By Callie Feyen
@calliefeyen

“Maybe by telling you my story, you can better tell yours, which is the only way to get home, by which I mean to get free of us.” – Mary Karr, Lit

I am discussing perimenapause with a friend, also in her 40s, both of us getting hands on education in a class we didn’t know we signed up for.

She lists off her symptoms—or are they characteristics—and I nod along, each of them a punch to the gut. I am the Hulk and then I’m Eyore; then Elsa and then it’s 10 a.m. and I need a nap.

She gives me the name of a medication and tells me it’s a game changer. I am also on meds, but they don’t do what hers are doing, and so like a commercial I decide to talk to my doctor but then she says this: “I feel how I felt before I was 12.”

She looks at me like I should know what she is referring to, but I have no idea what she’s talking about. 

“You feel younger?” I attempt, and she says that this is part of it, but what’s more is that she’s not bombarded by angst and sorrow. She feels carefree, solid. 

I smile and tell her she looks fabulous, and I’m not lying. She does. She looks luminous and playful. She looks happy.  I do not tell her that whatever is happening to me has, on some level or another, been happening to me since I’ve been alive. 

In preschool, during playtime when everyone got to choose what they play with, I took my teacher’s hand and brought her over to the circle table away from the noise and the chaos and told her this was all too much. 

In third grade, when the teacher threatened us with a study carole at the perimeter of the classroom if we talked too much or were disruptive, I asked her if I could please always sit there.

“With your back to the classroom and three walls surrounding you?” she asked.

“Yes, please,” I said. I would’ve offered to swear or stomp on someone’s foot if that’s what it took to sit in a carole.

I am not convinced there’s something wrong with me, but I do think that whatever sensitivities I have make it difficult, at times, to walk in the world. I know I won’t talk to my doctor because this is how I’ve always been. 

***

My great-grandmother, Elenie, never learned to swim. She was Armenian and she had two brothers—one was shot and killed by Turkish people and another died drowning while people who were also Turkish stood by and watched. In a video my aunt put together about my grandparents, Clara and Theodore, my aunt narrates: “[Elenie] was always afraid of water. She refused to swim and refused to let her children swim. If you see any pictures of her, she will be fully dressed in the water. And so her daughter, Clara, was the same way.”

My grandma drove a Cougar like a bat outta hell—the only way a car like that should be driven. She would pick fights with other women in the grocery store who were choosing their fish for Friday night dinners: “You can eat meat,” she’d say. “And you can read the Bible for yourselves now, too.” My grandma once went to urgent care for eczema, and then got ticked off because she had to pay the bill for the appointment and the prescription for hydrocortisone. She drove her car into car washes the wrong way; left her car in neutral in a grocery store parking lot, and it slid under a semi-truck. In each case, she talked her way out of any blame, and the establishments paid for any damage (that she caused).

My grandma was not a timid woman, but I remember her sitting at the side of the pool, always in the shallow end, always only with her feet just skimming the water, always with pants on—an homage, I suppose, to a story she could not free herself from.

***

My youngest daughter, Harper, and I are in the car on the way home from her swim practice. This is the first year she’s swimming competitively. I do not know if she’s any good. I do not know if she shows promise for years to come. I know she slices through the water like a shark on the hunt when she enters it. She is all power and force and precision. She is someone different than she is on land.

She tells me that practice was hard today. 

“Sometimes if I’ve had a bad day, a hard practice is good,” she says. “I can get it all out.”

“I know what you mean,” I say.

“Sometimes I can’t get it all out,” she says next. She goes on to tell me that sometimes things don’t click, that there’s no release. “Sometimes it’s just hard,” she says and then turns towards her window. “And that’s just how it is.”

“Yeah,” I say, and then we are silent.

Harper is the only person in my life who I can settle into silence with. With her, I feel no jitters, no sense that I must be or do or say something when no words are spoken. I think she understands that we both need the silence not to soothe ourselves, but to consider all that churns within us. I think she knows it is the silence that makes whatever untameable thing that wants to live, that wants to keep living, stronger. 

And so we are silent the rest of the way home.

***

A barrel turn is a type of turn where you hitch one leg up, while the other one slides across the floor. You are sideways and your arms must move in order to propel you into the air. The prep then, looks as if you are being dragged across the floor, or attempting to throw yourself somewhere. The foot that slides goes into the air, and you are to get so high that your body arches as you turn, looking like a barrel.

This is not a turn you can spot for. Actually, trying to spot can throw you off course and you could fall. This is all about the force and the prep and trusting that you can throw yourself into the air and that you will land.

We’ve been practicing this turn for weeks—maybe months, even. I am a master at the prep, but I’m too scared to throw myself in the air. 

I want to, though. 

Tonight, the instructor turns the music on and tells us to try, and when it’s my turn, and the lyrics go, “God is a dancer,” and “just take it step by step,” it is as if every part of me—all that I am—is standing up ready to accept the call.

I cannot execute the turn, though. I do not look like a barrel. I look like an empty, dented pop can being kicked across the floor. 

“I can’t do it,” I shout, and throw a hand in the air as if to erase something—the attempt, the failure, myself. I am not even half-way across the dance floor, and I walk the rest of the way to stand with the other dancers.

The instructor, a person whose pronouns are they/them, stops the music and takes a step towards us, but glares at me. “You absolutely can do it,” they say. “You just haven’t done it yet.” 

I wonder what it is like to inhabit two distinct traits. How strong do you have to be to know that you will live with two totally different truths; that they will eternally exist within you. 

“Also,” they say, and normally their voice is quiet and sweet, but now there’s an edge to it. “My body is not the same as yours, so you’re going to have to figure this out for yourself.”

I nod once and then wrap my arms around myself and breathe deeply. For years, therapists have told me that this is an act of protection; of hiding. They’ve encouraged me to knock it off. Just recently though, I’ve learned that this is also an act of self-compassion: that holding myself like this is grace. 

Maybe it is both, I think as they instructor walks back to the music, turns it on and demands, “Try it again.”