A while ago, before the "change of life" was a reality I fully understood, I was sitting in my best friend's backyard ruminating about the prospect of our lives with our children grown and gone. "We have to start making some decisions for ourselves," she said, with a righteous tone in her voice. "After all, you don't get a gold watch for menopause."
"No kidding," I said, breaking out into hysterical laughter at the combined pithiness and poignancy of her statement. Having now lived halfway to a hundred in a fairly prescribed way—marriage, children, house in the suburbs, volunteering at the kid's school—I wasn't able to imagine life without all of its familiar parameters. But I also knew I wasn't ready to be put out to pasture just because my body was soon to retire from one of its most noble acts--the producing and feeding of children. Sometimes I felt as if my very femininity was being called into question and I hadn't the faintest idea what to do about it. But I wasn't about to up and quit.
"Who wants a gold watch anyway?" I finally said. "After so many years marching along to everyone else's schedule, a watch is the last thing I want. Frankly, I'd prefer to be off the clock and on vacation. After all, we have more than earned our stripes in the name of service to family. I couldn't begin to calculate the thousands of dinners cooked, errands run, doctor and dentist's appointments kept, or holiday celebrations produced. To be honest, the "pause" part of menopause was looking pretty inviting.
Now a decade later, I know that menopause is actually a chance for liberation! Culturally we tend to focus on what menopause means in terms of a woman's body. It is a drying up, a time of newly emerging wrinkles, sagging flesh, blurred vision, and horror of horrors, a rounded belly. For those of us who crave the gold watch, an appointment with the plastic surgeon is the answer. But I can't bear to think that I would have to deal with perpetual care for the rest of my life. I'd rather write my own prescriptions, to work with nature and embrace change.
Life keeps moving on, and as the years go by, I've learned that I can't control its course; I can only adapt. We mark graduations, marriage, birth, even death with celebrations and fanfare. Why not menopause? What if there were rituals that recognized a woman's achievements-- crises managed, lessons mastered, attitudes and ideals reversed—and then launched her into her PAUSE in order to regroup and replenish. Maybe the physical changes would be easier to accept if we honored the journey that preceded them. At least we'd be spared the depression that often comes when we long for the way we were in favor of celebrating what we've become.
For as my mentor, Joan Erikson said: "Life is a progression. We are meant to be aware and eager to greet the next passage. Besides, holding on to anything ruins it."
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The Second Journey: The Road Back to Yourself is the currently featured book in the Getting Better All The Time group. Written by Joan Anderson, it's a story about finding yourself and what's important in your life. To join the group and stay on top of all of the new articles and excerpts, click here.
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Comments: 32
So true; it certainly holds for children, possessions and men.
I'm a couple years into it. Haven't had a problem with the weight thing, though. We'll see.
Loved your article, but I must say. Your friend was right. My sister and I had that conversation, about 6 years ago. We did make some important decisions, plans, and goals, for our retirement days. Just in a nic of time!
In any case, the way we were is not the way we arer and I'm liking the new me better all the time.
Joan
glad you liked the article.Just remember the best is yet to come. Think of all the wisdom you've accrued in your first journey. May you relish the 2nd.
Joan
According to Jungian Jean Shinoda Bolen, menopause is a time when we stop shedding and begin retaining the wisdom from all the years we were birthing and raising children. We've literally carried the culture and now its time to carry the culture to a new level...one where it considers the matriarchy.
Joan
Joan
The hot flashes are a bad trip for me.
I didn't realize I would go into full blown menopause after having a emergency hysterectomy. Here I am. 52 & feeling 72. Uh
I just take a day at a time.
We can't slow down the process of living, only adapt. One thing I know for sure, the way I was is not the way I am and once you accept the novelty that comes with change everything beomes better. Having gone through six decades of changes in my body, mind, and spirit, I am not only wiser but also better. May you have many independent adventures.
Joan
My life is full and happy. I value most moments and finally I know what I want to be when I grow up!
Thanks for the great article.
Just looking at what has occurred in my life over the past decade makes me celebrate me! Ten years ago I wasn't a grandmother, didn't have a retired husband, had no clue that I would be a best selling author, never thought I would inspire others to seize their moments...my heavens, what a difference a decade makes for me and all women our age. Indeed, we've accrued wisdom, knowledge and evoked change in most of the people aroound us. Damn we're good! Joan
One of the reasons I wrote these books and went searching was to prepare for the future when I wouldn't be someone's mother or just a wife. It is never too early to look toward that time of life when things aren't prescribed by others but when you can design your own way...plot your second journey and make a difference for youself and others. Happy travels. Joan
Only if we start to share our innermost thoughts about self will anything change. Competing with airbrushed images in magazines is impossible, short of staving ourselves, and yet that is the norm--looking like those women. So much of what we are fed is illusion, not reality, and yet we tend to believe the illusions. I read somewhere that plastic surgery will be so popular that women will choose between 20 different faces. Can you imagine a world that looks like that? Joan
During a very rough time about 8 years ago I mentioned to my sister that I just wanted "to be", nothing more. She responded that life is a perpetual change and one cannnot "just be". How true. We have to embrace the change of life. How's that for an analogy? He-he!
Ah, I see that is what you said. Sorry, I read it wrong the first time. (I really would like to just be, though.)
One of the four elders died.
Then I got Stage II breast cancer with both breasts off and a full node-resection, but there wasn't much time to think about that because more family crises were on the horizon. Then I was laid off a jobbette that held much of my identity and helped me deal with elders and a child with issues.
The whole department got laid off in budget cuts. I didn't cry as much as some others, but I was in a fog of grief. I spent miserable time trying to get a job in an industry where my BA was pitiful, in competition with MA's for $10 per hour jobs, grant funded (meaning they could go away in two months), tens or hundreds of us applying for each opening, sometimes against the MA who wrote the grant.
Then my ex, who had seemed a decent guy, dumped me for the traditional younger woman, except she had convinced me, and the tai chi community we were part of, that she was a lesbian. The soap-opera of this humiliated me beyond what I thought I could stand. The local officials were sympathetic toward me, but the national corporate executives of the non-profit tai chi society decided two workers, one younger than I, were more important to indulge than I. I had taught tai chi for them for eight or nine years, with the proceeds donated to a group that I ended up feeling betrayed by, but in the end that was OK since I needed to go back to yoga, which has saved my life about every 12 years since I was born.
I lost 30 pounds in about one month and fell on my head in the gym (I was retraining for the fitness industry where the social-work jobs were supposed to have gone--yeah, right, if you are twenty-something).
I ended up in intensive care, with my nurse friend having to explain that I just liked communion, I was not alcoholic. I had tried to tell the neurosurgeon he should try Madeira, before I passed out with a blood pressure of 70 over 50. They almost had to drill those little holes in my head to relieve pressure. I guess I am lucky they didn't have to do that.
On my follow-up with the neurosurgeon I was mad I was still alive. I told him I had been on the train to Jesus. He said, "That train was full."
I fell briefly in love with a mechanic who had the best line I've ever heard. I'm not sure what went wrong with that, but my present sort of boyfriend is probably better at helping me build better skill sets.
It has been an interesting ride.
hidden as if it is something to be ashamed of, as in the past when it was a secret subject,
and it is good to celebrate becoming older, along with all the hot flushes etc, because it
happens to all women.
I just wanted to say I am finally going through what is now under 6,500 pieces of gather new mail that is in my inbox on here. So with that in mind I have finally come to a piece of mail that was addressed to me in regards this article submission you have created to share with the gather community. Thank you for taking the time and sharing your piece with us here at gather. :o)
And I hope you have a Happy New Year... in 2009 :o)