like a chore.
I sense the same bewildered ache I had when I was fourteen and felt I’d lost my tomboy self. Now I wonder what will become of the strong, youthful woman I sought for so long, worked to create, and finally found? For I’m at the start of another passage, and this one ends in death.
• • •
I’m feeling a sense of sadness about the woman I no longer am, and yet she is the one who enables me to have the good sense to accept what is happening. I develop humility, humour and perspective, new tools I recognize as blessings, since I’ll have them well entrenched when, in the next stage of my life, I may face far more debilitating losses.
I’ve chosen not to take hormone replacement therapy—my woman doctor has never recommended it. At first I think, “I can deal with this, it’s only discomfort, and won’t last long.” After a few years, however, I see that the process needs my attention and respect. But I have to go about it the way I tamed a wild pony who could not be touched. I spent an entire winter singing to her, my head bent, never attempting to pat her. One day, I slowly raised my arm to stroke her neck andshe lowered her head to my breast. She changed me; I changed her. Finally, I slid onto her back and we moved as one.
I decide it is time to systematically try vitamins and herbs—ginseng, vitamin E, black cohosh, dong quai—until I find something that calms the daily and nightly waves of roaring heat, and the insomnia or anxiety accompanying them. I’ve learned that menopause is far more than the absence of a period. It is an enormous change—emotional, physical, spiritual—and is as irresistible as the contractions of birth. Day after day, night after night, year after year, I’m faced with the evidence of how I’m like the sea, or the moon, or the seasons. Heat rises within me, my blood vessels enlarge, my skin sweats. When this happens, I have no choice but to stop what I’m doing, wait patiently, and endure, since resisting, like fighting contractions, makes everything worse.
Lack of resistance, like singing to a pony, is not passivity but wisdom.
• • •
My granddaughters and my mother pull me beyond the narrow circle of my own perspective and teach me about what I think of as “the authority of the self.”
Bridget, eight months old, spies a blue-eyed stuffed dog on a shelf. She crawls toward it, making imperious barking sounds. “Ha. Ha.” She reaches up. Reaches, reaches. Her tiny, strong hand grasps the edge of the shelf and she pulls herself onto her feet. She stands, wobbling, picking up the dog with delight, entirely unaware of her precariousness. And Maeve, in the tub, declares, “I’m dog/fish/woman.” And she’s absolutely right. Her perfect female body is fully stretched, fish-like, in the dappled water. She reaches her arms forward, swimming, while her feet
kick kick kick
, with puppy-like abandon.
My mother, at eighty-one, thinks of death as a beginning,and is certain that something amazing will occur when she goes forward into her next life. She wears sneakers and jeans; works out with a personal trainer. “Punch, punch!” the trainer shouts, and my mother jabs body blows at a leather bag. She and my father still live in their drafty old farmhouse, and she breaks from our phone conversation to tell me what she is seeing at that moment: the blood-red amaryllis on her desk, glowing in sudden sun; a cloud of pinkspeckled blossoms on the crab-apple tree.
They persist, and insist, both tiny girls and elderly woman—embracing life, discovering it, delighting in it. This is what I am going to do, they declare. They accept the conditions of their life.
And they also see more clearly. Time confers clarity. There is so much time, for the little girls, that it’s like an ocean. There is so much less, for my mother, that it’s like an exquisite wine, drunk in smaller and smaller sips and held longer on the tongue. Yet in both
I sense the same bewildered ache I had when I was fourteen and felt I’d lost my tomboy self. Now I wonder what will become of the strong, youthful woman I sought for so long, worked to create, and finally found? For I’m at the start of another passage, and this one ends in death.
• • •
I’m feeling a sense of sadness about the woman I no longer am, and yet she is the one who enables me to have the good sense to accept what is happening. I develop humility, humour and perspective, new tools I recognize as blessings, since I’ll have them well entrenched when, in the next stage of my life, I may face far more debilitating losses.
I’ve chosen not to take hormone replacement therapy—my woman doctor has never recommended it. At first I think, “I can deal with this, it’s only discomfort, and won’t last long.” After a few years, however, I see that the process needs my attention and respect. But I have to go about it the way I tamed a wild pony who could not be touched. I spent an entire winter singing to her, my head bent, never attempting to pat her. One day, I slowly raised my arm to stroke her neck andshe lowered her head to my breast. She changed me; I changed her. Finally, I slid onto her back and we moved as one.
I decide it is time to systematically try vitamins and herbs—ginseng, vitamin E, black cohosh, dong quai—until I find something that calms the daily and nightly waves of roaring heat, and the insomnia or anxiety accompanying them. I’ve learned that menopause is far more than the absence of a period. It is an enormous change—emotional, physical, spiritual—and is as irresistible as the contractions of birth. Day after day, night after night, year after year, I’m faced with the evidence of how I’m like the sea, or the moon, or the seasons. Heat rises within me, my blood vessels enlarge, my skin sweats. When this happens, I have no choice but to stop what I’m doing, wait patiently, and endure, since resisting, like fighting contractions, makes everything worse.
Lack of resistance, like singing to a pony, is not passivity but wisdom.
• • •
My granddaughters and my mother pull me beyond the narrow circle of my own perspective and teach me about what I think of as “the authority of the self.”
Bridget, eight months old, spies a blue-eyed stuffed dog on a shelf. She crawls toward it, making imperious barking sounds. “Ha. Ha.” She reaches up. Reaches, reaches. Her tiny, strong hand grasps the edge of the shelf and she pulls herself onto her feet. She stands, wobbling, picking up the dog with delight, entirely unaware of her precariousness. And Maeve, in the tub, declares, “I’m dog/fish/woman.” And she’s absolutely right. Her perfect female body is fully stretched, fish-like, in the dappled water. She reaches her arms forward, swimming, while her feet
kick kick kick
, with puppy-like abandon.
My mother, at eighty-one, thinks of death as a beginning,and is certain that something amazing will occur when she goes forward into her next life. She wears sneakers and jeans; works out with a personal trainer. “Punch, punch!” the trainer shouts, and my mother jabs body blows at a leather bag. She and my father still live in their drafty old farmhouse, and she breaks from our phone conversation to tell me what she is seeing at that moment: the blood-red amaryllis on her desk, glowing in sudden sun; a cloud of pinkspeckled blossoms on the crab-apple tree.
They persist, and insist, both tiny girls and elderly woman—embracing life, discovering it, delighting in it. This is what I am going to do, they declare. They accept the conditions of their life.
And they also see more clearly. Time confers clarity. There is so much time, for the little girls, that it’s like an ocean. There is so much less, for my mother, that it’s like an exquisite wine, drunk in smaller and smaller sips and held longer on the tongue. Yet in both
Similar Books
