The Myth of a Woman

As a human, I approach life like a scientist. The moving physical parts fascinate me as much as the intangible things that hopefully make us human in the first place.

As a woman, I approach the middle part of life with as much humor as possible; because otherwise, brother (husband/male boss/male relatives/random men on the street), you should fasten your seatbelts. It’s going to be a bumpy couple of decades.

Before all of you XY’s make for the exits, please know that this is not going to be a tirade against men (I, personally, find many of you adorable). Rather, I have a few bones to pick with whoever designed this body that I, a woman, have to inhabit. Because, dude (and I use that in a contemporary way, no chromosomes involved, because it sounds better than ma’am, or thing, or, as I’d like to refer to that asshole: asshole).

The fucking Myth of a Woman almost killed me.

Listen, I had more education than I had any right to expect, a fantastically independent and forthright upbringing, three (in the context of youth) vastly older sisters, a family populated by a cornucopia of powerful, progressive Steel Magnolias.

Yet nobody, nobody, warned me. And I didn’t know enough to ask.

When you’re a little girl with older sisters, being a teenager actually seems kind of gross. There are (eewww) boys, you stop wanting to play the fun games and start playing other games that have secret rules, your friends get stupid and shrieky and giggly, your hair somehow becomes important, and there’s talk of some huge, mysterious thing called YOUR PERIOD.

What the fuck?

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Then you get there, and you decide where you’re going to go with all of that, and a lot of us spend at least part of the next couple of decades trying really hard to have sex while trying equally hard not to have any consequences caused by said sex. My consequences were two failed marriages and some spectacularly poor judgment on (many) more than one occasion. But there were benefits, too. I learned what works (better), for me and probably for a lot of others. Sex with love is more or less the only sustainable way for me to remain in a relationship. Sex without love is fun for a while, and then begins to feel, if you’re doing it right, like an empty substitute for something else; if you aren’t doing it right, it’s really just a poorly equipped spin class.

So you go through that part of your life, and you hopefully find some stretches of happiness, alone or with someone. Maybe you find SOMEONE. I did. Sheer luck. We’ve had and continue to have a good life, my love and I; one that’s been marked by some of the successes that a couple in America can accomplish, but far less in the negative column than all too many have suffered.

Disclosure #1: My own sexuality at 53 is likely whatever the accepted normal is — I mostly love straightforward, passionate sex. The act can occasionally begin as obligatory in a long marriage; I rarely feel that way, but when it happens, it almost always turns into what it should be. I feel desirable to my husband, and maybe to a few others. I work hard to not look any physically worse than I can help, and I am deeply appreciative of men who appreciate me at this (or any) age. I’ve been a fortunate woman.

And there we are again: back at being a Woman.

When I hit forty-five years old, I was working my tail off for an unbelievably demanding company. I was traveling what felt like all the time, a circuitous route that took me from Miami to Charlotte to Pittsburgh to Dallas and back to Miami twice a month. It was brutal, and a severe disconnect from my husband, which generally causes me to droop, physically and spiritually, like a plant in need of water.

But when I became physically ill, my body rebelling in all sorts of new and singularly female ways, my mind so clouded with worry and pain that I could barely function, I uncharacteristically cut a trip short and went straight to a gynecologist; I was certain I was dying of something.

And I was. Two things, in fact; fortunately neither of them immediate: age, and ignorance.

Disclosure #2: I am a recovering alcoholic, 18 years sober. When I was drinking, I contracted pancreatitis…I remember a nurse telling me at the time that she’d rather give birth. Alone and with nothing for the pain. It was, in my case, a level of excruciating pain so literally sobering that I never took another drink. And speaking of consequences, pancreatitis is probably why I became a Type II diabetic. It’s why I can’t eat artichokes, or cauliflower, both of which I love — weirdly, they can trigger a recurrence. Anyway, I immediately thought that the severe pain I was suddenly suffering in my mid-forties stemmed from alcohol abuse in my early thirties; any alcoholic will tell you, you spend a lot of your sobriety expecting the hammer of repercussion to fall on your head repeatedly, physically and otherwise. The word ATONEMENT towers in your mind forever, writ in stone.

Sorry. Digression is another symptom of age. Or maybe it’s just a symptom of me.

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Back to that paradise every woman gets to visit: the gynecologist’s table, where cold gains an entirely new meaning. The gynecologist says: you aren’t dying of ovarian cancer. How do you know after one examination and no biopsy? I ask. Because, he says, the cyst on your ovary is so massive that if it were malignant, I’d have attended your funeral months ago. But off you go, to a cancer guy, right after you have an awful thing called a trans-vaginal ultrasound. During which the wonderful tech (one of the kindest medical professionals I have ever met, a former navy medic) actually got an image of the alien creature trying to take over my reproductive organs before the thing popped, right there and then, causing me to actually scream. I didn’t even scream when I broke my leg, years earlier. I just kept saying shitshitshitshit then, which I did here also, just in case anyone was in any doubt that I hurt like shit, and holy shit besides.

The alien will come back, and he may bring some friends, said all the doctors. We should perform a hysterectomy, said one. Sister (who is a nurse) was ambivalent about that. Close Friend (who is not a big fan of ambivalence), who had an early hysterectomy, was vehemently against. Other friends in both camps. Husband right there with the usual support and rightly leaving the decision to me. Primary Doctor kept dropping “premenopausal” into our conversations, which I studiously ignored, because I’d read (barely) enough to know that word means very different things to and for every woman.

Well, the alien and its little cohorts did come back, repeatedly. The hot flashes started. The emotional rollercoaster I had been attributing to my job did not level out in the least when I changed to a less stressful work environment. I was filled with words, words that I had to do something with or they would fly out of my mouth in a hurtful, dagger-filled spew that would rain upon the ones I loved, so I began to write fiction and vent all of the awful pictures that were born of this altered, blood-stained imagination I suddenly possessed. Physically, I bled to match; add to that an inability to think with a brain that has always been my best feature, and I was manic, I was exhausted, I was on fire, I was ice, I was nauseous, I was hungry, bloated, dehydrated; old wounds ached anew, cracked bones remembering the injury I’d dealt them with the electric flash of a hornet’s sting.

Oh, I talked to other women. My friends, older by a bit. There was very little rhyme or reason to any of our symptoms, and many were uncomfortable talking about it. One burst into tears. Some urged hormone therapy, some were as scared of that as I was. Sister (the nurse again) had a terrible experience on HRT, and discouraged it mightily — she feared that the hormones would open a door to the depression always lurking around the edges of our family and it would finally get me in its grip and never let me go.

So, out of confusion from way too much conflicting information and more than a little fear, I resisted. Plus, that evil scientist within me wanted to know what would happen if I went it alone and hormone therapy-free. I suffered for it, and those around me did also. But I can’t regret it, because a) regret is a stupid, stupid thing that has no purpose other than to self-inflict misery and b) when I caved and started some very mild HRT, the relief was so enormous that I often still wake up in the morning wanting to say something ridiculous like “I’m back, baby, yeah,” in my best Austin Powers accent.

You see, here’s the thing about menopause. You could look up nearly any symptom, physical or mental, and there’s always some awful, life-threatening thing it could indicate…and there’s menopause.

Seriously. Forgetful, unable to multi-task, terrified that it’s early onset dementia? Get yourself checked, but chances are it’s the alteration to your cognitive abilities caused by menopause. Looking at your boss (or sibling, or spouse) and imagining truly hideous ways in which they could die, motherfucker, die? You aren’t becoming Dexter, but you should probably get in an extra workout, or take a walk, or a day off. Aches and pains, rashes, sudden infections, cravings for weird food and anti-cravings for foods you’ve always loved, an indescribably erratic libido, tears at nothing and at everything…I could go on and on about my own experience.

But the worst thing, the most insidiously evil thing about menopause, is this: NOBODY FUCKING TALKS ABOUT IT. Talktalktalk all you want about women failing to support each other in various arenas, THIS is one of the worst communication breakdowns between women ever. I cannot rant about this enough.

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Before I came to my formerly addled senses, I emailed a friend one Sunday morning when my symptoms became too much. I kept hoping I was close to the end of the worst of it; but I had just had another bout with a cyst, and was ready to wave a white panty-liner in surrender. My friend bore the brunt of several years of accumulated undirected rage, for which I will love her forever. She understands that the only way I could possibly deal with this crap is through inappropriate and embarrassing humor, and she had the endless grace to find me funny. It was like a light on a very dark shore. Going through some notes and saved emails yesterday, I stumbled across it and boy, coupled with all the force-fed hearts and flowers crap of Valentine’s Day, it really made me simmer.

Here I am, two years ago, in all my hysteria:

“…So, here’s a bit of TMI. Being the bio-geek that I am, I decided I’d experience the whole menopause thing as if it were my very own lab experiment, no HRT, just me and my reproductive organs, bonding over this natural progression. I was a lucky girl all through my adult life: no real period problems, no cramps, no headaches, none of that, very light very brief cycles, and what the hell were all my female friends and my sisters bitching about, for godssake? Pffft.

Well, ha-ha, Mother Nature, you treacherous bitch, the joke’s on me, isn’t it? Because apparently what you don’t have to contend with in your prime is visited upon you all at once when the lovely state hilariously known as “the change” hits. “The change” — that absolutely cracks me up and makes me want to sob hysterically at the same time, because never in the history of the universe has anything been so understated.

First of all, why isn’t it “the changes?” What, too on the nose? Because I WISH it were only one change. There are too many to enumerate, and none that you want to hear about except the obvious one, which is the one where you change from merely kooky to apeshit homicidal maniac, and then to regretful apologetic clingon, and then to sex-crazed lunatic, and then to epically insecure anxiety-ridden freak, and then to dissociative lump, and then back to kooky and all over again, only in a different order. You know, just to keep your loved ones on their toes. If only my husband knew which state was coming, he could time his five-year surprise pilgrimage to Tibet accordingly, where he hopes to be jailed as a spy by the Chinese government, because that?

Would be a more stable environment.

And that doesn’t begin to cover the physical changes, which again I will spare you the graphic descriptions of, except to say that I will have had many a dialogue with most of my moving parts before it’s all said and done (and IS IT? EVER? REALLY!?). I’ve packed away most everything I own in the way of clothing in favor of various shapeless things made imminently wearable because I can sweat through them and it doesn’t show, and I’m all stocked up on sunglasses now that I’m Vampira, Creature of the Night, what with these blinding migraines. Plus, I have a physiological addition or two, like, say, an enormous cyst on my now useless ovary that painfully bursts and regenerates over and over and surgery will not guarantee its permanent demise and two out of three doctors advised against the trauma of surgery because if I can just get through menopause it will dry up once and for all. So I’ve become BFFs with the alien motherfucker masquerading as a benign cyst in hopes that I can get its number and phone the fuck home on its behalf so that its supercool spaceship will land in my backyard and an alien probe will commence that will extract it and take it back to its home planet where it will inflate and burst on someone else’s time. (PS: and why do GYNs invariably use the word dry when talking about menopause? Is it supposed to be encouraging, because empty husk of womanhood here.)

Anyway…I have finally thrown up my hands with this little how-much-can-one-marriage-take experiment and am starting hormone therapy. After which I will no doubt grow a third arm and a beard, thereby rendering me more or less permanently and epically insecure. But hey, a single state of emotional turmoil is kind of appealing when you’ve been living with so many.”

Crazy, right? No, no more so than I already was. But menopause has an odd way of taking things you may have tied up too closely with your identity, like your ability to be a mother, your sensuality, your passion for work and life, and tweak them. You will in all likelihood get them back in a better way. Motherhood never ends, it just looks different and sometimes a lot more equitable. Sensuality distilled is far more powerful than the training wheels we get in our wasteful youth. Passion, directed like a laser, is immeasurably more effective than the scattershot we tend to fire early on.

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My current and permanent frustration results from this: centuries of change have barely changed this part of our lives. It’s absurd.

I, unfortunately for you, certainly can’t keep my mouth shut about this during a weekend designated as romantic (or really, at all, ever, but onward). I’m willing to bet that some women are asking themselves this Valentine’s Day, after killing that last bladder/yeast infection, after searching for a “personal lubricant” that’s capable of lubricating the Sahara between their legs, after touching up those roots and applying that new $48 age-defying eye cream, after steeling themselves against anything ranging from mild discomfort to severe pain in order to have even a moment of the passionate sexual contact that they want so badly and miss so much, they’re asking themselves: is this all there is, for the rest of my life?

To them I say: Screw that stupid mythology still stubbornly clinging to Being a Real Woman. You know the one, that says women have grown, menstruated, given birth, and gone through menopause for eons and survived, long before there were ways to manage physical pain and mental anguish. The storyline that says you’re wrong to want help.

Let’s tell some real stories, for a change, to each other. Screw myths. Let’s be legends instead.