Kitty

I read 'The Hours' by Michael Cunningham over the weekend, a wonderful book capturing the lives of three very different women, and made a note of this small passage. I liked it because it is just a nodding acknowledgment of the ageing process (Kitty is the friend and neighbour of Laura Brown):

"Kitty looks at her coffee cup with elaborately false, foolish absorption. She seems, briefly, like a simple, ordinary woman seated at a kitchen table. Her magic evaporates; it is possible to see how she'll look at fifty - she'll be fat, mannish, leathery, wry and ironic about her marriage, one of those women of whom people say, She used to be quite pretty, you know." (p.107)

Howards End

Another into a brief foray into literature. From Howards End by E. M. Forster, this is a description of Jacky Bast; I don't think she is strictly a menopausal woman being only in her thirties, but it is about the judgements that are made of women as they age. I won't quote the whole gory description of her appearance, described as 'not respectable' but 'awesome', from the boa, to the pearls, to the cheap lace and the flowery hat, but here is how it concludes:

"It was the face of the photograph, but older, and the teeth were not so numerous as the photographer had suggested, and certainly not so white. Yes, Jacky was past her prime, whatever that prime may have been. She was descending quicker than most women into the colourless years, and the look in her eyes confessed it." (p.49)

Menopause is wisdom

Via a recommendation on Facebook I arrived yesterday evening at this article entitled 'The Bitch is Back' by Sandra Tsing Loh that argues wonderfully that menopause is in fact a return to a more normal emotional/psychological/hormonal state and not some kind of aberration. She begins by lambasting the vast majority of menopause literature that plugs away at the 'problem' but then she arrives at 'The Wisdom of Menopause' by Christiane Northrup and has an epiphany.

I'll quote for you here what she refers to as the juicy core of the argument:
"A woman once told me that when her mother was approaching the age of menopause, her father sat the whole family down and said, “Kids, your mother may be going through some changes now, and I want you to be prepared. Your Uncle Ralph told me that when your Aunt Carol went through the change, she threw a leg of lamb right out the window!” Although this story fits beautifully into the stereotype of the “crazy” menopausal woman, it should not be overlooked that throwing the leg of lamb out the window may have been Aunt Carol’s outward expression of the process going on within her soul: the reclaiming of self. Perhaps it was her way of saying how tired she was of waiting on her family, of signaling to them that she was past the cook/chauffeur/dishwasher stage of life. For many women, if not most, part of this reclamation process includes getting in touch with anger and, perhaps, blowing up at loved ones for the first time."

She describes the fertile phase of a woman's life as having been under a hormonal cloud of nurturing and the explanation for the supposed crazy behaviour is:
"And now that Aunt Carol’s hormonal cloud is finally wearing off, it’s not a tragedy, or an abnormality, or her going crazy—it just means she can rejoin the rest of the human race: she can be the same selfish, non-nurturing, non-bonding type of person everyone else is."

It was interesting because I had observed this myself; not only in the lack of broodiness that had plagued my adult life since the age of about 18 but also a sense of release from responsibility for taking care of people. It has coincided with my children reaching adulthood so I had not interpreted it that way but on reflection it seems to fit. Yes, I feel suddenly more selfish, occasionally feeling a bit like I am being self-indulgent to spend my time attending to my own interests rather than those of other people, but quite enjoying it nonetheless.

Bits of the article I found irritating in the way I often do because of the assumptions it makes about 'middle class' women's lives and the route they follow. I have not had a career and had my children young (all born by the time I was thirty). I am not experiencing the "clanging chime of her 10-year-old voice, note by note, draining your will to live" because now I can just try and relate to my children as adults. And this whole description of the life of a 50 something woman has absolutely nothing that I relate to:

"A third, related, survival tip is to have no shame. The middle-aged women I know, clawing their way one day at a time through this passage, have no rules—they glue themselves together with absolutely anything they can get their hands on. They do estrogen cream, progesterone biocompounds, vaginal salves, coffee in the morning, big sandwiches at lunch. They drink water all day, they work out twice a week, hard, with personal trainers. They take Xanax to get over the dread of seeing their personal trainers, they take Valium to settle themselves before the first Chardonnay of happy hour. They may do with just a half a line of coke before a very small martini, while knitting and doing some crosswords. If there are cigarettes and skin dryness, there are also collagen and Botox, and the exhilaration of flaming an ex on Facebook. And finally, as another woman friend of mine counseled with perfect sincerity and cheer: “Just gain the 25 pounds. I really think I would not have survived menopause—AND the death of my mother—without having gained these 25 pounds.” "

but all in all I found the article enlightening and very amusing, I was annoying Dunk by giggling and not explaining myself as I always demand he does when he finds something amusing on the interweb. So hop on over and feel a bit better about the process, and maybe try and relish the return to normality instead.

(Image credit Ellen Weinstein from The Atlantic)

Invisible

Returning to the theme of the portrayal of older women in literature I have been reading 'Swimming Home' by Deborah Levy and came across this quote. It refers to the elderly Madeleine Sheridan:

"She screamed at the waiter for a whiskey and a Pepsi for Jurgen, who disliked alcohol for spiritual reasons. It was hard for an old woman to get a waiter's attention when he was busy serving topless women in thongs. She had read about yogic siddhas who mastered human invisibility through a combination of concentration and meditation. Somehow she had managed to make her body imperceptible to the waiter without any of the training." (p.74)

(Photo from trip to Dartmoor with mum and dad)

Jelly Babies for breakfast again

Maybe it's just the winter but I can't be bothered to get out of bed, even when I'm hungry, so I am relying on the box of jelly babies on the bedside table to sustain me.
Had my first period for months over christmas, heavy and painful, lasted nearly a fortnight. New menopausal symptoms include lethargy, apathy, disinterest, boredom, and general can't-be-botheredness. Couldn't even be bothered with a new year resolution; I want to let myself sink into the slump and brood about it. I still have little bursts of enthusiasm and energy but they seem to tail off very quickly. See ... I've lost interest in writing this post already.

All downhill from here

So I finally caved ... and bought some reading glasses. I had been wearing Dunk's spare pair occasionally and pretending that I didn't really need them. But I now have to officially admit that sometimes it's not just that the light is bad. Interestingly it was not reading but knitting Dunk's new jumper that tipped the balance. It has a complex cable and the yarn is very dark blue and I was finding it too hard to distinguish between the knit and purl stitches.

 However, in taking a photo of myself I got a very nasty shock. Mostly I kid myself that my face hasn't changed much over the last few years, in fact the frown line has been there since my twenties and has not got any worse, but when I uploaded the photos and tried to pick the nicest one I noticed that old age had been creeping up on me unawares:

It's the perniciousness of ageing that is most disturbing, or maybe it is just human nature to determinedly ignore these things until one day an old lady looks back at you from the mirror and you have the cheek to be upset about it. 
Well, it's 16 months since I started this little 'diary' and there has not been much progress. No particular symptoms have emerged other than a wayward irregularity in my cycle. I have stopped expecting anything predictable and at least my body has been predictable in it's unpredictability:-)

It's later than you think

There's nothing like a letter from the Pension Plan telling you that you have a mere 16 years and 340 days to go until you can retire on your 65th birthday to make you want to get a new job. The thought of having to do the whole thing again nearly twice over is just too much. Having said that it did feel like a surprisingly long time; certainly long enough to have a whole new career, like my dear sis who is venturing into the world of nursing after a lifetime in financial services ... Go Claire!

Menopause update: it feels more than anything like my body is merely getting forgetful.  My brain is already headed in that direction at an alarming rate so I guess it's just following suit.