Unprepared

I love my library.  Not my own personal library, but the one down the street: the biggest lending library in the city of Toronto.  Six floors of booky goodness, all free for the taking.

Every once in a while I like to stop in and browse randomly through the shelves, picking up books that I wouldn't give the time of day in a bookstore.  A book on the history of clocks, copyright 1963.  Magazines about the science of agriculture.  Random volumes of poetry.  I get absorbed in the most unlikely subjects.  

I picked up a volume called "Dropped Threads", a collection of essays by women writers.  The common theme was Things In Life that they had Not Been Adequately Prepared For by school or their upbringing.  One woman wrote eloquently of being awake at 4:30 in the morning, not knowing how much longer she would have to spend with her husband, who had been slowly, incrementally dying of (living with?) kidney failure for the past ten years.  How could anything prepare you for that?

Some of the essays fell completely flat.  I read the first few paragraphs, then skimmed the rest.  One woman wrote about her hips, how they budded as the first sign of her womanhood; how she struggled with the aesthetics of having big hips; how she fell and broke her hip and how this symbolic brokenness went down through all the other layers of symbolic hip-related feminine blah blah blah and for Pete's sake - who cares?  

I don't mean to be cruel to women who struggle with their hips.  It wasn't the content that bugged me, it was the tone.  A very adolescent angst-y, melodramatic, overreaching-with-all-the-heavily-interlaced-symbolism tone.  Trying way too hard to make more of the story than there was.  

It was what it was.  If that wasn't enough, don't bother writing about it.

I did enjoy the essays that told genuine, enlightening stories of events that women had been unprepared for in their lives.   Like the woman writing at the age of 36 (my age) of her two abortions.  She had one when she was 23 and one at 29.  She hadn't been sure about the second one, but went ahead because she was frightened of being a single mother.  As she wrote, she was still single, and feared she might have missed her chances to experience motherhood.  What can you even say about that?

I believe the thing I was least adequately prepared for in a specific way in my life was one particular aspect of menstruation.  I assumed each period only lasted one day.  I don't know where I got the idea, but advertising wasn't as explicit back then as it is now.  There was no talk of light days and heavy days and overnight pads.  No one, not even the sex ed teacher, mentioned duration, so I imagine that it started when you woke up in the morning and was done by bedtime.

Wouldn't that be nice?

What were you least prepared for in your life?  Option a) answer in the comments.  Option b) this is the topic for your next blog post.