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.