(In)Visibility

Even during the years when I was straight, married, actively engaged in childbearing and child-rearing, I never defined myself in terms of my reproductive capabilities. So I was surprised to find, when I started skipping periods, that the prospect of entering menopause depressed and frightened me. In part it was the horror stories I'd heard all my life. I'd have hot flashes. I'd have night sweats and mood swings; I'd become what the men in my ex-husband's family called a "Menopause Minnie" --shrill and irrational, sexless, unattractive. My cunt would dry up. I'd brow a beard. And I figured that the very existence of those worries was proff my fate was sealed, because such fears were themselves pretty irrational, and I could get pretty shrill, at least in my own mind, when I thought about what was in store for me.

To whatever degree these things are genetically linked, there was nothing to suggest I'd have a particularly difficult time. My mother hadn't had flashes. Nor was she any more moody or irrational than she had a right to be. So what if in later years she ocasionally tweeed a hair or three from her chin? That was hardly what you'd call a beard. What was I worried about?

All my life I've been blessed (knock wood!) with an efficient and trouble-free body that did what it was designed to do without my having to give it much thought or anything more than routine maintenance. I still have my tonsils and my appendix; my plumbing always hummed along as smoothly as the rest. I never had cramps. I got pregnant quite literally without trying, had an uneventful pregnancy and normal delivery. I nursed my son, to his satisfaction and my own.

Why should menopause be any different?

For years I didn't know. But I knew that it was. I'd wake in the night and lie staring out my window in that last half hour before my alarm went off, and I'd wonder what the hell my problem was.

Getting older? Memento mori? First you get bifocals, then you hit menopause, and then you get shrill and irrational and you grow a beard and quit having sex and then you get old and die? Something like that?

Something like that. Of course I had the bifocals already, and they made me queasy, and of course I wasn't thrilled with "get old and die." But I didn't look 49; I didn't feel 49. I had an active sex life and a chin that didn't need shaving. I was still trying to decide what to be when I grew up. Pushing fifty had its drawbacks, maybe, but was nothing to lose sleep over.

Ah, but that was pushingfifty. What would happen when the big five-o pushed back? Would this be when whatever it was that was going to dry up, did so -- dried up and blew away?

This wasn't something I could have asked my mother about, even assuming she hadn't died years earlier. I couldn't have asked her, or any of my aunts or female cousins either. To hear most of them tell (or not tell) it, none of them owned a vagina of any description, let alone one in which dryness might qualify as a change worth remarking. I figured I was scared and depressed at the prospect of the possible loss of my sexual appetite, or of reduced responsiveness, or of being seen as less attractive and desirable. I was scared and depressed at the prospect of stepping over the line separating bifocal-dependent but active middle age from that nice euphemism "older" (meaning, one-foot- in-the- grave-and- the-other- on-a- banana peel).

All of the above strike me now as perfectly reasonable fears, given the youth-loving, sex-fixated culture we live in. Lose your youth, lose your looks; lose your looks, lose your sexuality; lose your sexuality, disappear. Those messages are out there, ubiquitous, in the air we breathe, in our toothpase and blue jeans and cars, in whatever the marketplace offers. Smarter and more independent -minded women have believed them -- even, in some cases, as they swore that they had not.

It's taken me a while to understand that my worries weren't about sexuality and attractiveness, particularly, or even exactly about aging. They were about being a 50-something woman in a society that still judges females by criteria quite different from those it uses for males. And while said society might finally have evolved to the point that some women over 40 can play political and economic hardball with the guys, and a few retain their aura of erotic possibility into the 50s and well beyond, generally speaking, the "older" woman who isn't a highy paid, prominent professional is damn near invisible.

I didn't want to be invisible, any more than I wanted to be a joke, a Menopause Minnie.

I was afraid of the loss of color and energy of all kinds; the leaching away of wildness and juice and noise and smoke and the ability to travel light and the willingness to do so at a moment's notice. I was afraid not so much of growing old or dying as of growing timid and tame.

My first indication that, yes, the dread "it" was finally happening came on a 10-day backpacking trip. I'd figured my perido would start before I got home, and brought along what should have been a generous supply of tampons. Sure enough, three days out, it started. No problem. Two days passed, then three; no problem except the bleeding seemed heavier than usual. Four days, then five, and a heavy, clotted flow with no sign of abating. I was A) out of tampons, and B) beginning to panic because my periods never lasted more than four days, but this one seemed to have settled in for the duration. And there I was, in the northern Pennsylvania wilds, wadding up toilet paper from my quickly dwindling supply, rinsing my underpants five or six times a day, feeling weak and sick and wondering if I had cancer, growing surer by the hour that I did, and if not cancer something else, nearly as dire. I couldn't bring myself to face the fact that at my age, while I might actually have some pathological condition, there was a likelier explanation for wht turned out to be a two-week-long near hemorrhage.

My mother's menopause was brought on artificially, by radiation treatment for persistent hemorrhaging that was possibly menopause related (she was in her mid-40s), exacerbated by stress. My father was dying of leukemia, and she really had no one to turn to. This was in the early fifties. No support groups; the church said accept the will of God. Psychotherapy was for crazy people, and cathartic shows of emotion were for the weak, for those who were "not our kind." In our family, whtever your problem was, you toughedit out and chalked up cosmic brownie points, redeemable in heaven. No wonder Mom's system rebelled.

I've been thinking of my mother a lot recently. She comes into my mind at unexpected times, bearing unexpected gifts, admontions, accusations. Just as I was drafting this piece, for example, I recalled an incident that had lain dormant for 40 years.

I remember a train, going somewhere, probably from Alexandria to Roanoke, where we had kin, or Richmond, where my brother was in school. My father was still alive, but doesn't figure in this memory, which is graphic and intense and connected to no context except the train. I am maybe nine. I accompany my mother to the restroom, which is a typical train restroom, tiny and cramped. Nevertheless, we both go in. I pee and then my mother does, or in the memory I think that's what she's doing, balancing carefully a few inches above the seat. But maybe not. The flow keeps on and keeps on coming, and it doesn't smell like urine, exactly. It smells familiar, but not like anything I can name. It keeps on, keeps on, while I pretend not to watch, pretend not to be fascinated, and a little bit splashes on the toilet seat and it's not pee at all, but blood. My mother changes her Kotex; she says something wry, like "what a nuisance" (as strong a statement as she was likely to allow herself), then wrings out and rolls up the soaked pad and wraps it in paper toweling, which turns a sudden shocking red. "What a nuisance." She washes her gory hands. Her face is pale and sweating. We return to our seats without another word.

Looking back, it's hard for me to believe that this happened; hard to believe that my mother, squeamish as she was about most bodily functions, would take me with her into the cramped and intimate space of a train while she changed her sanitary pad at all, let alone when things were as out out of whack as they obviously were. I ask myself if it's possible I dreamed this, or made it up. I do make things up, it's true. But not this time.

I thought, that day in the train, that my mother was dying; that she would bleed to death and it would be my fault because I did nothing to help her. But she didn't ask for my help, or tell me what she needed. I was supposed to know what she needed, and how to give it to her. Alone in the Pennsylvania night, rinsing and wringing out the T-shirt I used when the last of my toilet paper was gone, I might have remembered that incident and seen some connection, but I did not. I rinsed and wrung out my soaked shirt and hoped I wasn't dying, hoped that whatever I had was something western medicine could cure.

It's been two years now since . . .what do we call it, Punto Final? The Last Hurrah? Plenty of time for whatever endocrine-driven uuproar was going to make its dry, hot, hairy presence known to do so. Nothing. Okay, an occasional, shall we say, warmflash. Better than ever sex, boundless energy and high spirits. Should I feel left out? I don't.

What I feel is a mix of relief and amazement, frustration and anger. Relief because I have been spared most of the discomfort experienced by some. Amazement bordering on awe when I step back from myself and acknowledge the path our bodies follow through our lifetimes. But I'm frustrated because, despite my history of rollicking good health, I'm statistically at high risk for both breast cancer and osteoporosis-- and the hormone therapy indicated for one is contraindicated for the other. It makes me angry that no one can give me advice that feels like anything other than guesswork. Estrogen alone? Estrogen and progesterone? Herbal remedies? Herbal and hormone? No interventionn? Snake oil? Good thoughts? It's a crapshoot; the studies contradict each other and doctors disagree.

Menopause and related conditions, including breast and uterine cancer and osteoporosis, have recently emerged as hot topics. Books. Talk shows. Major articles in major magazines. Good, I say. It's about time. But I worry that interest will quicly peak and just as quickly wane. I worry that our national attention span has already been stretched thin over this topic. I'm afraid that tomorrow I'll woke up to an All New! Improved! Hot! Sexy! Condition/ Pathology/Ethicak Issue du Jour, and the compelling concerns of women my age will be out there on the remainder stack with anorexia, incest and surrogate moms and the rest of yesterday's news. Out of sight and out of mind.

Invisible, in other words. I don't want that to happen. Don't plan on letting it happen. Not to me, and not to other women my age either, if I can help it. I'm opting for visibility: We are here. Visibility: We have lives-comples and interesting lives. Visibility: We are women. This has not changed.

Here is a story to end with.

Once upon a time there were two women. One was 50, one was 55 when they met and fell in love. Anyone who noticed might have told them they were too old to be that passionate --it was embarrassing to think about, even for them. All that necking in the car! Like kids! Phonecalls at midnight and five a.m. The little poems and notes and pictures shoved under office doors (I forgot to mention that they worked in the same building) at great risk of discovery,which was half the fun, of course. But no one noticed. They were too old to be interesting.

Once in a while the women went dancing. They went dancing at straight clubs! And because they were old, no one paid much attention. In a way that was nice. Before they were living together, when they were just having an affair, it was very nice. Protective coloration. They could walk arm in arm on the street and it was just two older women walking; two women whose combined ages, as they liked to remind each other, added up to more than a hundred years. No one looked twice at them. They could hold hands as they strolled through the park. Two old broads, who cared? Once or twice, feeling pretty bold, they even kissed in public. On the lips! In broad daylight! People smiled at them: such good friends.

After a while, though, after they were living together, still passionate, still leaving each other silly little romantic surprises under the office door but feeling like a couple and wanting people to recognize that about them -- after a while it began to royally piss them off that people dismissed them that way.

How dare they? the women asked each other. How dare they deny us the very essence of what we feel? How dare they look at us and see just friends, roommates, not lovers; how dare they assume we don't doit? Two older women, one quite gray, getting it on. We do!

Unthinkable!

They tried to think what to do. And it seemed to them that their lives were filled with color and energy of all kinds. They felt wild and, yes, juicy, and they made all kinds of noise. They could be out the door and on the road on ten minutes' notice, on their way to adventure. It was hard to believe that no one noticed; no one so much as blinked. Shouldn't the whole world be cheering them on?

First they had to get the world's attention, but this had been their problem all along. Clearly, they were going to have to go for the outrageous, though outrageous really wasn't their style. What to do, what to do? They didn't quite have the nerve to strip naked and make love on the lawn in front of City Hall at high noon, though the idea had its appeal. Something that crazy, that noisy and wild. They thought and thought, eyeing the City Hall lawn with its sparkling fountain and its pigeons and noontime strollers. Lots of noontime strollers. "Maybe if we were younger," one of the women began.

"Maybe when we're older," said the other.

They looked at each other and laughed.