Yes, I’m talking about Eve, the first of our kind. One of God’s first children. The one who let some slithering snake talk her into eating forbidden fruit and ruining it for the rest of us.

If you are unfamiliar with Eve’s short story, here it is in a nutshell: God created Adam and Eve, gave them everything they would need, including a little garden of paradise on earth, plus a few simple rules like “don’t eat the fruit from the tree of knowledge of good and evil.” Eve took a walk, found said tree, a snake (actually, Satan himself) talked her into taking some fruit, she ate it, gave some to Adam, God busted them. Bam. We’re all screwed. God pronounced a curse upon them and their descendents where man would toil and sweat for his food and women would endure pain during childbirth. Oh, and we’re all now subject to the process of death and disease. Good one, Eve.

This is why I’d like to have a little chat with Eve. Really? A snake talked you into eating some fruit when you had an entire garden of deliciousness for your choosing? Come on, you didn’t see where this was going? Where’s your intuition?

Now some women choose to shower Eve with accolades for standing up to God, that big bully. No one tells Eve what to do. She showed him. Obviously these women have not been subject to the varying repercussions of Eve’s actions. Namely, painful childbirth, PMS, and menopause. I’m thinking if any of these women were enduring swollen ankles and breasts, searing contractions, or night sweats, they’d be singing a different tune.

As one who has been recently diagnosed in the ovarian failure stage of menopause, I’d like to give Eve a piece of my mind. And as one who has endured the recent scare of my mother’s possible breast cancer diagnosis, I’d like to slap the first woman with her own fig leaf.

Now some might think I’m a little crazy, even borderline blasphemous, but when your FSH levels hit 127 and hot flashes are a part of every day life, you gotta blame someone. It’s the only way to make it through the waistline weight gain, drying skin, headaches, confusion, insomnia, and overall yuckiness. It’s either Eve or my husband, and he didn’t really do anything except choose to marry a woman who would enter menopause at 44. How did he know? I’m sure had he known his lovely bride would turn into a raving, homicidal lunatic at the sight of an overflowing garbage can or a weeping psychotic because of a Kleenex commercial, he’d chosen differently. It’s not his fault. Besides, he has to do that toil and sweat stuff for the rest of his life, so I’m targeting my anger at Eve.

I’d really like to know what she was thinking. Was the fruit so enticing and unique she had to have a taste? Or was the snake such a cool salesman she might’ve eaten one of the branches or the grass underfoot if he’d told her to do so. Whatever her reason, I’d like to know. Because not only did she bring pain and death upon her descendents, she pretty much gave men a reason to believe that the world would be a better place if women just did what they were told. This had to be why women were held as second-class citizens for so long. If women were kept “barefoot and pregnant” or “rattling those pots and pans,” there’d be no time for shenanigans involving bad fruit and a slimy salessnake.

Okay, so maybe I’m making more out of this than I should. And I realize I could’ve easily failed the test placed before Eve. Although today, when I’m feeling bloated, boiling, and bitter, I’d like to think I would’ve yanked that snake right out of that tree and flung him violently beyond the walls of the garden. Then yelled at Adam for not killing it in the first place. Or not.

Either way, should you see Eve, tell her I’m looking for her.