Becoming A Menopause Goddess (eBook)

CHAPTER ONE

The Beginning of Our Travels Together

It very likely started when we hit forty and realized that gravity was not our friend.  The End of the World as We Knew it.  Yet, all in all for a few short years, we handled the changes in our bodies reasonably well.  We exercised, ate healthy foods, and congratulated ourselves on how gracefully we were aging.  And then, the hormonal shitstorm hit the fan.  The changes (emphasis on plural) were streaking at us faster than meteors in the Perseid shower.  Emotional, physical, mental.  You name it - nothing was left unscathed.   We were smack dab in the middle of The Big “M”.  Menopause.  The Change.

No one prepared us for THIS!  The magnitude, the intensity, and the sheer number of changes overwhelmed us.  So Theresa and I did what all good women friends do.  We shared our freakouts, panics, sorrows, and epiphanies with one another.  We bitched, whined, and complained, and yes celebrated, on a fairly regular basis.  And we wondered.  We wondered what exactly the Big M would result in.  What were we actually changing into?  Werebeasts?  Psycho crazy ladies?  Space aliens?

Then one day we were deep into a long distance discussion of these changes (and still finding some humor in them). I was lamenting that all through high school I’d wanted to be voluptuous and womanly, instead of a Twiggy-esque stick figure female, and now finally through the magic of perimenopause and age, I found myself at least looking like a goddess.  Unfortunately, that goddess was Venus of Willendorf.  “Venus of Who?” asked Theresa.  “I learned about her in an art history class,” I told her.  “She’s this ancient stone goddess from Crete or somewhere.  She has a huge bulbous head atop a zaftig torso dominated by these ginormous pendulous breasts.”

After we finished laughing together, Theresa offered the possibility that we really are becoming goddesses.  Maybe The Big M is morphing us into Venuses of a sort.  True, we menopausal women are not the Venus of Willendorf; a symbol of fertility, the fecund female.  Nor are we Botticelli’s young Venus rising lustrous and innocent from the half shell.  No, our mature goddess is a real woman’s goddess, a goddess for the 21st century.  More than a figure of fertility, more than a benevolent goddess, more than youth and outward beauty, she is a woman.  A woman at the crossroads of midlife.  With all the real-life thoughts, feelings, wonderings and wisdom that the Venuses of old sure never got to voice. 

It seemed, by God, time to find out just who she might be and to celebrate her coming into being.

Theresa and I decided that this celebration required expanding our circle of Venuses, (Venii, Venici?)  to get input and insight dealing with and exploring our “new” lives.  Looking forward and back and just being in the present moment, right here, right now.  We invited women friends of all persuasions, backgrounds, occupations, and locales to join us for a slumber party with a focus.  We were going to share, learn, commiserate, and vision.  We were going to help one another find our way through the changes and learn who we might become for the next 50 odd years. And of course, we promised  lots of chocolate and wine.

Who is this new Venus that we may be on the brink of becoming?  It’s much easier to understand who she is not.  Venus is not the archetypal goddess we usually envision in the full season of procreation, fruitfulness, and sexuality.  She's a goddess, if not past her prime, at least past her summer.  Venuse is entering the autumn of her life and her leaves are turning.  Venus is leaving fertility - and basically the world as she has known it -  behind.  And she has no map to guide her.

She’s tall, short, rounded, thin, blonde, brunette, quiet, loud, perky, morose, single, married, partnered, in-between. She’s a CEO, a nurse practitioner, an artist, a real estate agent, a homemaker, a golf pro.  She’s blue collared, white collared, and Izod golf shirt collared. She’s a Democrat, a Republican, Independent, apolitical.  She's all of us; all of us mid-life women coming to grips with the myriad changes inflicted upon us by this time of life.

Including but not limited to “The Big M.”  The Change.  Menopause.

We do feel like changelings or werewomen.  Our bodies are completely unfamiliar to us during this involuntary change where it seems our very molecules are being reconstituted. 

And if we don't want to change?  Before us lies the opportunity to reinvent ourselves, but what if we don't want to?  What if we like things the way they are?

Sorry - Mom Nature doesn't work that way.

Which brings us to our present time and place - unwilling travelers being forced down a road well trod, but poorly documented.  We are embarking on a path taken for hundreds of years, yet for all we know about what lies ahead, it might as well be a maiden voyage.

Our mothers, would-be-cartographers for this unmapped journey - are less help than we hoped they would be.  Many of them had their uteruses (uteri?) removed before "the Change" naturally came upon them.  Dutifully ingesting their hormones, many of them appeared not to chronicle this passage. In keeping with the times, they did not talk about the changes that they did experience and may have traveled a solitary path into the unknown.  (Gail Sheehy in her book The New Passages calls this "the Silent Generation."  But I'd also call them the unexamined generation.)  Many simply ignored the changes - the unexamined life preferable to peering inside too deeply, stirring up God knows what feelings, urges, etc.

We tried reading articles and books on our own.  Some of the information was helpful; some contradictory, much was overwhelming.  Most of it was like reading textbooks - dry and complicated and factual.  Some of it was overly upbeat and filled with new-agey advice about this wondrous transition to the glorious creature that we should be thrilled to become.  I got images of Glinda, the good witch of the north, waving her wand and gliding in yards of bouffant pink tulle.  Never cranky, always smiling, and certainly not sweating like a pig.  Small wonder most of us were unable to relate to this fantasy scenario.  We wanted to celebrate this change but we wanted it grounded in reality.  

Modern women of the 21st century, we surfed the net hoping for guidance.  Again, we found a dizzying array of info and confusing bits of divergent data.  We “learned” that menopause was a mere hormonal blip that most women would hardly notice.  On other websites, we “discovered” the opposite:  that the Change was likely one of the biggest events in a woman’s life, right up there with marriage and childbirth.  Bioidenticals, HRT (Hormone Replacement Therapy), soy isoflavones, black cohosh, wild yams, maca root, testosterone patches, and a host of other unfamiliar remedies peppered the websites.  Confronted by a veritable smorgasbord of “fixes”, we found ourselves paralyzed by the sheer number of choices available.  While we trusted our health care professionals, we did not want to abdicate responsibility for our own welfare.  Yet the more we researched and read, the more confounded and befuddled we were.

It soon became clear that we required much more than information.  We were in desperate need of wisdom, that sage advice that can only come out of personal experience.  We were going through BIG STUFF and we needed  answers.  

So we turned to one another - our fellow Venuses - for answers and questions to illuminate our journey.  We founded a community of like-afflicted women eager to understand, to commiserate, and most important, to share.

Perhaps the most critical lesson we learned can be encapsulated thus:  We need not travel alone.  Undertaking this expedition as a solitary traveler can be hazardous in the extreme.  The path is strewn with huge boulders of self-doubt, longing, anxiety, and depression.  Alone, these obstacles can seem insurmountable.  Together, we belay and boost one another with laughter, tears, and a collective knowledge that helps us up and over the hurdles.  The synergy created through our individual sharings becomes wisdom before our very eyes.

A Venus Group Is Formed

Our group of goddesses came together in an organic fashion.  Theresa and I invited our closest friends, who asked some of their friends and acquaintances.  We all trusted (read hoped and prayed) that we would gel into an interesting “work group”.  No single one of us knew everyone in the group.  We were going to get acquainted, share openly and honestly with one another, and try to blaze a trail together all in the space of a weekend!  It was a tall order indeed.  But hey, we were women!  We were used to doing the impossible - at work, at home, even on vacation. ...