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.