Wednesday morning Bible study at Bethlehem Lutheran, and I watched six women between sixty-two and seventy-nine lower themselves into folding chairs the same way. Right hand on the table. Left hand on the chair back. A slow bend at the knees with the jaw set tight. Nobody mentioned it. We opened to Colossians and Beverly Strand poured the coffee, and every one of us wrapped both hands around our cups like we were warming ourselves, even though the fellowship hall was seventy-four degrees.
I have watched women do this my entire adult life. Not just sit down carefully. All of it. The quiet management of pain that never gets named out loud. The ibuprofen in the pocket of every cardigan. The heating pad tucked behind the couch cushion. The way we say “I'm fine” when someone asks, because the question is a courtesy and the answer is expected to be brief.
I did it too. For years. My hands would throb at two in the morning, and I would run warm water over them at the kitchen sink in the dark rather than wake Gerald. When the methotrexate made me nauseous every Tuesday through Thursday, I still made supper. When the rheumatologist in Sioux Falls told me we could try a different medication with different side effects, I said, “Let's try,” the way you say it when you're out of ideas but you're not allowed to stop.
Here is what I have come to believe: women my age were raised to endure. We were raised by women who endured. My mother Doris had two knee replacements and never once said the word “pain” in my hearing. She said “stiff” and “a little sore” and “not as bad as yesterday.” She walked through her kitchen with her hands on the counter and the backs of chairs like she was navigating a ship in rough water, and she never sat down to rest while there was someone else in the room.
I loved my mother. I also inherited from her the belief that my pain was not important enough to make a fuss about.
That belief cost me years.
There's a particular kind of resistance that women over sixty face when it comes to cannabis, and it doesn't come from doctors or dispensaries. It comes from inside our own kitchens. It's the voice that says this isn't for people like you. It's the worry about what the neighbors will think, what your husband will say, whether the pastor will look at you differently. It's the sense that after sixty years of doing things a certain way, changing course is an admission that you can't handle it.
I'll tell you what I couldn't handle. I couldn't handle three hours of sleep a night. I couldn't handle dropping things, and fumbling buttons, and watching my own hands betray me. I couldn't handle my grandson asking his grandfather if I was sick.
My daughter Lisa, who is a nurse, had to tell me three times to try cannabis before I listened. Three times. Not because I doubted the medicine. Because I doubted my right to try it. Because somewhere between 1958 and now, I had absorbed the idea that a woman my age should be grateful for what works well enough and stop asking for more.
I want to say something to the women reading this, the ones who sit down carefully and wrap both hands around their coffee cups and say “I'm fine” every Wednesday morning.
You are allowed to sleep through the night. You are allowed to ask for something that works better than what you have. You are allowed to walk into a dispensary and say, “My hands hurt and I'm tired and I've tried everything else.” You do not need your husband's permission or your pastor's blessing or your daughter's medical degree, although I had all three, and I am grateful for them.
What you need is your own permission. And I am telling you, as a sixty-eight-year-old Lutheran farmer's wife who has been where you are sitting right now: you can give it to yourself.
I take a 2.5-milligram capsule every night at eight o'clock. I rub salve on my knuckles when they flare. I sleep seven hours. I crochet blankets for my grandchildren. I am not a rebel or an activist or a woman who breaks rules. I am a woman who finally decided that her pain was worth addressing, even if it meant trying something unfamiliar.
The chair will still be hard to lower yourself into tomorrow. But the question is whether that's the only option you're willing to consider.