Real Life

Be the change

A newly signed-up member of the Menopause Club finally finds a label for her status that appeals to her
Be the change

Menopause. Jeez! Look, if we really really have to suffer it as a ‘thing’, can’t we rebrand it? Reframe it? Crochet it a sexy bonnet? Or dress it up in some slutty YSL cage boots, give it a reality TV show, a thrashy theme tune, put it on the cover of Vanity Fair, something, anything?

I didn’t really think much about menopause until last month. It was one of those things like psoriasis or leaky buildings that you know exist but don’t really get until they happen to you. Now, aged 48, it seems menopause is a club I am going to be frogmarched to join, Groucho Marx-style (he would never join any club that would have him as a member).

I know I have no say in it, but if I’m being commandeered, I just wish menopause was cooler. So your periods have stopped. Big wow. That’s not really a bad thing, so can’t menopause be more sparkly, uplifting, kickass, rocking, unruly and hot? Can this next phase of my life be less about scrap-booking, aromatherapy and easy-listening and more about being obnoxious, forbid-ding and scaring the bejeezus out of people?

Most other female rites of passage – adolescence, motherhood – are a bit comme-ci comme-ça; you lose one thing, you gain something else. When you hit adolescence you are no longer a child but you get to wear high heels. Having a baby has its own kind of messy trauma, but on the plus-side you get some grudging respect for being a mother and can utilise special parking spaces. But menopause just seems unremittingly grim – an unending insult – except maybe if you’re into gardening. If you’re keen on Metallica or martinis or something, not so much.

Regardless, I’m determined to be positive about this next phase in my life, but my usual methods of perking myself up are proving not so much problematic as just flat out useless. Whenever other major life events have happened to me (death of parents, divorce, depression, dog farewell) I tend to research the topic in depth, read a lot of books, and try to find out more about how to approach each thing in a bid to rob it of some of its anxiety and horror. But researching menopause has made me “think such awful thoughts that I cannot even say them out loud because they would make Jesus want to drink gin straight out of the cat dish.” (Thank you Anne Lamott.)

The more I read, the worse it seems. The view of menopause, even among professionals, seems to be that it is simply scuzzy.  

Here’s what you get if you search for articles on menopause on the Psychology Today website: Why the menopause creates a perfect storm for anxiety. The second curse on women: Menopause. The menopause mid-life weight gain. Panda love, menopausal whales and sex over 50. Actually that last one sounded promising. “Did you know there are only two mammals that live past menopause? Humans are one, what’s the other?” “Pandas?” “No. Whales.” Sorry, not making me feel any better, shrinks. There’s also Menopause, the Musical.

But this just seems to feed the cliché of the post-menopausal cream cake eater. The topics of the songs are “chocolate cravings, hot flushes, loss of memory, nocturnal sweats, and sexual predicaments.” I’d prefer something darker and more subversive, with hot sex and a soundtrack by Nick Cave and Kylie (her Neighbours days are long gone).

There has to be some good material: according to some doctors estrogen-deficient women are nothing but the walking dead. I don’t find Grumpy Old Women uplifting either, for obvious reasons. Lisa Jey Davis has written a book called Getting Over Your Ovaries: How to Make the Change of Life Your Bitch – great title – but even she seemed to be a bit of a lone voice. “It was time to not only change the vernacular, but to speak up and say ‘Hey! This isn’t an old lady’s disease! We aren’t old! We are strong and dammit, we are beautiful and sexy too!’”

Did I detect a note of desperation? I was kind of thinking ‘stroppy and scary’ needed a mention too, but then I’m thinking of becoming a menopause terrorist rather than, ahem, politely asking for an attitude change, if it’s not too much trouble.

But one thing seems clear, if I want to think of my own menopause as exciting and cool, I am going to have to convince myself rather than waiting for anyone else to do it for me or expecting professional help. So I’ve been trying to find upsides to it, and there are quite a few. Being uncom-promisingly yourself seems to be the biggest one.

“It may be that the past is but the prelude to the most authentic period of your life. Even if until now you more or less went along with the expectations of others, you can now choose to be yourself. Women become truer to themselves after menopause not only because they grow older, but because their circum-stances change,” writes Jean Shinoda Bolen in Goddesses in Older Women. This sounds great, but had you ever heard of Jean Shinoda Bolen until now? No, me neither. I’ve heard of Helen Gurley Brown and she said, of menopause: “If you’re not a sex symbol, you’re in trouble.” I’d have thought the opposite, frankly.

Surely one of the benefits of menopause is you no longer have to feel tyrannised by social norms of femininity and sexuality? You don’t have to make yourself into a hermetically sealed, airbrushed image of male sexual fantasies. You don’t even have to pretend to be normal anymore, whatever that is.

In their book Eccentrics, academics David Weeks and Jamie James say they found while most men expressed their eccentricity when they were young, many women turned eccentric after their kids grew up. While they were married and with young children a woman tended to conform to standard social mores so as not to disrupt the life of the household. But when the children left home, she felt free to let loose her eccentric, creative side, and often divorced her husband. “The eccentric women in our study tended to be more curious, radical, experimenting and aloof than the men.”

I have also started compiling my own list of menopause pin-ups. At the top of the list, actress Helen Mirren. “At 70 years old, if I could give my younger self one piece of advice, it would be to use the words ‘fuck off’ much more frequently.” Other excellent role models: Meryl Streep, Vivienne Westwood, Sandi Toksvig, Madonna, Hillary Clinton, Patti Smith, and Kim Gordon.

The ‘Queen of Mean’ Florence King said “a woman must wait for her ovaries to die before she can get her rightful self back.” Hooray to that. And in my reading I think I might even have found a new branding for menopause. It is sometimes called the Crone Phase: apparently what can be the most powerful time of all for women. In the manner of gays calling themselves queer, it appeals to me to reclaim crone. I don’t think I would mind being a crone. Not an old crone though. Old is always just 15 years older than I am right now.

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