Holy crap with the hot
flashes already. Honestly. It’s getting ridiculous.
On Tuesday I accompany a
friend to Connecticut to retrieve a purse that got left behind at a deli after
a family function. Remarkably, the
wallet is still intact, so it’s worth the drive down. It may be a long ride, but we manage to have
some fun on the way there and back, playing with phone apps, trying to prove we
are smarter than grade schoolers while playing Brain Quest, and hitting a pub
for lunch.
The most fun, though, is
when we are both having dueling hot flashes.
Thank goodness my friend’s SUV has different temperature zones because
every time I have a hot flash, my friend doesn’t, then vice versa. We are constantly turning the temperature up
and down, turning the seat warmers on and off.
At one point, her side registers 71 degrees while my side at 59 degrees
starts up the air conditioner.
Eventually we both settle at 68 degrees at the same time, and all is
right with the world.
Wednesday I am again
plagued by ill-timed hot flashes, as if there is ever a good time to have them. Well, I suppose if I’m freezing on the Arctic
tundra in my skivvies, a hot flash might be beneficial, which is ironic because
when I have a hot flash, I wish to be on the Arctic tundra in my skivvies. Wednesday is the day my boss stops by to do an
impromptu observation. All goes well until
I get the report later that day: “Everything
was fine … except when the kids had their backs to you at one point while you
were talking to them…”
Yes, it’s true. I must hide behind the children while sitting
in a chair directly in front of the fan.
After years of being in ice cold classrooms, I finally score the one
where the heat blasts all day long, every single day of the year, even when it’s
warm out. Now that I am plagued with
waves of hot flashes, the heaters are like curses, taunting me and laughing at
me. Wednesday right in the middle of my
fifteen-minute observation, I get hit with a mega-hot flash, a
sweat-out-of-my-pores hot flash, a face-and-chest-as-red-as-tomatoes hot
flash. I work my way to the back of the
room, behind the kiddos and behind my boss, and do the best I can to teach
through the dampening aggravation. My
boss is writing about how I am forcing the kids to turn backward if they want
to see me, and I am dying for him to leave so I can dump the sweater I have on
and turn the fan higher without a lot of histrionics.
Damn hot flashes that
interfere with my daily life. I know, I
know. I should be happy I’m young enough
to still be having them. I should be
singing “I Enjoy Being a Girl” but all I can muster is some sad version of “Feeling
Hot, Hot, Hot!” I’ll gladly take a
luke-warm observation report to avoid the embarrassment of having a hot flash
in front of my students and, worse, my male boss. There’s something comforting about paperwork
in my forever-file that reads, “sat in back of room for a minute so students
couldn’t see her…” rather than “Holy crap, she turned redder than a baboon’s
butt…”
If only my classroom, like
my friend’s SUV, had separate temperature controls. Until then, I’ll continue to hide, turn on
the fans I keep all year long, and do the sweater-on/sweater-off routine. Honestly, it’s almost ridiculous.
