VALERIE SCHULTZ: Strange, blessed detachment of menopause
| Monday, Nov 07 2011 10:43 AM
Last Updated Monday, Nov 07 2011 10:45 AM
Motherhood is the most rewarding, most demanding role a woman can play. You have to give more of yourself than you have ever given to anybody, including your spouse. The task of infancy, of course, is constant vigilance, and the teen years are a source of constant worry. The middle years of childhood are a time of parental self-doubt, as you weigh the pros and cons of the thousand decisions you make every day. Being a mother is overwhelming, impossible and somehow wonderful.
Then the kids grow up. They want to leave the nest. You resist, you mourn, but you acquiesce. No longer children, they become these separate people you recognize as adults.
The day-to-day fretting dissipates once they live away from home. Rather than the nightly worry about your kid doing her homework, you assume that your adult child is paying her bills on time. Rather than the weekday concern about her actually eating the healthful school lunch you packed, you vaguely hope that she is well nourished. Gradually, I find that I have less of a personal stake in how my daughters conduct themselves.
I still love them, want the best for them, and would defend them against any threat. But they are no longer a reflection on my parenting skills. I sometimes wonder: Did she get her teeth cleaned? Did she register the car? Did she write her grandmother a thank-you note? And then I think: Hmm. Not my problem.
As you adjust to this healthy detachment, life suddenly tilts and deposits you like an errant pinball into menopause. And people who love you start treating you like you are a little crazy. My cycles seem to be, finally, over. I've waited a long time, longer than many women, to reach the mountaintop of menopause successfully. I seem to have made it. I'm here. I like the view. Then the altitude makes me dizzy, and I feel a little sick. I'm here? I'm done climbing? Is it really all downhill now?
On the seesaw of menopause, one minute I'm confident and wise, and the next I am an ancient, ridiculous adolescent. Take the other day: "You've reached an age where you know a thing or two," says the relaxed guy's voice on the TV commercial during a football game. I nod in agreement -- yes, I have! I do know a thing or two! -- until I realize it's a commercial for Viagra. And I berate myself for being stupid and pathetic.
I'll admit that I'm a little crazy, because I've started drinking coffee. I don't drink coffee. But insanity comes gently: One morning, after my daughter brews a pot and its scent floats from the kitchen, I pour a cup, sweeten it, add some cream, and drink it. No idea why.
It's not bad.
"You're drinking coffee?" my daughter asks.
"You're drinking coffee?" my husband asks.
I ask my slightly unbalanced self, why not? Can't one develop a fondness for something previously disliked? Why shouldn't I become an elegant, cosmopolitan coffee drinker? Are they saying I can't pull it off?
They back away slowly.
Fortunately, the October 2011 issue of The Atlantic arrives just in time for me to realize that I am not the kind of crazy that requires lock-up. An article advertised on the cover as "The Madness of Menopause" (and actually titled on the inside as "The B*tch is Back"), by Sandra Tsing Loh, discusses the phenomenon known as menopause. Since, as she notes, we boomer women between the ages of 44 and 65 are the largest demographic group in the United States, and since, as I note, we obsess on every stage we go through, menopause can no longer be ignored. The personal salvation I gleaned from this humorous yet encompassing look at The Change is that we women, rather than losing our minds as we approach the latter part of life, are actually crazy while we are in the throes of conceiving, bearing and raising children, or in our prime.
The motherly merry-go-round of reproductive hormones prompts us to be unselfish, multi-tasking, caring, super-thoughtful overachievers on whose madness the rest of the family relies. Then menopause flattens us by transforming us back into regular people, whose lives don't get commandeered by the urge to nurture everyone and everything. We are suddenly just like everybody else, which is not necessarily welcome news to our loved ones, who miss our selfless efficiency and reliable cheer. "The real wisdom of menopause," concludes Loh, "may be in questioning how fun or even sane this chore wheel called modern life actually is."
So there is a perfectly sound, physiological reason why I don't really care if a well-balanced dinner gets cooked in my house every evening. Furthermore, my suspicion that my husband is just as good a parent as I am at guiding our grown daughters through the occasional crisis is absolutely true. Lately, I have even witnessed my daughters mothering each other and doing a lovely job. And it's fine by me.
Rather than going crazy, I am just becoming a less intense version of myself. I hope my loved ones can handle it.
These are the opinions of Valerie Schultz and not necessarily The Californian's.
