At the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, I was preoccupied with how vulnerable our elders were to this new and frightening disease—until one day I realized, with chagrin, that I myself fell into that category. One might have assumed that a woman in her late sixties would have been more cognizant of her “senior” status, but so little had changed in my daily life, besides reduced fares on public transit and Via Rail, that I rarely contemplated my age.
Come on now!—folks might object. You’ve been through menopause. You can’t pretend that wasn’t a monumental change in your relationship with your body! Surely, you are a lot different now than you were before?
Well, yes. And no. To be honest, mostly no. And although each person’s experience, including that of non-binary and trans folks, is unique, I suspect that Western society’s tendency to catastrophize ordinary life events—a tendency that has only accelerated with the relentless appetite for trauma on social media—has downplayed the genuine benefits of outgrowing one’s reproductive capacity.
The word “menopause” signifies “cessation of menses,” though not all mammals slough off the bloody uterine lining after a period of fertility the way humans do; their bodies simply reabsorb the material. So it is more accurate to use the term to refer to a female body having exhausted its store of viable ova. According to American researchers, we humans can enjoy 40 percent of our adult lives after that happens. For the average woman, that means at least thirty years.
Just ponder for a moment how long that time is. Time no longer in thrall to potential pregnancies. Time no longer constrained by incubating new life but devoted entirely to the life that already exists. Including, if you’re lucky, your own! Menopausal women with grown children, especially women not responsible for the care of their grandchildren, finally have the freedom to pursue their own interests.
This is why women like me sometimes call our female pals “girls.” It’s not because we want to hide our seniority. It’s because, despite enduring all the natural shocks that flesh is heir to, we feel young again.
And it isn’t only humans who enjoy this freedom. This sweet post-menopausal phase amounts to up to 40 percent of a female orca’s adult life and 20 percent of a female chimpanzee’s. Chimps were added to the list of mammals that go through menopause only in 2023, the same year a persuasive study was published arguing that the reason wild animals are rarely observed post menopause is that they generally do not live long enough. That other mammals go through the same life phases as we do proves that menopause is completely natural. It is not an illness to be cured any more than puberty is.
Usually, when people refer to women going through menopause, they are gesturing vaguely at a process that can go on for years. Medical terminology is more precise than this. “Perimenopause” is the proper term for the indeterminate amount of time leading up to “menopause,” defined straightforwardly as twelve consecutive months without a period. Once that conclusive year has elapsed, a woman may be described as “post-menopausal.”
Perimenopause is the shitty part of the equation, because it is so unpredictable. You never know if or when you might have a period, how heavy it will be, or how long it will last. Even someone like me, regular as clockwork from age thirteen, had to carry a couple of tampons at all times, because I no longer knew when a gush of blood might disrupt my activities with its reminder that my body had a mind of its own.
In addition, that sturdy Canadian body, inured to both sweltering and frigid temperatures, no longer had a reliable thermostat. I might be teaching a creative writing class when my face would suddenly flush and perspiration drip from my hairline. Sometimes this fervour could masquerade as an emotional response to the story under discussion, but more often than not, everybody in the room—after all, I was teaching in the Faculty of Continuing Education, and many of my students were at least as old as I was—knew exactly what was going on.
Eventually, over the (many) years that this process continued, I stopped trying to hide my condition. What was the point of pretending? Everyone who menstruates is destined to go through the same process. If society had a problem with that—tough. Women are tougher. After all, by the time we go through the “change of life,” we have already endured menstruation and are resigned to the fact that no amount of yoga or CrossFit really puts us in charge of our insubordinate bodies.
In fact, according to the Absorbent Hygiene Product Manufacturers Association (a risible name befitting the purveyors of products girls are mortified to buy at a drugstore), the average woman menstruates 500 times over 37.5 years, “for an equivalent duration of 6.5 years of her life.” No wonder it feels like you are always on your period! And given the inconvenience and discomfort of having periods, given the ever-present fear of unintentional conception as well as the risks of childbirth to both mother and infant, many of us are more than ready to wave goodbye to our fertility when the time finally comes.
Still, it sometimes felt like nature was taunting me when it put me through menopause. Taunting me in a very particular way, as I had conceived both my children through in-vitro fertilization, my fallopian tubes having been too damaged by an ectopic pregnancy to propel my otherwise healthy ova into my uterus. In other words, I had zero chance of becoming pregnant again should I have wanted a third child (which I most certainly did not), and therefore, all those periods I endured post childbirth were completely pointless. I am sure women who do not want to have children or people who do not feel comfortable in female bodies are even more distressed than I was by what then seemed a nasty cosmic joke.
But sometimes even I was forced to laugh. One summer whilst I was going through “the change,” we rented a cottage for two weeks. My strategy for coping was to jump into the lovely cool lake whenever those annoying hormones surged. This happened with such frequency that my kids made up a song about it:
Mum made a big splash
It must have been a hot flash
A very, very hot flash
Because it was a big splash.
I liked the ditty so much that I deliberately increased the force of my splashes, cannonballing off the dock to dramatic effect. My cackling offspring eventually added more verses to their song, although twenty years later, neither they nor I remember what they were.
After all, what rhymes with menopause? Santa Claus? Vichyssoise? Doctor of Laws?
Ultimately, apart from those unpredictable hot flashes—which left me with a sweat-stained mattress and a body that, to this day, is incapable of regulating its temperature—my experience of menopause was relatively mild. Not significantly worse than my experience of menstruation, which, given the uncomfortable lead-up to each period and the inconvenience of the period itself, had encumbered a week out of every month for most of my life until then. In fact, if you compared the number of hours disrupted by menopause to those disrupted by menstruation, the latter would certainly have won.
There were unexpected benefits as well. For example, I no longer have to shave my legs, because my body hair is so sparse, and waking up like clockwork at 3 a.m. for several years introduced me to the joys of cryptic crosswords. It remains a relief to never worry about bleeding through white trousers, and it is especially welcome not to periodically (sorry not sorry) curl up in bed with a hot water bottle and a fistful of Advil.
Of course, menopause can be more challenging for those whose experience includes insomnia, depression, osteoporosis, or heart disease. Among the most benign treatments women use to deal with these issues are ingesting extra vitamins, ginseng, black cohosh, or flaxseed, and undergoing acupuncture. Some may resort to more extreme measures like hormone replacement therapy, antidepressants, or clonidine, all of which can have worse consequences than the problems they are designed to solve, especially for people over sixty.
I am not saying that those who are suffering shouldn’t seek help. They absolutely should. Nonetheless, the indiscriminate encouragement of women to take hormones to “manage” menopause is a cause for genuine concern, especially given the fact that aging men go through a similar process (called andropause), with many of the same complications, but nobody publishes articles about them with titles like “The Fate of the Untreated Menopause” as though getting older were a disease rather than a normal stage of life.
A pretty damn fine stage of life, if you ask me. I am thoroughly enjoying my post-menopausal existence. Recently, while one of my friends was on a “holiday” devoted to the care, feeding, and entertainment of three grandchildren aged one, three, and six, I was wandering through Mexico with my partner, studying ancient ruins, visiting the studios of artisans, birdwatching, and snorkelling. We had lived in that country when we were first married but hadn’t been back since we had kids. Yes, we were slower and more nervous travelling in our seventies, but otherwise, it was a joy. I am safer adventuring now than I ever was as a young woman, and because of that, I can talk to everyone, and everyone is comfortable talking to me.
As a “space crone,” in Ursula K. Le Guin’s wry phrasing, my life is filled with a marvellous and revelatory freedom. And I hope to go forward in life continuing to make “a big splash.”
Join us tonight for The Walrus Talks Menopause. We’re demystifying the whole journey, from peri to post, and the impacts on women’s health. Attend in person in Toronto, or sign up for the online livestream. Register here.
