Bride of Frankenstein

Years ago, and well into my seventh month of pregnancy in New York City, it occurred to me one day that, as I would be unable to run from a fast predator, I was lucky not to run into an urban panther. These weekly blogs will consider women's lives from the perspective of one who is now older.

Americans, I think, are presented with a stingy, unimaginative view of women’s beauty. Despite what is real in our experience, we have a conventional wisdom of accepted beauty that applies to very few women. You’d have thought that the cliche of Barbie doll would have died of old age by now; instead it’s been resuscitated after surgical augmentation.

The current manifestations of the ideal woman are frightening:  women so skinny their vertebrae form a prominent profile and their breastbones protrude; hipless stick figures with out-of-proportion breasts glued on. What is called beautiful now is the image seen by a camera, not the human eye.

Faces injected with toxin and made into masks, shiny and unable to move; mouths stretched by face lifts, gashes with fat implanted to form strangely plumped lips. From my perspective of years, this ideal is clearly ugly, even hideous. But what about the young girls and women, those only beginning to experience life? How do they fare under this burden of monstrosity posed as beauty?

It seems the only sin worse than being a woman with an unaltered body is being an aging woman. It is becoming too difficult to watch what happens to our actresses as they grow older. Once curvy with youth, they become stringy and strained as they stay thin for the camera. And one after another, they emerge from surgical “tune-ups,” looking stunned, their once-beautiful faces strangely changed, and occasionally quite damaged.

The situation is beyond declaring the emperor has no clothes; we need to say that the empress is being deformed. She was not born that way, but was made so by insufficient nutrition, liposuction, face lifts, breast implants. What is so wrong with a woman’s body that it must be obliterated in this way?

Night watch

Years ago, and well into my seventh month of pregnancy in New York City, it occurred to me one day that, as I would be unable to run from a fast predator, I was lucky not to run into an urban panther. These weekly blogs will consider women's lives from the perspective of one who is now older.

Perimenopause, part two:

My sleep was disturbed. At times it was as if some hand had shaken me awake, so insistent was the pull from sleep. I left my bed and walked through the rooms, answering a call too faint to make out. Fully awake, I sat and read -- not fiction that could roil my emotions, but books about evolution or aboriginal songlines -- accumulations of facts that murmured me back to sleep. 

I used this night time, too, to read about menopause, that phenomenon so simplistically named. It was my summons, this changing of my hormones, this changing of my life. I felt it as a passage, a ritual ordeal, like entering a crevasse in the earth and walking in the netherworld for a time. Some women would re-emerge fiercer, others disappointed, or shaken, or holy. None would be unchanged.

When I walked through my darkened house, I was amazed at how little light my eyes needed to build an accurate map of the space around me. In the kitchen, with the oven behind me, I was surprised to see my shadow cast on the wall by the light of the digital clock -- three yellow numbers suddenly suns enough to outline my head on the pantry door.

All my senses seemed sharper in the gray of night, reminding me of my youth. I had been blessed with quick and sensitive senses; all five processed the world’s information for me with speed and accuracy. I’d always been grateful for it, yet also took it for granted. Now, it seemed the world sent too much data -- all of it loud and insistent -- and my senses were becoming dulled under the assault. I was reassured to find, in the middle of the night, that sight and hearing were still smooth, swift, and sensitive, and that my touch identified what and where as surely as ever.

Perhaps the changes of aging prepared one better for the dark. Perhaps women, menopausal and past, with their disrupted sleep, were natural sentries, nocturnal protectors, able to concentrate aging eyes in the dark, and to focus ears that relaxed to keenness in the silence of the night.

Aunt Clara

Years ago, and well into my seventh month of pregnancy in New York City, it occurred to me one day that, as I would be unable to run from a fast predator, I was lucky not to run into an urban panther. These weekly blogs will consider women's lives from the perspective of one who is now older.

I spent some years in perimenopause; I used to joke that I was wandering there and couldn’t find my way out. Here’s a snapshot:

I had the greatest difficult with the changes in my body. Nothing was as it had been; everything was thicker, rounder, heavier. I had long been accustomed to a sleek form and now possessed a fullness quite different from any body I’d every been -- little girl, developing teen, nursing mother. Even my pregnant self had been different, not this sheer weight of breasts and belly. Like Gregor Samsa, I woke up one day -- and found myself the Venus of Willendorf.

My brain, too, felt different -- fuzzier, more cluttered. It’s not that the thinking, analyzing, decision-making processes were slower; indeed, they seemed more incisive, faster, cleaner. It was the retrieval system changing, as if it got distracted in its brain search and then, from panic or fatigue, served up the nearest datum -- giving me “jar” when I’d wanted the word “saw” or reversing the order of words while I spoke, as if German grammar rules were playing hide-and-seek in the folds of my cerebellum, popping up like prairie dogs when I was chatting to the bank teller, causing me to choke and stall on the most banal phrases.

“I think so too” became “So too think I,” at which point I had no choice but to correct myself or fall silent. I wonder about mime, or American Sign Language, or representational dance forms; did non-speaking menopausal women lose the hand signal, confuse the gesture? I think not; it is speaking itself, vocally finding and ordering words, that was now so fraught with uncertainty.

I was Aunt Clara, clutching my doorknob-filled carpet bag, sputtering explanations for my new self. I had relied on my language abilities all my life, took pride in being well spoken, turned wit into a tool for inclusion, changed glibness into spoken acuity. But suddenly, language, the civilizer and equalizer, had become a game of Russian roulette.

Our bodies, our selves

Years ago, and well into my seventh month of pregnancy in New York City, it occurred to me one day that, as I would be unable to run from a fast predator, I was lucky not to run into an urban panther. These weekly blogs will consider women's lives from the perspective of one who is now older.

We carry our eggs before we are out of our mother’s womb. Girl children become something else when menstruation begins. Women continue this monthly fertility ritual, interrupted only by pregnancy -- which epitomizes how vastly we can physically change. But menopause brings it all to a halt; it wasn’t called “THE change” for no reason. 

Sometimes this overhauling of the cycle takes months, sometimes years. My body took an extended time to close up the fertility shop. During those years, I began to observe myself constantly, alert to changes, taking measure of mood, looking for signals. 

What disturbed me at first was the unraveling of pattern in a body whose rhythms I long had known. Every month I had recognized the awareness of my beauty that meant ovulation; two weeks later, feelings of utter ugliness and raw-edged nerves signaled the imminence of menstrual flow. I was so familiar with the aspects of my body’s cycle, it was ingrained. I ate and read and dressed accordingly, in unconscious, not self-conscious, reflection of where I was in my cycle.

I never could understand those girls in high school who called the incipient ability to bear a child “the curse,” though at least they were straightforward in their self-prejudice. Those girls who used euphemisms like “my friend” troubled me more; what had forced them to live with such dishonesty?

Neither curse nor friend, it’s a small monthly miracle. Every thirty-four days my body, with no attention from my conscious self or will, made a place to nourish and cradle a cluster of mingled DNA (another miracle) that would become a baby. How do our bodies know exactly what is needed and how to do it, performing all the necessary functions, omitting no details? This brilliance of our biological bodies, constantly going about the agenda of potential, is thrilling. 

It seems a privilege. I’ve made jokes about redoing my uterine walls and have had my share of cramps and floods, but, truth be told, I felt honored to be entrusted with such important work, and grateful that my strong body did it so well. 

I think the conventional wisdom of menstruation as a burden is a sham, was brought to us by the same vandals who reduced the magnificent ability to bear a child to craving pickles and ice cream. In the 1950s and 1960s, maternity clothes were all tiny pleats, bows, Peter Pan collars -- as if, instead of having a baby, a pregnant woman was a baby. The power was drained away.

But the power is in us. Living this cycle of monthly participation in creation, as women do, makes those philosophical ponderings on the separation of mind and body unbelievably ridiculous. No one who has gotten her period on the day of the prom, or who has felt cramping pain that melted her knees, has any questions about whether the mind and body are separate. Such intellectual posings are a waste of time; they are so often set up as conflicting poles -- either/or -- and the body/mind setup is all of a piece.

We need all our power to handle the last shift; menopause rattles everything we know about ourselves. I lived my rhythms instinctively; they had been my standard for thirty-five years. Then it began to change, was different every month, like a butterfly that repeatedly alights but, for reasons indiscernible, each time rises into the air again. 

The entire process of being a female human is remarkable. We undergo change as an integral part of who we bodily are. And what of our spirit, our heart, our soul, our inner light? I think the changes we live also deepen our spirit but, unlike our bodily changes, soul change is also a conscious effort. 

Be alert, my soul.