Wise she is

I was not expecting a bloke to write an insightful and moving Facebook post about menopause, but social media continues to surprise me.

The post was by a Scottish-Australian author called Zen Prem (also known as Noah David), who wrote something a few years ago called “Menopause: A Man’s Guide to Not Being a Complete C#nt.”

He wryly describes it as being an “interweb sensation, with millions reading it”.

“Which is quite an achievement considering my principal qualification in menopause was having slept next to women going through it,” he adds.

“I was basically a war correspondent who’d never left the f#cking hotel.”

He thought he understood “the sweating, the insomnia, the rage, the disappearing libido and the occasional desire to kill a man for slurping his noodles too loudly”.

He writes that “somewhere in the middle of this biological coup”, a woman’s partner looks at her and says the fatal words: “You’ve been really f#cking moody lately.”

Note from Alana: Oooooh. That is not a helpful thing to say to a menopausal woman. It is totally infuriating. Of course she’s been moody. She’s been dealing with A LOT and is desperately hoping it doesn’t break her.

The part that really got me in Zen’s post started with the word “grief”.

“She may be grieving a body she thought she’d have longer, a sexuality she understood, a face she recognised,” he writes.

“Children who don’t need her the same way. Parents disappearing. A career winding down. And a culture that decided a woman becomes invisible at roughly the age a man starts being called ‘distinguished’.

“And perhaps the strangest grief of all …

“The woman she used to be.”

He notes that middle-aged men are grieving things too, like their hair and a reliable penis.

“Nobody tells you that two people can start grieving themselves at roughly the same time,” he writes.

“And if they’re not careful, they’ll mistake that grief for falling out of love.”

With those words, I was swept back into the trenches of my marriage crumbling.

“Sometimes nobody stopped loving anybody,” he said. “They just stopped recognising themselves. And then blamed the nearest person.”

I felt tears pricking my eyes.

“Don’t stand there waiting for your ‘old wife’ to come back.

“People change. The woman you married disappears in tiny increments. So does the man she married.

“And maybe that’s not the tragedy.

“Maybe the tragedy is spending so much time demanding the old versions back that you never bother meeting the people standing in front of you now.

“The question isn’t whether she can remain the woman you originally fell in love with. It’s whether you can stay curious enough to fall in love with the woman she’s becoming.”

My marriage failed for many reasons, but a major one was that we didn’t get to know the people we were becoming.

And then came the part in Zen’s post when I felt he really understood about menopause that I’m just starting to: something pretty empowering emerges from the ashes.

“We don’t talk nearly enough about what some women seem to find,” he writes.

“Themselves.”

He calls them ‘Crone Yoda’ – not sure I entirely love that, but hey.

“She’s seen some shit. Raised children. Lost people. Survived heartbreak. Changed bodies. Buried parents. Forgiven things she probably shouldn’t have and spent several decades knowing where everyone else’s f#cking passport is.

“Then something shifts. She stops needing quite so much permission. She knows what she likes. She knows what she doesn’t.

“And she finally discovers that no is a complete sentence requiring neither footnotes nor a f#cking apology.

“That’s Crone Yoda. She doesn’t have all the answers. She just has considerably less interest in everybody else’s.

“Wise she is.

“And if you’re lucky enough to love a woman becoming more herself, don’t stand there demanding the old one back.

“Meet this one. She might be f#cking magnificent.

“She’s not the woman she was.

“Neither are you.

“Thank f#ck.

“Now introduce yourselves.”

When my ex was breaking up with me, he used a line from Avatar to explain why the love died. He said we didn’t “see” each other any more.

“I see you” is a greeting used by the Na’vi people in the fantasy film. The film’s director James Cameron once explained to Oprah that “I see you”  is a phrase with a deeper meaning along the lines of “I understand who you are.”

My ex and I didn’t understand who each other were any more.

DD met the emerging me, saw her and accepted the challenge of trying to understand her. He struggled with my menopausal moodiness, but I hope we have made it out the other side.

I sometimes feel a little sad that he didn’t get to spend more time seeing wrinkle-free me, but I am also glad he is experiencing the woman who is becoming more herself.

PS Zen Prem also received a few tough insights into how unpleasant raging hormones can be after recently undergoing cancer treatment. Read his full post here … Warning, as you may have already guessed, he swears A LOT.

Song of the day: Fleetwood Mac “Landslide”