Hormones, Magical Hormones

Last week my partner Nancy and I took a much needed vacation to Mexico. We’ve both travelled to Mexico multiple times but this time we found a magical beach, more beautiful than any either of had ever seen. It was quiet, secluded, clean, and full of whales! We stayed in a beach tent on the Pacific Coast of the Baja Peninsula. We read books, drank margaritas, took walks, and watched whales migrate south. 

Breakfast was included in our stay so we wandered inland to the main facilities in the mornings to eat huevos rancheros and sopes. One morning we sat next to two young couples. At one table was a man and woman in their mid-thirties. The woman was heavily pregnant and very chatty. Just beyond their table sat another man and woman, about the same age. 

As they talked, the non-pregnant couple shared that they had a one-year-old back at home. The women talked and talked about their pregnancies, the one who was one year into motherhood talked about how she managed work and mothering. The still pregnant one talked about her worries and her plans for balancing her new mommy responsibilities. The “dads” sat quietly, proudly, admiring their fertile, capable vessels, piping in periodically but mostly encouraging their wives to talk.

I’ve been pregnant and I am a mother. Pregnancy and motherhood are my favorite life experiences, bar none. But I just turned fifty-four and, like clockwork, I’ve been hit hard with raging night sweats and daily hot flashes. My belly is round (not from a baby in there) and I’m irritable. Sitting there listening to those youngins basking in the glow of their fertility was really bugging me!

My partner Nancy has already been through the hormonal whiplash that I’m going through now and she’s been a patient, loving and helpful advisor with me and my newish symptoms. As we sat at breakfast I found myself distracted, half paying attention to my conversation with her while also trying to eavesdrop on the conversation of the new parents.

Later that night as Nancy I sat outside on our beach chairs looking at the stars that blanketed the sky on the most beautiful beach we’ve ever been, I said, “Can you imagine talking about menopause with men the way those women were talking about pregnancy?”

“Never,” she said, shaking her head without taking her eyes off the stars.

Menstruation, pregnancy, and menopause are the three profound and significant biological life events women experience, but pregnancy is the only one that seems to warrant any co-ed conversation. Why is that?

When girls get their periods they somehow know to keep it a secret, never letting their male peers know about the equipment and supplies they need to use or the symptoms they experience. From the time menstruation starts, girls and women are mocked for their mood and body changes. As if that isn’t hassle enough, girls must also manage being sexualized in response to their hormonally changing bodies.

If there is any kind of male-female mealtime chat about menstruation, it is not in a reverential way to proclaim how amazing it is that these female bodies are now capable of reproduction but rather to discuss how inconvenient and unpleasant the period process is. Girls learn early, in middle school and sometimes earlier, that period talk in the presence of boys will only lead to humiliation.

Conversations about menopause are equally unwelcome around co-ed dinner tables. Menopause happens to women, so why subject the fellas to this nuisance talk. Even the most open-minded/open-hearted men steer clear of menopause chat. Men (and sadly women too) are socialized to believe that women in menopause are hysterical. Jokes are made that women will lose control and attack for no reason when they enter the dreaded menopause. While young women are hyper-sexualized when the start to menstruate, older women are desexualized once they reach menopause.

Pregnancy is the one phase of a woman’s life where the male species shows interest and respect. It’s no mystery why. Pregnancy involves men. Those two nice young new fathers at the breakfast table in Mexico nodded lovingly, enthusiastically, appreciatively as their fertile females waxed on about the changes in their bodies and their lives pre- and postpartum. There was no mocking, no teasing, no dismissing their pregnancy experience because they were part of the equation.

It’s wonderful that men want to be involved in the pregnancy stage of a woman’s life, but to really understand women, men must understand the other significant hormonal stages that women go through as well. 

Menstruation and menopause affect women and so they affect men. To dismiss or disregard these stages that bookend the pregnancy period is a disservice to women and men alike. For women, this shadow culture of menstruation and menopause breeds internalized shame. Women hide their symptoms for fear of being mocked or humiliated. 

For men, they are denied the opportunity to really understand the profound workings and power of the female anatomy. In turning a blind eye to the very hormones that make pregnancy possible, they are missing opportunities to truly know and understand the women in their lives. 

As the mother of a girl, for obvious reasons, I’ve always talked to my daughter told about menstruation and pregnancy. Boys need to learn about these things as well. I’ve encouraged my friends with boys to talk to their sons about what it means to get a period and of course how to control for unwanted pregnancy. I’ve talked to my daughter a little bit about menopause, but I could do better. And I’m guessing that in most families, menopause does not come up in parental conversations with sons. 

Sitting in my pot-bellied hot-flashing body that day watching the pregnancy and new mother glow of the young women holding court next to me, I wanted to protect them from their future selves, “Hold onto that power,” I would tell them, “remember how fierce you feel now, being able to grow a human inside your body! In twenty years when your hormones take you on entirely different road trip into menopause, remember that power is still inside of you.” 

I’d tell them that society will tell them otherwise, but not to believe it. I’d hug them and bless them and wish them well. I didn’t say one word to those women that morning, but I really of wish I had. 

The Good Place

 

I turned 54 yesterday. As I sat with my eighteen-year-old daughter on the couch I thought to myself, “wow, she has a really long time to live.” I get tired just thinking about the days ahead for her — college, graduate school, work, figuring out her life day after day after day.

But I didn’t get tired when it was happening. It didn’t feel like a slog when I was in it in my twenties and thirties. The work I was doing felt life-giving and necessary. I felt like figuring it all out was my JOB. 

I just started watching The Good Place. Eleanor Shellstrop, the main character, gets sent to the show’s version of heaven (The Good Place) accidentally. In reality, based on her terrible behavior on Earth, she should have been sent to the Bad Place (hell). I’m just on season one, but from what I can gather, Eleanor learns some important lessons in the Good Place that change her. The powers that be want to send Eleanor to the Bad Place. But in her time in the Good Place she changes and those powers recognize that maybe Eleanor actually belongs there. 

In the Good Place, you are matched with your soul mate. You live in your dream house. There are 18,000 flavors of frozen yogurt you can eat any time, as many times a day as you want. You get to fly. There’s no traffic or pollution. Everything you need and want is there. 

In the Bad Place, you have to do tasks you’d despise on earth — like hosting a baby shower or cleaning up rat poop all day long. Eleanor has good reason to stay in the Good Place and she and her friends are working their asses off to make it happen. 

Last weekend I co-led a retreat with ten women in menopause. We were all seeking clarity about ourselves, our lives, and the world around us. At our age, we don’t have the kind of energy that 18 or 20 or 32 year olds have. We are tired. But there’s a pressure to keep acting the same way we’ve always acted. 

Unfortunately, in our dysfunctional, capitalistic, American society, women are told that either they keep up with the younger Jones or accept their fate as washed up old dogs with no reason to live. The United States has the highest number of plastic surgeries — 4,361,867 in 2018, almost 2 million more than Brazil, the country next in line.

The message is that if we keep looking younger, we’ll keep acting younger. We’ll retain our passion to work hard and stay young. Getting older is a negative thing. Women (and men) in this country work as hard as Eleanor Shellstrop to stay out of the Bad Place of aging.

At the retreat we released that pressure valve of staying young. We acknowledged our desire to just be where we are now, to give up the grind and reflect on where we’ve been. Instead of striving to keep up with things that don’t matter to us anymore, we honored the need for rest and community. 

What I realized at our weekend retreat, and again on the couch with my young, full of life daughter yesterday is that I really don’t want to be young. I don’t want to work as hard as I used to. I don’t want to worry about being liked or approved of. I want to settle back and reflect on how hard I have worked already. Going back to the younger stages in my life would be like going to the Bad Place. 

I’ve spent years in different careers, in different relationships. I’ve explored countless therapy modalities and self-help concepts. I’ve read thousands of books and traveled far and wide. At fifty-four, I want to sit on the couch and listen to my daughter tell me her plans. I want to bask in the comfort of knowing that I don’t have to work that hard anymore. 

Spending the weekend with a group of women in a similar physical and emotional place was affirming and energizing. I was reminded again and again that I like where I am. I don’t want to go back and do the hustle I watch my daughter doing. I don’t want to figure out what my major is or pine over romantic interests. I’ve done all of that and I’m happy where I am.

There are lots of aspects of getting older that are hard. I don’t love the new jowls that are forming on my face. My joints are pretty stiff. And I can’t drink wine without getting a massive headache. But even with the little trouble spots, I choose this place. I want to be where I am now. I like getting older. It’s where I belong. This is the Good Place.

The Absence of His Presence: Goodbye Freckles

Our dog died yesterday. We think Freckles was nine or ten years old. Some of his history is unknown to us so we deduced his age based on what we do know and the vet’s best guess. We also don’t know Freckles’ breed, but we think he was part Shih Tzu for sure. Based on the length of his torso and the shortness of his legs, he also might have had some Dachshund in his DNA.

Whatever he was, he was amazing. He didn’t bark (except at the mailman). He didn’t shed. He only whined around food. He napped constantly — wherever, whenever around the house, snoring loudly as if sending our household the constant, subtle message to just slow down, calm down, and chill out.

Sometimes Freckles’ would send a more direct message — coming directly to where one of his humans was sitting, settling in to nap along side them. He often sat right next to me on my meditation pillow or snuggled his bottom right beside my head when I lay on my yoga mat.

Every night he excitedly climbed the stairs for bed as if he were going on an doggy adventure. He’d march down the hall clicking his nails on the wood floor until he reached our room where he’d burrow into the blankets in his crate and start snoring again.

Freckles was also obese. When we got him three years ago we started on an immediate campaign to help him lose weight. We exercised him, revised his diet, tailoring his portions down to the exact quarter ounce. His only treats were raw foods — his favorites were carrots, cucumbers and red peppers.

Because of his history of obesity, the vet told us, Freckles’ had a bad heart. We knew that in one of his previous households he’d spent years eating fatty human foods and getting little exercise. He was well loved but his health suffered as a result. We hoped that by investing in his health we could postpone or even reverse the possibility of heart failure.

But we couldn’t. Freckles lived in our home for a little over three years, creating a slow steady presence so grounding and anchoring that I didn’t even realize it until he was gone. Two nights ago Freckles began to struggle to breathe. My partner Nancy and I raced him to the ER vet where he was given oxygen and medication. The interventions didn’t work — nine hours later he went into respiratory failure and then heart failure and died.

When we got to the vet they put us in a corner room with a flyer about getting support after your pet dies. There were tiny cremation urns on the shelves and a box of tissues on a shelf next to the tiny naugahyde couch where we sat.

A vet tech came in and handed us a clipboard with a list of choices for what to do with Freckles. At the top of the list was the several hundred dollar option for individual cremation with a ceramic paw print souvenir. Listed below were other cremation options and the option to take your dog home.

“I want to take him home and bury him in the yard,” I told Nancy.

“I don’t know if I can bear to handle his dead body and bury him,” she said. She was imagining a rigid, dead Freckles.

“Can we see him first and then make a decision?” I asked the tech. “Sure,” she said and left our tiny bereavement room to collect Freckles.

Another tech brought Freckles back. He was strapped to a tiny stretcher underneath a plaid fleece blanket. After she wheeled him in, the tech unstrapped Freckles and left him for us, still covered in the blanket.

Nancy gingerly pulled up the blanket to uncover him. He was still warm, still Freckles. We laid our hands on him and cried. We missed him so much already.

Just minutes after reuniting with his body Nancy looked at me and said, “Let’s take him home,” nodding as tears ran down her face.

We pushed the call button for the tech to tell her our decision.

It felt good to drive home with Freckles. The tech had put Freckles in a tiny cardboard casket and it was comforting to have him in the backseat with us. We decided, on the twenty-minute drive home that we’d bury him between the two vegetable beds he liked to snack out of every summer. His favorite were the snap peas. Every season Freckles ravaged my pea plants, his fat little butt hanging off the edge of the raised bed as he chomped the plants he could reach.

As soon as we got home I went to my sewing room and got a white cotton sheet I’d been saving for a potential future project. While I ironed the sheet Nancy gathered shovels, gloves, and a pick ax from the garage. I brought the sheet up and we laid it out on the dining room floor so that we could prepare Freckles.

He looked the same in the box as he had on the stretcher. He was still Freckles, still soft and furry, lying on his side, the same position as he often was, napping around the house. Together, we took him out of the box and laid him on the sheet. Nancy got his favorite stuffy, a raggedy old black cat, and we placed that between his paws. We added a carrot and his tooth cleaning bone, two of his favorite snacks.

Then we wrapped him in the blanket, tucking him in for his next journey. Friends had brought flowers to a dinner party we’d hosted the night before and we laid several buds on top of his wrapped body. We said thank you and goodbye and then we went out to dig a hole.

I’d read that we would need to dig a hold three-feet deep. We didn’t really forge a plan for how we’d do it. We just started digging. To accommodate Freckles’ body the hole would need to be short, narrow, and very deep. We dug from soil to clay to rocks. It took about two hours and lots of inventive techniques to dig the hole. We barely spoke as we dug, both grateful for the activity to distract us from our grief.

By the end we were covered in dirt and filled with pride at our accomplishment. We went in to gather Freckles. After another round of goodbyes and the last minute addition of his pink monkey, we carried Freckles out to the garden and kneeled down to lay him into the hole. We thanked him and told him we loved him. And then we covered him up with the soil we’d just dug.

As I meditated this morning I waited for the tapping of Freckles’ nails to come join me on my mat. I keep hearing phantom snoring in the dining room as I sit here writing. I feel the pull to wrap this up so I can take Freckles on his walk before I start my work day.

I feel the absence of Freckles’ presence everywhere. It’s not even been a full day that he’s been gone but I miss him. I miss all his little sounds, gestures, movements, and needs. I missed his excited running in circles at breakfast time this morning and I miss all the walks we’ll take along the lake.

To my left, outside in the garden is the tiny grave we dug for Freckles. He’s there. Last night at his dinner time we went outside to toast him. We lit a candle and made some wishes. We told him thank you and I love you again.

It wasn’t the same last night, going to bed without the sound of Freckles’ snoring. Freckles was everywhere, all the time. There is a huge void in our home. There’s no way around this feeling. It’s the absence of his presence.

A few times since we buried Freckles, in moments where I’m aware of his absence, when I look to his bed and know I’ll never see him snoring there again, I go to the window and look at the raised beds. I look at the spot where we laid him to rest and feel comforted. He’s here. He’s gone but he’ll always be with us.

Last Minute Parenting

 

These days I am intermittently filled with pride and overwhelmed with sadness. I always knew, but never quite believed that this moment would come; that my daughter would grow up. Periodically, I saw it happening. My iPhone reminded me every year of how much smaller she looked the year before, but this feels too sudden. How did it happen?

I am counting the months until my daughter moves out of the house — not in a good way. Soon I’l be counting the weeks, and then the days. “How can I make the most of this time?” I ask myself, “how do I soak her in before I send her off?”

And my biggest questions, “have I done it right?” and “have I done enough?” Rationally I know that I won’t lose contact with my daughter when she goes to college, but the combination of her surging independence and desperate need to impart everything I know in the next ten months leaves me furiously scrambling to make sure she is ‘ready.’

When my daughter has a conflict with a friend I move through all of my own friendship struggles like a slideshow in my brain and tell her, “It doesn’t matter what they do. You need to make sure that whatever you do has integrity.” As I share this lesson I am reminded of the countless times I acted dishonorably. 

When the topic of Fentanyl-laced pot comes up I look anxiously at my daughter, hoping that she’d never take a toke off of a joint from an unknown source. As we talk about the risks she tells me, “Well, I don’t smoke weed, but if I did, I’d get my own from a dispensary.” Phew. I am reminded of the innumerable stupid choices I made in high school and college, eschewing the clear voice at the back of my head telling me not to risk it.

Every day I think of things I want to make sure my daughter understands before she leaves — how to really scrub the toilet; how to make good coffee; how to save and invest her earnings; to be on time; to communicate respectfully; how to write a resume; to join clubs at college; to trust herself; to try new things. 

And every time a lesson comes into my mind I have to soothe myself. “Laura, you’ve had eighteen years,” I tell my panicky mother-self, “she knows what she knows.” I have to trust that my daughter will keep learning along the way. Just like I did. She’ll learn from the world, from her own mistakes, from the wisdom of all the other people she’ll come across in her life. She has her her own internal wisdom and all the micro-lessons I’ve done my best to share along the way.

My friend Linda is seventy-five. Every morning she sends me a text message. Usually it’s a GIF with a prayer for a good day or a funny image of rain clouds or a traffic jam. Every day her sweet image includes the letters, “GM” which stands for Good Morning. Linda has been doing this tiny ritual for months. I love it. It’s a daily reminder that I am loved and that someone is thinking about me.

Even though my daughter still lives at home, our time together is limited; I always want more. A few weeks ago I started my own version of Linda’s daily affirmation for her. I think of the real things I want my daughter to know — that she is loved, that she is good enough, that I am proud of her — and so many more. Whatever piece of wisdom or sentiment that comes into my heart at the moment, I write. In a very short text, I write a GM message. The act comforts me. Maybe she’ll read these texts or maybe she won’t, but I hope that even if she doesn’t read the text every day, she’ll know what it is — a sign that she is loved. 

The first time I wrote the GM text, my daughter texted me from her basement bedroom to ask me what the text was. “It’s just something I’m doing,” I wrote back, “you’ll get one every day.” I waited and watched the three dots on my screen.

“Thanks Mommy,” she texted back. Message received.