Boldt from the Blue

This is the smoke-filled room, the kitchen where the sausage is made, the backstage, the drawing room, the atelier.

What I'm making here is an identity: Eroica Boldt, my homonculus and possibly my Frankenstein's monster. A ME who can go forward into the second half of my life as my duly appointed representative, with powers and problems that are different from me as I know me from the first half.

It's going to be important to differ from myself in the following ways:

1) Immediately and practically I have to know new media, and that includes having a blog. This is like the stem cells of all the new media that will comprise my public self in future decades. Everything is non-specific and kind of disgusting right now: but as the tissue firms and divides and changes into a cosmos, each part will have both recognizable form and efficient function. Trust me.

2) I'm going to be rich. This is because the first half of life was conducted among different systems, which didn't conveniently reward the gifts I have. Society has changed, community has changed, patterns of wealth distribution have changed; I have changed. Also, I want to be rich and previously I have wanted not to be rich.

3) I'm going to be old. Mary Kay Ash said that between the ages of 20 and 40 a woman can get by on looks, from 40 t0 60 she can get by on personality, but from age 60 she needs cash. I have ten years to earn enough cash to replace the beauty I never had and the personality that grows less charming every year. There's only so much you can do to preserve your health. I want to use mine to make money. This is a change from what has gone before; my health has been used to preserve, not to produce.

4) I have a career. In the sense that Marlo Thomas' character That Girl had one in the 60's: one that she passionately believed in, worked to promote, and defended, but which did not exist yet in the real world. My career is still incipient in that sense but like an unborn child it has changed everything with its inevitability. I have a career being Eroica Boldt, an author who became an electronic publishing group and eventually a brand. Eroica Boldt's ebooks do more than line her pockets: they inspire young people globally to recognize and use their strengths well. Eroica Boldt's readers are subversive against terror, mind-control, and learned helplessness. Eroica is wise, kind, healthy, brave and rich yet her greatest contribution is to promote wisdom, kindness, health, bravery, and wealth in others.

5) I have passed through the belly of the beast of fertility. I have outlived the thing that swallowed me whole at 13. Fertility is not evil. I don't resent it; I'm grateful to have had it. But it is a force of nature that is bigger than every human being. Fertility is more all-consuming for women than for men. Fertility for women is like being eaten alive, and then you have a different personality and set of priorities...that's putting it too mildly....while you're in it than when you're out of it. While you are fertile you can be killed by different things and for different reasons than when you are out of fertility. And you don't have to be medically fertile to be in it. Your body is a tool of God and nature to get certain things done. You don't get to choose, no matter how you feel about it. Sometimes you don't even get to choose how to feel. And this absorption into the force of nature that is fertility is so complete, it can take over how you identify yourself. It becomes a factor is what you think of who you are, and the phenomenon is so universal that it goes unremarked. There's an period of grief and anguish which is written off as adolescent mood swings, and then we identify with our breasts and our periods and our nubility and we care a lot about what guys think of us, or we care about hte degree to which we care. No one can ignore it!

Let me state here that my marriage and my children are my chief joy. Let me also state that the countdown to menopause is going too slowly for me. There's a griefstricken, lost girl waiting for me on the other side of it that I haven't been able to be for going on 35 years. How would you like to lose someone you love for 35 or 40 years? How would you like to lose YOU for 40 years?

For most of human history girls were swallowed by this dragon and became women and died inside of it. Died of childbirth, died of abuse or disease or starvation or heartbreak, died of old age as grandmothers or as virgins but mostly died before menopause. Anyone who outlived the dragon, who felt it die and rot away around her to emerge blinking into her old/new self, emerged as an old or dying person whose health and strength had been lost long ago. Now, for the first time in human history, a generation of women is outliving fertility with health and strength intact. Some of us have decades ahead of us. Some of us are still young in every respect except what our hair or skin looks like. Previously, those whose fertility died young around them were considered prematurely old, they were considered to have lost their femininity and their primary identity along with losing the beast that had eaten them.

I won't have to cut myself out surgically, probably. Probably it will die a natural death. And yes, I will grieve. I'm grieving the youth that got eaten. There is no little girl left to be. It's all gone. And I'm grieving the children I didn't have. No matter how many you have, the ones you wanted but couldn't have will always be lost and missed. Those ghost children are more gone than ever when fertility and the illusion of choice go for good. When fertility dies around me and I blink around in brighter light, ankle deep in death I have to find a way to step and step and step forward out of, I will do it with the heart of the girl who went down, appalled, 40 years ago. A girl who couldn't stop the teeth or the throat or the crop. A girl who resigned herself to 40 years of waiting to get out, waiting for the accommodation to be over, waiting for things to get back to normal.

During the second fifty years of life I won't be a girl. I'll just be me. Again. Finally.

6) Did I mention that I'll be rich? As a corollary, I will have choices that I've never had before. This will be a big change. For those without means, all choices are defensive. They are reactions to situations we don't choose. Yes, we can choose how to react. But the operative word is react. As a person with money, I will be able to proact. I'll be choosing situations, not just responses. I'll be creating effects in the world. I'll be making situations for other people, better situations than the ones they have, I hope. I'll be creating opportunities for myself and others. This is what I think money's real job is, and I will be its boss instead of its employee for the first time.

7) I used to think of the death of loved ones as an appalling aberration, but soon I will see it as normal. The older I get the more goodbyes I will have to say. Some of my classmates have already died. I didn't know them well. This knife will cut closer and closer to home as time goes by. Unless I die first, which I don't want to.

8) Other changes will happen but I don't know what they are. As an exercise in humility, let me list them, too. Change eight: I don't know yet.

9) I don't know yet.

10) I don't know yet.