There are things no one told me about perimenopause, important things, things I would have liked to know about well ahead of their arrival. I put too much stock in my understanding of this liminal state based on my understanding of the prefix peri – I thought this would be the time around, near, close to menopause, it would be a short hallway to traverse, during which I’d get a few hot flashes and the need to buy a big new bottle of personal lube and fewer tampons, my periods would fade away and one day, voila, menopause! And there I’d be, in the Crone third of my life.
Now that I’ve gone through that doorway, I see the meaning of peri is also surrounding, just like the dictionary says. Perimenopause, in my body at least, has all the subtlety and softness of adolescence, which is to say it’s like a hammer or a shovel or some other implement of blunt force trauma. I assume the fine pruning shear changes come later, once I’ve survived this first round of rounds. Hot flashes aren’t cozy, like blushing, or hard-work-pleasant, like hiking uphill in the sun, toward a scenic viewpoint; I become my own crucible, consuming my old self with no idea of just what is going to survive the sun’s surface heat centered in every cell of my being. It’s the white flash heat of a nuclear explosion, unleashed without a call from the red phone, and gone just as quickly. And this whole thing is so much more than hot flashes. It’s the sudden inability to remember words that have been faithful expressive companions forever, the losing of car keys and purse, and tasks from my mental list. It’s the anger at myself because I couldn’t figure out how to enjoy as many one night stands as possible before I lost any sex appeal I ever had. It’s the anger I feel at the every book and article and expert who claims as truth the algorithm calories consumed < calories expended = weight loss. Because I have learned through experience, tracked and documented in an app that threatens to entice me into an eating disorder, that I can starve myself and walk 3 miles a day on my treadmill, set to a speed and grade that puts me in the promised “fat burn zone” and still my body will gain, gain, gain. It is a kind of magic, my ability to turn a shred of cabbage, a long sweaty walk, and bad thoughts into more me.
For a while, I could pretend the weight gain was temporary, I could hide the full extent of it by focusing every second on sucking my belly in while in public, by wearing the “right” clothes. Now there is no denying reality: I am becoming a toad, and this change feels like a spell cast without a reversal option. Dessicated with a witchy wart on my chin, my center of gravity has moved to my wide, simultaneously fat and wrinkled, pale toad belly. It’s not the exciting belly of pregnancy or the luscious fat belly of a goddess, when I look at myself, all I can see is a toad. One toad in particular, the one I saw in a nature documentary, careening across the forest floor with stunning clumsy crashes into tree roots and over logs.
I am a little bit down on myself right now.
I know this. I recognize the cruelty of these negative things coming out of dormant, patriarchy-infected files in my brain, things I’ve internalized, things I never think about other people’s bodies. This hatred is special, reserved just for me. I see women who have slept with the same men I’ve slept with, and I think, “they must wonder how I ever managed to get him into bed with me.” I see men I’ve slept with and I think, “he must be feeling so lucky that we never got together/stayed together because look what he’d be stuck with now.” I force myself to get dressed and leave the house each morning by refusing to examine each hateful barb my brain launches at the rest of me, telling me how hideous I am, how embarrassed I should be, how ugly. I wrap myself in the largest towel I own before I step out of the shower because the sight of my naked body makes me cry. And then I cry more after I remind myself that, if I’m lucky enough to live another 10-20-30 years, I’ll remember this form of my body longingly and wonder what the hell my problem was. I cry because I’m so angry at the way I’ve internalized this misogyny and how I can see its true face intellectually and yet not alter the fact that my gut believes it all.
Given all the real and grave problems facing us today – climate change, the pendulum swing back to authoritarian and fascist regimes, toxic masculinity and white supremacy ascendant, etc – my choice to write about this petty wrestling match I’m locked into with my body and perimenopause feels like complicity in these evils. I know I should be putting my energy into healing and fixing and building the world my children, all of our children, need and deserve. And of course my feelings about this become stress hormones that tell my body “bad times ahead, plump up now for the famine!” and I move that much further into my toadself.
One of the advantages perimenopause has over adolescence is that I do know myself well now, and thanks to years of therapy and mindfulness and journaling and cultivating introspection and assessment of self, I have a decent grasp on how all of this connects back to the same old deficits and unhelpful patterns I’ve been working on since childhood. I know how to pull myself through what feels like base betrayal, like the mutiny of my meat suit. I know how to wring meaning from experience, even when I don’t like it.
For now, I’m comforting myself with one memory, I’m using it as the cornerstone in the narrative architecture I’m constructing, brick by brick, stick by stick, to shelter whatever arises from the ashes of this perimenopausal phoenix fire.
Two summers ago, in the early days of this transformation, I went with my daughters to our favorite swimming beach. It’s an inlet of the Salish Sea, where there’s shelter from wind but the water is still cold, year-round. I’ve been swimming in the water around this island my whole life now, and it has always been bracing, fine so long as I stay in motion but not the sort of water one enjoys in a tropical vacation way. Until this day, when I realized that, for the first time, there was no chill at all in my body. None. I had grown my own insulation, enough that the water was truly pleasant, even in the deep away from shore. And my new padding gave me buoyancy, enough that I could float without effort, looking up at our blue sky, completely at ease. There are many things I’m struggling to accept about myself, and I cannot honestly say that I love anything about how I look. But I loved how I felt that day, I loved the way the sky and shore looked from the sea, and I loved being alive and being myself just then.
If I am to be a toad, I will at least be a strong toad, hell bent on enjoying my life despite my body’s changes and my brain’s self-sabotage campaign. There is so much beauty to appreciate and horror to confront so long as I just keep my gaze in the right direction. And now I’m big enough to stay planted where I set myself, to mean it when I sing, “I shall not be moved.”
The Witch of Gazzam Pond 