were my age, did you get the hot flashes? What did you do?"
She looked at me like I'd asked her about her underwear at the altar rail. Then she said, very quietly, "Oh. The change." Only she didn't say it out loud, exactly. She whispered it, the way she used to whisper "cancer," and "divorced," and "Protestant." Then she said, "We didn't discuss such things, Nancy," and asked me if I'd seen what they're getting for tomatoes at the market now.
So that's that. But here's what I remember, now that I think about it. The winter before Jim and I got married, when I was still living at home, I remember Ma standing at the kitchen window in January with it wide open, the snow blowing in on the sink, and my father saying, "Mary, for God's sake, the heat!" and her not turning around. I was twenty-two years old and I didn't know what I was looking at. Nobody told me. Nobody told her either, I bet.
Well, I'm telling. That's the whole point of this page.
Last day of school! The kids are gone, the teachers are gone, and I'm the only one left in the building except the custodians, sitting in my library with a list of 114 books that are still out. One of them is a book on the Titanic that has been checked out by the same boy since February. I have my suspicions he's building a model.
On the drive home I had a flash at the light on Park Avenue. Rolled down every window in the Buick, turned the air on high, and sat there with my face in the vent. The man in the next car looked over at me. I looked right back at him. Mister, you have no idea.
Hello, whoever you are.
My name is Nancy Callahan. I'm forty-nine years old. I've been the librarian at a public middle school in Worcester, Massachusetts, for fourteen years, and married to Jim for twenty-six. We have three children: Sean, who is twenty-five and an accountant, Erin, who is twenty-three and teaches second grade, and Brendan, who is sixteen and a mystery.
Raj, our computer teacher, who is twenty-six and thinks I'm a hoot, showed me how to make a home page after school last week. He thought I'd do one for the library. I'm going to do that too, eventually. But I went home and couldn't sleep (I never can, lately, more about that later) and I thought: what I really want is someplace to write down what's happening to me. Because nobody else is.
Here is what happened. On May 20th I stood up at the School Committee meeting (that's what we call the school board here in Massachusetts) to ask for money for new encyclopedias and a second computer for the library. I had my notes on index cards. I'd practiced in the car. And about two sentences in, a wave of heat came up from somewhere around my breastbone, right up my neck into my face and my scalp, and I could feel the sweat start at my hairline, and my face went, I'm told, the color of a boiled lobster. In front of the Committee, the superintendent, a man from the newspaper and about forty parents.
I finished my presentation. I got the encyclopedias. I did not get the computer. And I went out to the parking lot and sat in the car and thought, Oh. Oh, so this is it.
It's called menopause, and I'm going to say the word right out loud on this page as often as I want to, because my mother never said it once in her whole life. That's what this page is going to be about. Hot flashes and whatever else comes. Come along if you want.