No escape

Hands down, the most uncomfortable time during my visit home, was a conversation with my mom while we drove to a quilt show. The quilts were in Montrose, PA, which is about 1 ½ hours from Moscow. It’s an extremely picturesque drive, passing old farmhouses and homes with large verandas. The leaves on the rolling hills were a range of colors and they were still on the trees. We took backroads because we had the time and it was a lot prettier.

However, for part of the drive I was distracted from the scenery because we talked about menopause, and more specifically, my mom’s menopause. (I’m not going to worry about her reading this entry until she learns to turn on a computer. And even then I don’t think she could navigate the internet anyway. I’m not being mean - during the weekend she asked me if an iPod is something to sleep in.)

The conversation started innocently enough. We never actually said the word, “menopause.” Mom was telling humorous stories about how emotional she is these days. She can’t read the newspaper mostly because of the coverage of dead soldiers, however less emotional stories get the tear ducts going too. She also says she cries during church. She then moved onto stories about her friends, mostly the Material Girls (her quilt group). She also told me about a neighbor whose husband has suggested that his wife see a psychiatrist. We both laughed at this because we think the couple needs psychiatric help for much more serious reasons. Mom then started going off on how men don’t understand and how dumb we are. She brought up 13-year-old girls and I panicked. Suddenly staring straight ahead out of the windshield wasn’t enough separation from this topic.

I did what any nerd would do in my situation. I made the topic scientific, even a little mathematical. I recalled the information from my research paper on estrogen and Alzheimer’s disease during junior year’s endocrinology class. I talked about how a man produces a level amount of estrogen through his whole life so there’s no shock to his body. When his testosterone level rapidly declines, it doesn’t affect him as severely as a woman is affected by her estrogen drop. There are theories relating women’s decline in estrogen to the higher relative number of female Alzheimer’s patients. My mom had nothing to add to this part of the conversation, as I had hoped. I had successfully hijacked the conversation. We turned to talking about the silly exploits of the neighbors and we never looked back.