In my menopause era. Officially.

 Unremarkable uterus and ovaries, is what the ultrasound results say. That’s GOOD news. 

Coupled with the note attached to my FSH results from a couple of weeks ago, it means MENOPAUSE, and this makes me feel like so much is over.

Not that I was going to have more babies. (The time for more babies was between Dorothy and Minnie, but I am pretty sure Minnie was the last egg).

On the becoming/being spectrum, I’m inching closer to has been in every way every day.

I had the ultrasound in the same place I had all my first ultrasounds, the five joyful ones and the baby who wasn’t, really. Driving there, empty, I remembered driving there for the first time to see what would be baby Harry, a little blurry gummy bear. The street names that I was anxiously looking for because I was driving in an unfamiliar part of town. The basement of the clinic that’s so silent and mauve. A waiting room full of glowing people anticipating a look at the potential their bodies are cradling or faded older folks who look both bored and anxious.

I was in the second group today, of course.

A kind, efficient tech who didn’t angle the screen toward me or turn on the wall-mounted monitor. “Nobody cute peeking out at you,” she said in her Wisconsin accent. Warm jelly on my belly and cold sterile jelly for the internal probe. The woosh woosh sound when she measured blood flow in my ovaries, but no galloping baby heart. Again. Ever.

I can buy really expensive underwear now. Clean out pads, tampons, ovulation strips, pregnancy tests taking up space under my bathroom sink. Throw away condoms for good.

We called our parents immediately after that first ultrasound with Harry to tell them about our squirmy little magic bundle of cells– 8 weeks pregnant, we gushed. I remember how happy my parents were, and how my dad laughed and laughed and said he just knew it was a boy.

After this ultrasound, I went to a coffee shop to do some work and walked in to see a brand new grandma and her daughter with a teeny baby just starting to hold his little head up and look with those alien navy blue newborn eyes at the world moving around him. 

An old man in a Vietnam vet baseball cap is having breakfast with his daughter at the table in front of me.

These are signs, right? That my world is as unremarkable as my ovaries and uterus, resonant glimpses to shush the what-ifs.

My second act is going to be to get rich inventing an estrogen soak– basically the fountain of youth in hormone form– how hard can that be? cue image of Gargamel chasing Smurfs