FOR WOMEN ONLY:
MEN! KEEP OUT!
THIS IS GIRLTALK! YOU ALL HATE THIS STUFF!
THE FOLLOWING CONTAINS WORDS LIKE MENOPAUSE! HOT FLASHES!
DEPRESSION!
SHOCKING! TERRIFYING! NOT FOR MALE EYES!
Penni Comes of Age--A Personal Story of Menopausal Madness
Fifty loomed large. My mind obsessed on words like “old hag”, “crone”, Baba Yaga. Not that long ago women didn't even live to be fifty. We either died in childbirth or from the horror of life without Stouffers and microwaves. Do you remember women of fifty from your childhood? They had purple hair, support hose, and powdery faces.
It occurred to me that there was always the chance I was the evolutionary link to an ageless female race. Perhaps this thing called menopause wouldn't happen to me. I looked pretty good as long as I kind of eased up to mirrors and squinted. I did notice that if I
wasn't prepared, I experienced weird supernatural sightings of my dead mother.
Preventive action was taken: I bought every product with “Anti-aging” on its label, I lost twenty pounds and then had to buy a Wonderbra to hold up everything that collapsed without its happy fat support, I got scuba certified to show how vital I still was, although I couldn't stand alone with the tank on my back, I started going to a hairstylist with one name, I approached CW about skipping a year of college so I could get a facelift.
It sneaks up on you though, like an insidious virus. I was sitting at the ballpark and said, “My God! It's hot!” Everyone looked at me. No one else was sweating. Dan said, “It's 70 degrees out.” Chuck said, “Maybe it's the nachos?” My best friend Jan, who is five
years younger than I, looked at me with pity and handed me a napkin.
That's when I knew. So I did what I do best. I bought every book I could find on the subject and there are plenty. The Baby Boomers are not going gently into that good night, no sir! We will deny, fight, protest until we no longer can remember what it is we're fighting and they stick us in the nursing home.
I was not terribly taken with Simone de Beauvoir's statement that “With no future, [a woman] still has about one half of her adult life to live.” I devoured rebellious, in-your-face books about leaving husbands, buying motorcycles, wearing purple. I read with envy May Sarton's graceful, gentle books about living alone, gardening, writing, and then later discovered her admission that it was all a front for the loneliness and fear, a denial of the anger. Erica Jong, Carolyn Heilbrun, Gloria Steinem, a parade of intelligent, feisty women, dealing with their changing minds and bodies. I learned all the catch phrases, the fear of the Bag Lady,
“dishonored Gaia", aging Sibyl.
Meanwhile, the hot flashes turned into downpours, I lay in bed at night, wide awake, feeling my skin wrinkle and listening to the static in what used to be my brain. I wept over my transmogrification into a wrinkled, dried up prune with a short-circuited cerebellum. Depression set in.
It was time to see J, my precious gynecologist, who had delivered my babies, and seen me through every passage so far.
“My life is over. Just shoot me!” I cried dramatically, sitting crosslegged on the examining table, my poor pruny body clad in a stylish piece of crinkly blue paper.
Jay was not impressed. He's the same age as I am, but then, men age differently from women. He was probably getting ready to buy a new Porsche and take a trophy wife. He looked cute with no hair.
“Good grief,” he said. “all you need are some hormones and a little Prozac.”
Now I don't know how you feel about these things. My mother never took a hormone; she just made us all suffer for three years. Then she denied that she had ever had a bad day; menopause? What was that? So I decided the hell with stoicism. I took everything J
offered. And in three weeks, I felt great. I briefly wondered if I was still me. Or was that awful person I used to be the real me? Should it bother me that I was now a chemically-enhanced pseudopenni?
But these are meaningless and esoteric questions. My only true concern is that there will be a nuclear war and I won't be able to get my drugs. I could deal with the physical aging, but I couldn't stand to lose my sense of me again, the fullness of every day, all the things I still want to see and do. As Heilbrun says, “Once we give up the fight to look and act eternally young, we discover new powers of attractiveness and sources of pleasure.”
When I mentioned a facelift to the family, Ammo protested loudly. “I don't want you to change, Mom. I like you the way you are!”
And I realized, with some surprise, so do I. |
