Women's Bodies, Women's Wisdom (114 page)

One widely held misperception about raising children has always upset me. That is the myth that prepubescent and pubescent boys are inherently easier to raise than girls. Even many feminists subscribe to this belief. I’m told by many people, “You just wait—you’ll see how difficult girls are when they get to be eleven or so.” Well, I’ve now had two eleven-year-old girls. I’ve supported them, in every way that I can, to be strong, even opinionated if necessary, and to be powerful. I didn’t want them to “dumbify” themselves when they became teenagers. They were
not
difficult then, and they are not difficult now. (In fact, my thirteen-year-old nephew was much moodier on a regular basis than either of my daughters.) That boys are easier to raise than girls might well be the experience of many. But this difference is cultural, a consequence of the differences between the ways boys and girls are treated and reared.

It makes sense to me that girls would get moody around the age of twelve or so. They can see what’s coming. In her book
Fire with Fire
(Random House, 1993), Naomi Wolf makes a strong case for the fact that all girls are born with a strong will to power that eventually gets turned inward by what she calls “the dragons of niceness.” Thwarting their innate desire to excel and win can make girls very unhappy at this age and can cause them to turn on each other, too. If girls are socialized to be pas sive and self-sacrificing, their powerful spirits don’t like it. (If someone was actively trying to do that to me, I’d be
very
tough to live with.) Instead of attributing this moodiness to the inherent hormonal inferiority of the female, we should be encouraging girls to speak their minds, not to turn their gifts and talents inward. If a teenage girl is taken seri ously and encouraged to follow her dreams, she will be no harder to raise than a boy. Young women need to be cherished, honored, encouraged, and praised for their gifts. Otherwise, the world won’t benefit from these gifts, and the cycle of oppression will continue. (See my book
Mother-Daughter Wisdom
for a full discussion of this.)

Each of us mothers must also learn to mother ourself, or else we can’t possibly be good mothers to our children. When women ask me the best way to mother teenagers, I tell them to do everything in their power to be happy and fulfilled themselves. This kind of role modeling goes further than anything else you could possibly do to nurture daughters who will then know how to do the same. Self-sacrifice and martyrdom are a well-worn path to chronic disease and anger, pure and simple. And though our culture has illuminated this tired old path for centuries—and we’ve watched our mothers and grandmothers travel along it—it’s time to stop. Mothering and nurturing ourselves with the same care that we use to nurture our children takes a great deal of courage. And it’s absolutely necessary if you are to truly flourish.

14
Menopause

Like an electrical charge, menstruation and the ebb and flow of energy
is an “alternating current.” During menopause, the flow of energy be
comes intensified and steady, like a “direct current.” We are charged
with energy to the degree we have opened ourselves to the wisdom of
the Crone.

—Farida Shaw

T
he term
perimenopause
refers to the years leading up to the last menstrual period.
Menopause
refers to the actual cessation of menses— the term derives from the Greek
meno
(month, menses) and
pauses
(pause)—which is also known to many women as “the change of life” or simply “the change.” The years surrounding menopause and encompassing the gradual change in ovarian function constitute an entire stage of a woman’s life, lasting from six to thirteen years, called the
climacteric
.

Whatever we call it, no other stage of a woman’s life has as much potential for allowing a woman to understand and tap into her own power as this one—if, that is, she is able to negotiate her way through the general cultural negativity that has surrounded menopause for centuries. This negativity has been challenged and changed significantly in the past decade as the women of my generation, the baby boomers, enter menopause by the millions. As a result, this climacteric experience is now significantly different from how it was for our World War II–generation mothers.

By the year 2000, 45.6 million American women had reached menopause, according to the North American Menopause Society, with numbers increasing every year. Worldwide, the number of women over fifty is expected to reach 1.1 billion by the year 2025. At the same time, longevity has increased dramatically. American women now enjoy a mean life expectancy of approximately eighty years, up from only forty-eight years for a woman born in 1900. This means that a woman is likely to live thirty to thirty-five years following menopause, making menopause the “springtime” of the second half of life.

Media attention to the subject of menopause has risen accordingly. More books on menopause have been written in the past decade than on any other subject in women’s health.

Though the advice about menopause ranges from exalting hormone replacement therapy to promoting natural menopause without hormones, the important point is that the silence surrounding this process has now been broken by the women of the baby boom generation. The medical profession stands poised to help women through this life stage, and centers specializing in the health needs of midlife women have sprung up all over the United States. This is a potentially good thing, but every woman must learn to listen carefully to her individual inner guidance to hear her personal truth about how best to deal with this conflicting advice on negotiating this life stage.

When a woman is anywhere from about forty-nine to fifty-five, her hormonal shifts will often be in full swing, and she’ll want support for these changes. After that, hormonal balance ensues once again for most women, and they are often freer than ever before to pursue creative in terests and social action. These are the years when all of a woman’s life experience comes together and can be used for a purpose that suits her.

MENOPAUSE: A CROSSROADS

If you want to know where your power really is, you need look no further than the processes of your body that you’ve been taught to dismiss, deny, or be afraid of. These include the menstrual cycle, labor, and, the mother of all wake-up calls, menopause. The years surrounding menopause are a time when most women find themselves in a crucible, having all the dross of the first half of their lives burned away so that they may emerge reborn and more fully themselves. Menopause can be likened to adolescence in reverse—the same stormy emotions we experienced during puberty often return, urging us to complete the unfinished business of our early years.

I’ve already mentioned that PMS is the wake-up call of the monthly cycle, urging us to clean up everything that isn’t working in our lives. Seasonal affective disorder is the wake-up call of the annual cycle. Perimenopause is the wake-up call of the entire life cycle. If we’ve been pressing the snooze button on any parts of our lives that need attention, the years surrounding menopause will bring them to our attention in ways we can no longer avoid if we are to truly flourish in the second half of our lives. Once a woman understands that the true meaning of menopause has been inverted and degraded, like many of the other processes of her body, she can reverse this programming and make her way through the rest of her life fortified with purpose, insight, and pleasure.

Joan Borysenko, Ph.D., refers to the years between the ages of forty-two and forty-nine as the “midlife metamorphosis,” when a woman begins in earnest to create her life in such a way that her inner most values are lived out in her everyday activities. During this stage, she is more apt to tell the truth than ever before in her life and less apt to make excuses for others. Many women quest for peace of mind against a background of turmoil and change as they end twenty-year marriages, have affairs, get left by their partners, face the empty nest, start new businesses, and explore new facets of their identity.

At midlife, a woman looks back at her life and ponders where she has been and how far she has come. Now is the time when she grieves the loss of any unrealized dreams she may have had when she was a young woman, and prepares the soil for the next stage of her life. She grapples with many issues that coincide with but are not directly associated with hormonal function, such as caring for aging parents with health problems while also wanting to focus more on herself, perhaps by traveling extensively for the first time or going back to college. Depending upon her degree of success or perceived success in life, she may find herself in a crisis that is not so much physiological as it is developmental. How she negotiates this crisis will af fect her health on all levels as she goes through menopause.

During my lectures, I’ve sometimes shown a slide of Mount Saint Helens erupting to illustrate the stormy emotions that so often characterize these years. This is a time when many women, myself included, begin to manifest some of the fierce need for self-expression that frequently goes underground at adolescence. I like to think of midlife women as dangerous—dangerous to any forces existing in our lives that seek to turn us into silent little old ladies, dangerous to the deadening effects of con vention and niceness, and dangerous to any accommodations we have made that are stifling who we are now capable of becoming. By the age of forty-five, I found myself deeply engaged in the process of scrutinizing every aspect of my life and my relationships in an effort to eradicate any dead wood that either held me back or no longer served whom I had become. My tolerance for dead-end relationships of all kinds began to evaporate. This eventually led to the end of my twenty-four-year marriage and was the impetus for writing
The Wisdom of Menopause
(Bantam Books, 2001; revised 2006). Women in midlife are at a turning point: Either we can continue living with relationships, jobs, and situations that we have outgrown—a choice that hastens the aging process and the chance for disease dramatically—or we can do the developmental work that our bodies, and our hormone levels, are calling out for. We must source our lives from our souls now. Nothing less will work. When we dare to do this, we truly prepare for the springtime of the second half of our lives. It all boils down to this: Grow or die.

In Celtic cultures, the young maiden was seen as the flower; the mother, the fruit; the elder woman, the seed. The seed is the part that contains the knowledge and potential of all the other parts within it. The role of the postmenopausal woman is to go forth and reseed the community with her concentrated kernel of truth and wisdom. In some native cultures, menopausal women were felt to retain their “wise blood,” rather than shed it cyclically, and were therefore considered more powerful than menstruating women. A woman could not be a shaman until she was past menopause in these cultures. “Menopause,” observes Tamara Slayton, author of
Reclaiming the
Menstrual Matrix
(Lantern Books, 2002), “when understood and supported, provides the next level of initiation into personal power for women. With our increased life span, our way of thinking about menopause needs updating from these ancient mythologies. I think of perimenopause and the twenty to thirty years following menopause as a time of ripeness. Instead of rose buds, we become rose hips—juicy fruit that contains and nurtures the seeds we will sow later.”
¹
At menopause, we’re just getting started. In 1998, I wrote, “What we need is a new Crone archetype—a sort of ‘Aquarian Crone’—that reflects these new ways of perceiving this time of life.” And that is exactly what is happening. Urban shaman Donna Henes dubs this stage “the Queen” in her book
The Queen of My Self
(Monarch Press, 2005). (See
www.thequeenofmyself.com
.)

The years after menopause are sometimes referred to as the wisdom years. I believe that one of the primary ways this wisdom gets wired in our brains and bodies has to do with the neurotransmitters FSH and LH (See
chapter 5
, on the menstrual cycle). These levels are high at ovulation, when women are maximally fertile—and also maximally open to new ideas and “cross pollination” from others. After menopause, these neurotransmitter levels stay permanently elevated in the ovulation range for the rest of our lives—which, in my view, renders us more open to a continual flow of wisdom that heretofore was available only at ovulation.

OUR CULTURAL INHERITANCE

Up until very recently, the conventional medical mind-set has been that menopause is a deficiency disease, not a natural process. Jerilynn Prior, M.D., professor of endocrinology and metabolism at the University of British Columbia and coauthor with Susan Baxter, Ph.D., of
The Estrogen Errors
(Praeger, 2009), writes, “Our culture finds it easy to blame women’s repro ductive systems for disease. Linking the menopause change in reproductive capability with aging, making menopause a point in time rather than a process, and labeling it an estrogen deficiency disease are all reflections of nonscientific, prejudicial thinking by the medical profession.”
²
Since menopausal women are no longer using their energy in childbearing, their systems are described in terms of functional failure or decline: Breasts and genital organs are said to gradually “atrophy,” “wither,” and become “senile.”
³
Menopause, viewed through this lens, is the ultimate in “failed production”—a system that is “shut down.”