Once upon a time, in hushed voices, it was called “The Change.” If it was headed your way, you’d be forgiven for thinking that this meant the ultimate, the mother of all changes. When spoken of publicly, which was rare, menopause was the butt of jokes. Women lacked real information about it. Given these things, feeling fear and resistance was a natural response.
Thirty years ago, when I saw it on the horizon, I felt much more trepidation than I did about old age, which I had always imagined would be interesting (and it is).
But with menopause I quaked a little. What will happen to me physically? Who will I become? How is it possible that I’m already at this stage, when only a minute ago I was finally enjoying my body and my life? Now came hot flashes, extra weight, and the feeling that I’d lost control of my real self, which was riding, day after day, a hormonal ebb tide.
I didn’t know how to think about any of it. I wish I had.
When the first hot flashes came, I looked on them as you would a magazine you hadn’t subscribed to arriving in your mailbox, a magazine chock full of photos and stories about things you’d just as soon never know about, let alone experience.
It took me a couple of years to come to terms with menopause. I had to keep reminding myself that I am located in a body and the body is subject to change, a simple fact but somehow hard to face when it came to this time of life.
‘It took me a couple of years to come to
terms with menopause.’
Fighting the body’s changes, except when it changes in ways we like, will make any passage, whatever it may be, more difficult. If I couldn’t accept the fact that sweat might suddenly pour down my face during a work meeting (as it sometimes did and as it still does, once a day promptly at 6:30 a.m., even though I’m 80), I’d have been miserable and hot.
This is just as true after menopause as it is before and during. You already know you’re not going to be the same at 70 as at 60 or at 80 as at 70. My mother lived to be 100 and in her 90s she and I noticed that major changes occurred not just by decade, but, at that point, year to year. The best thing we can do for ourselves is to befriend our physical changes, invite them in and be curious about what they carry with them that is useful and possibly even life expanding.
Puberty in Reverse?
The second thing I can now see about my approach to menopause is that when I was experiencing it in my 50s, I failed to grasp that I’d had an earlier, similar experience. Just as friends and I were focusing on what was happening to our bodies with this change, my childhood friends and I had focused with the same intensity on our bodies when we hit puberty. It’s one thing to know this and give it a cursory look and another to think about how deeply our adolescence can inform menopause.
It helps to know we’ve gone through something as hugely transformative as this supposed “mother of all changes,” before, and we made it through. Hormonal faucets turn on usually somewhere between 12 and 14 and turn off around 30 or 40 years later. Both last for about the same length of time.
What I understand now that I didn’t then, is that our bodies provide these spans of several years as portals for us to move from one state of being to another. Both demand what any portal demands: to be alert so as not to trip or bang into a wall instead of following the way through—fortunately, both allow plenty of time to adjust.
‘I failed to grasp that I’d had an earlier, similar experience.’
In my book of essays on aging, There Was an Old Woman: Reflections on These Strange, Surprising, Shining Years (OSU Press, 2023), I propose that because we already managed a portal of giant proportions in adolescence, might there be something to be gained by looking back at how we did it? How did we think about it? What did we do on a practical level to manage the ricochets of our emotional and physical lives? Music? Drawing? Dance? Math? Science? Nature? Friendships? Sports? Taking things apart and putting them together again? Animals? Jogging? All of the above, or a bunch of things not listed?
With me, it was literature, nature and writing, and those are things I turn to now, in old age, more than ever.
In adolescence, you taught yourself how to navigate a major physical, emotional, mental and spiritual transition. You found your bearings, even if it meant a lot of trial and error. If you hadn’t, you wouldn’t be reading this now. Look back and you’ll see yourself coming to grips. Maybe there’s something that you’re no longer in touch with but which could now help in this transition. Maybe you knew something about yourself then that you need to remember now.
Although we can apply them to menopause, we can also carry the triumphs of making it through our most daunting challenges into old age itself, because change doesn’t end with “the Change.” Old age is a dynamic time. Even in the midst of the most difficult parts of it, we can acknowledge we have what it takes to find our way because we’ve done it before. And we started learning how when we were just kids who didn’t have the tools and skills we have now.
The vessels that carry us through our lives are hugely important and need care and attention all the way, but both times of life, puberty and menopause, allow for extreme close-ups of ourselves holding on and letting go, trying to establish or re-establish our values, our identities, our mechanisms for expression, self love, and where and how to put something worthwhile into the world.
On the other side of the proverbial hill lies a sometimes difficult but often enlightening time if you stay awake to it, with changes to reckon with and transformations to create on our own, as well as plenty of room to reflect on the beauty and power of change itself.
Andrea Carlisle is the author of a collection of essays on aging, There Was an Old Woman: Reflections on These Strange, Surprising, Shining Years. Her work has been published in literary journals, newspapers, magazines, anthologies and by independent presses. For more information, see andreacarlisle.com.
Illustration credit: Shutterstock/Andrii Yalansky
