IIn my 20s and 30s I went hard, driven by a desire to live life to the fullest. I wanted to stay up all night with heated conversations, collecting experiences and adventures, making art and meaning out of everything that happened. Somewhere in the distance I imagined that I had reached 40 years, but never thought beyond that: I would turn 40 … and then I would be s65?
My naivety died in the middle of the night three years ago. I woke up drenched in sweat, shivering. It was shocking to suddenly find myself so cold and in the dark. Within a month I was waking up at least twice a week – three, four or even five times a night.
But it wasn’t just the night sweats. My menstrual cycle changed, dropped a day for a few months, then returned and then shortened again. The first two days of my period got a lot heavier – “crime scene periods”, another middle-aged friend and I texted each other, relieved we weren’t alone in this mess.
In a Goodwill dressing room one afternoon, a furnace roared to life in my lower abdomen, setting my head and limbs on fire. I pulled off the sundress I was trying on and tore one of its seams. My first hot flash. I didn’t understand what was happening. Was it perimenopause – the dawn of the end of my fertility? And if it was, wasn’t I, at 43, too young to have it?
Jessica Rose written in the New York Times that “the perimenopausal period is associated with as many as 34 different diseases ranging from hair loss to ‘burning mouth syndrome’, which is a tingling or numb feeling in your lips, gums and tongue”.
The long and vague list of perimenopausal symptoms caused a familiar feeling in me. When I wrote Like a Mother, a book about the outdated scientific and cultural myths of pregnancy in 2016, almost every expert I interviewed said a variation of the same thing: compared to what we ought to know about this basic human process, we don’t know anything.
A lack of definitive information, especially when it comes to female reproductive health, does not mean that a condition is too obtuse or mysterious to understand. Most likely, this means that the condition is dismissed, underappreciated and poorly researched.
Trying to find information about menopause was confusing and disorienting. Various websites and texts have given inconsistent definitions. But I liked the approach that OB-GYN Jen Gunter takes in her book The Menopause Manifesto.Gunter describes the years before and after the end of reproductive fertility as the “menopause continuum”, which includes the entire process from premenopause to postmenopause. The idea of a continuum accounted for the fact that the journey could span decades. Menopause can fully occupy a third or even half of someone’s life.
For all the time we spend in this zone, we know frustratingly little about it. Many enter this era completely unequipped. About half of all people will go through this, but it is rarely talked about openly. And each of us experiences it differently. There is biology, but also the context of our lives: relationships, race, access to health care, family history.
At 46, I’ve been experiencing what Gunter calls “menopause transition” symptoms for three years. There are the night sweats and heavy periods. I also have to pee all the time, also 10 minutes after I last peed. My vagina sometimes feels like a brittle shell.
It’s easy to focus on the inconvenience. But along with these hormonal, nocturnal and vaginal changes, I experienced a softening, an openness. In the past three years, I have made changes that I could hardly have imagined a decade ago. I grew out my gray hair. I started taking antidepressants. I became sober. I ask for help more often. I fight less with my mother. I feel more porous, open to others, less worried about myself.
My first instinct, when I look at myself in the mirror, is not to judge, but to simply try to see myself, clear-eyed and realistic.
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In her non-fiction book Flash Count Diary, novelist Darcey Steinke explains how she discovered that warm glows can lead to greater empathy. “The hot flash comes unwanted. You can’t control your body, and that makes women more empathetic towards others who are suffering,” Pauline Maki of the Center for Research on Women and Gender at the University of Illinois at Chicago, Steinke says.
I would like to know how many more years I will be cooking my silicone menstrual cups, and if I should buy a bulk bottle of lube. I wonder if the overwhelming sadness I sometimes feel is due to hormone surges or the world’s grimness.
But I have reached a level of peace that I didn’t think was possible. Often that peace comes, refreshingly, from an unwillingness to give a crap about trivial nuisances.
My earlier inability to imagine middle age is both a failure of my own imagination and of American culture, which is hyper-focused on youth—it offers few meaningful images or discussions of female middle age. This span does involve uncertainty and loss, but the cultural conversation must also include the accompanying wealth, vastness and growth. The deeper becoming.
I may not quite recognize the woman I see when I look in the mirror, but I am curious about her. I will follow her. I think she’s going to take me somewhere interesting.
