Mental Pause

My wonderful husband, Walter and I were having dinner a couple weeks ago when our conversation turned to the subject of sleep. I mentioned how relieved I was that I'd been sleeping like a baby since we'd returned from Savannah several days before. This was a much welcomed development, since I hadn't slept through the night for a number of months preceding.

After listening to me for a few seconds, Walt shrugged his shoulders and said quite innocently, "You must be going through menopause."

What?

The atmosphere suddenly became a little less than romantic.

I couldn't help but wonder where in the world Walt had been for the last few months.

In the time that has passed since shortly after last Thanksgiving I have:

1.Been forbidden to have any part in the lives of three of my precious grandchildren.
2.Watched my youngest daughter nearly die of pregnancy related complications.
3.Suffered through my fourteen year old son's emotional breakdown (to the point I had to remove him from school and put him in therapy)
4.Experienced an 80% loss in our electrical contracting business (and subsequent income).
5.Sat by the same daughter's bedside as the surgeon forcefully removed her pre-mature baby at 24 weeks 4 days gestation (that's a 5 month pregnancy if you do the math). Knowing it was the only possible chance for saving both of their lives was little consolation.
6.Helplessly stood by as the pre-mature baby died two weeks thereafter.
7.Grieved accordingly.

Need I go on?

Because those are just some of the reasons my brain had been too full to sleep!

Suffice to say I was a bit taken back by my husband's rather pat answer to the issue.

If I'd truly been "hormonal" I would have sprang across the table and strangled him on the spot. Don't tell ME about hormonal!

Within a New York minute of Walt's comment (and without the aid of strangulation) I believe I'd effectively set him straight on the matter. Never-the-less, the question remains ...why do men always seem to think that every negative emotional reaction we women experience is somehow related to our hormones?

Any one of the aforementioned situations would have merited a few sleepless nights, with or without hormonal interference. And yet Walt saw none of those things as significant in their own right?

Noooooooo .... the source of my insomniatic state had to be narrowed down to that one thing, and that one thing alone.

Hormones.

It's an age old question and I have no reason to believe that I will be the one to come up with an answer.

Maybe he was right. Maybe what I was experiencing was not a "natural" reaction to the truckload of unusually stressful situations that hit me without warning. If only I'd realized that possibility! Had it not been for my hormonal state of being, I probably would have been able to skip obliviously and happily through the entire ordeal!

Perhaps there is no such thing as "stress" aside from hormonal influence after all! Wow! What a revelation!

Of course, it would have to be a MAN who would come up with such a simple answer. We women are way too hormonal to ever think of such a thing.

Ladies, I think you will agree ... sometimes we just have to wonder what men are thinking and why they happen to be thinking it! My best guess is that their minds are over-saturated with testosterone thus rendering them incapable of grasping a true-er and more complex explanation.

I've come to this conclusion. If you can't beat 'em, join 'em!

Just blame it on the hormones!