“Sometimes you just have to go through the crash and see if you can walk away on two legs.” Sandra Tsing Loh
I wasn’t going to write about menopause. I wasn’t even going to notice menopause, except maybe Margaret Mead’s zesty part. I have a hazy recollection of other plans. Based on anecdotal information, I figured it would be a blip on the radar, followed by blessed relief from the blood. As a writer, I flailed around the empty page whenever a thing inspired me. The inconvenient body was never the thing.
Until it was the only thing.
For most of my adult life, my body was a reliable machine. I bled every 28 days, a calendar in the flesh, with no cramps and negligible mood swings. I had four kids, with easy enough pregnancies and natural births. I nursed everyone long enough to make my mother-in-law nervous and, aside from a few brief breast infections, all went well. I lived on the island of children for a great blur of time, growing them all up and keeping everyone alive, rising every morning and setting each night, like a disheveled nurturing sun. Everyone was my job and I was good at it.
Until I wasn’t.
Menopause was a vague idea in my busy young head, a thing for old ladies, a bloodless otherworld, something about flashes and dry vaginas. Not for me, I foolishly thought. Women weren’t talking, so there was no warning about the dangers ahead. My body complained sometimes, as they do, but it seemed like a normal life in a meat suit that usually worked well enough. I wasn’t prepared for the full system breakdown ahead. No one told me.
Menopause is inevitable, we should at least expect it and understand its power. We should be equipped to midwife ourselves through it safely and sanely. Imagine if no one talked about or understood menstruation. Imagine the girl who begins to bleed with no expectation, information, or understanding. (Many of us don’t need to imagine, it’s in the record.)
It’s all in your head, they say. Take these anti-depressants. Lose some weight, change your diet, do yoga, meditate. Above all, don’t talk about it.
It’s changing, thank the goddesses who are finally yelling about midlife and menopause in all its variety. There are headlines, essays, podcasts, and books: The Menopause Manifesto and The Vagenda by
, a fierce advocate for women's health; Everything is Fine, a fun, chatty podcast for women in the middle; articles and more articles; Wayward, a novel about the thing. I want it all, can’t get enough, and am trying to add to it.The best reading for me isn’t the nuts and bolts, how-to-fix-it stuff - though there is much value there - but rather the personal accounts of midlife hell. Darcey Steinke’s Flash Count Diary; Marina Benjamin’s The Middlepause; Sandra Tsing Loh’s Madwoman in the Volvo. I was driving a trusty old Volvo wagon when the world came crashing down around my ears, so that last one really hit home.
The thing that helped most in the midst of my own natural disaster was finding my people. Connecting. The knowledge that others were suffering similar trials validated my experience and calmed me down. I wasn’t the only one having a secret, epic crisis.
Writing like a madwoman, mostly about the mad-making thing, was my path through it. Finding others and raving, hearing the echo of their own raves, has been the most effective drug for me. On the page, in person, through any available conduits, we need to connect and share.
We will, every woman on earth, navigate similar and yet wildly different storms in the middle of our lives and, if we don’t find each other and talk about it, we will feel alone and possibly crazy. We are not alone.
Write about it, read about it, sing about it, make your art about it. We’re not alone. We’re not crazy. We’re magnificent. Let’s talk.
Cheers!
Lisa
Things to share:
I love this woman and her barbed snowflakes.
Read “The Just” by Jorge Luis Borges. “These people, unaware, are saving the world.”
This is old (and it’s advertising, sorry), but this video is such a brilliant confluence of music, film, dance, and design. I’ve been revisiting it for years and it always makes me happy. And watch the making of, it’s fascinating. (I found out later that Twigs was not long out of uterine surgery when this was filmed, and she ripped her stitches. “Grim as fuck,” she called it. The things women endure.)
"We're not crazy. We're magnificent." I'll repeat this to myself and thank you for it again and again.