Aging ain't for sissies...

This is not a question, or a thing that makes me “go hmmm” this shit is all truth. 150% accurate. I have a handful of girlfriends who are older than me, a couple by like 5-7years, and a few who are already mid-sixties. They’re all aging BEAUTIFULLY. I’ve been watching them, and copying them ever since I hit early thirties. Eat like this, don’t eat like that, drink this much water, cleanse, have this much sex, and anything else that women discuss when it comes to aging. Each of them doing it her own way, depending on things they believe in, and finances, but there is one consistent thing they all told me, every single time the aging thing came up. “AGING AIN’T FOR SISSIES.”

And man, they are NOT WRONG. I love who I am inside my heart, soul, and being way more at forty seven, then I did at thirty five. There is not enough money in the world to send me back to my late teens, early twenties. I’m good here. Most of the time. But it is, an adjustment, let’s just say.

My crew and I discuss every part of aging, nitty gritty style the way only women can. What my best girls neglected to tell me, as did my doctor post “you don’t have any hormones left in your blood” visit on Friday, was how difficult/embarrassing it might be to have, Joe, my lovely pharmacist, at my local vitamin/pharmacy tell me exactly, WHERE, all these new hormone creams are supposed to go. It might have helped if he were one of my gay friends, we talk about all sorts of shit, me and them. But Joe is not one of my gay good friends, Joe is straight. I’ve met Joe’s children. Which makes it all so much worse.

Nope. Nobody suggested that perhaps I’d want to have the female pharmacist break down the application of my new Testosterone cream, which, since I don’t intend on suffering alone, is the bikini region, or two other options, which are not that high up. Or the fact that my Estrogen cream goes outside, of the inside, of my business. Now replace all my ambiguous hints for actual, proper, medical terms, and then you can begin to imagine how I wish, I prayed for the floor to open up, and swallow me whole. But I wasn’t to be that lucky. Nope, not today. Joe, who also sells me my iron, and my antibiotics was breaking the “how to apply” these two new creams, the same way he does when talking about a new vitamin I hadn’t tried yet. “So Shantelle, have you used this product before?”

“Why Joe, no I haven’t.” I was prepared to leave it at that. I mean my doctor broke it down for me on Friday, I can see that the little prescription page also tells me just how, and when to apply. I think I’ve got this. I’m good. I smile nervously at the patient at the next window, also a man. Of course. Normally there is never anybody else at the counter there. Never. So Joe, why did you need to go and do that to us, to our relationship? Everything was going so lovely between us. Shit, I write explicit sex scenes, I’m NOT SHY. I’m not a prude. I can handle sex, and sex dialogue…what I can’t handle is this new level of “intimacy” that Joe and I are now on.

I just want it to go back to how it was Joe. Like, couldn’t you just skip that part of your job, just this once? For me? For us?

You know what, now that I’ve written it out, and it’s off my chest, it actually does make me “go, hmmm, hmmm, hmmm…”