We live in a culture of “next.” When I bought my last phone this spring it was the newest model, and within a few months I was getting emails offering me the ability to trade it in for an even newer and “better” model. In contrast, on my kitchen stove sits a cast iron skillet made in 1910, the same year my Grandmother was born. It has quietly been used to cook meals for multiple families for more than a 100 years, and it remains just as effective and enjoyable to use now, approaching 120 years after it’s first meal. In fact, for some cooks it would be far more sought after than the newest cast iron in the store today.
There are days I, as a woman in the midst of perimenopause, feel very much like my cell phone. Our culture doesn’t let women age. We are bombarded from all sides with messages designed to convince us that aging is a catastrophe. We are buried under an avalanche of advertisements for products that can (supposedly) hold back the horrors of “visible aging.” We have been taught to treat the silver in our hair with disgust, the laugh lines on our face with horror. But it doesn’t have to be this way.
Here’s what I am not going to do, I’m not going to romanticize aging. As my mother says: aging isn’t for sissies, but it beats the alternative. Women in menopause are at higher risk for depression, anxiety, and a host of other issues and it is no surprise that those issues have been under researched and are poorly understood[1]. Our culture, perhaps because we are so deeply death phobic would like us to think that the alternative to aging is eternal youth, bought with potions and treatments. But that’s a straight up lie. And while we can’t stop them trying to sell it to us, we can stop buying. We can begin to write our own narrative for ourselves, and future generations.
Reclaiming menopause asks us to start here: there was no mythical time in history when aging was easy, or when menopause was something women glided through with ease. But there are cultures in our world, and throughout history, when aging was respected and, the hard won wisdom of those who had lived long enough to do the work of eldering were honored. And there is a key difference: we don’t choose aging, it just happens; but we get to choose if we invest the work to become a wise elder. Reclaiming menopause is a radical act, a counter cultural journey into the depths of ourselves, identities, and to recon with our lives as they are not as we wish they had been.
In the practice of reclaiming menopause it is important to note that we do have examples throughout history and around the world of wise elder women and the roles they played in our world, rewarding right relationship, mentoring, protecting, and sometimes causing the right kinds of trouble.
Scottish myth includes the Cailleach (literally ‘veiled one’ in Gaelic), an ancient giantess/goddess (though she is not always large in size) who myth says create the highlands and islands by dropping rocks from her basket as she strode across the world. Yes folks, an old woman made the world by tossing rocks around like toys, there’s something we might unpack in therapy!
Other stories of her tell of a rather nasty old priest (a story from the Christian era) who did not believe she (who in this tale is a seemingly normal woman living quietly in a little Scottish village) could possibly be as old as she claimed to be. In it the Cailleach shrugs and says that maybe she’s just old and doesn’t remember so well but he can check her because she tells him every year of her life she has slaughtered an ox, and tossed one leg bone up into the attic to mark the year. He climbs up into the attic to count the bones and to no one’s surprise descends again days later pale as a sheet and muttering numbers no one has ever heard before, he wanders off and is never heard from again.
In another story the Cailleach shows up in a blizzard in a tiny isolated village (though no one knows who she is) and is cared for and offered hospitality. In thanks she promises to guard the village for evermore as long as they remember her, legend says through centuries, wars, pestilence, and disaster that little village has never known a year that was more bad than good.
Just one myth system (chosen because it belongs to my heritage, if you are interested in learning how to work with your inherited myths you can find out more about that here) and yet so many various ways to see the role, purpose, and power of women in the second half of life and how she might help us in our journey of reclaiming menopause. But here is what also delights me. The Cailleach is far from perfect. Sometimes she falls asleep midway through a chore and floods a valley (creating a new loch), other times she looses her temper and hurls boulders across the mountains at someone who annoys her.
In those moments I knew that she was a perfect example for those of us navigating all the phases of menopause. In those stories I see women who have seen enough life to become powerful, confident in themselves, whose bodies perhaps don’t do what they once did, but can still powerfully react with anger and passion when the situation calls; and who sometimes deal with the issues of brain fog as well!
Perimenopause and post menopause both have strong impacts on our bodies, brains, and minds. Caring for ourselves in the midst of this transition asks that we (maybe for the first time), prioritize our whole wellness. But this portal from one season of our lives to another also offers us an invitation. There is a chance in perimenopause for women to rethink choices, to dream new dreams, to reclaim parts of themselves that have perhaps been asleep or exiled for a very long time.
Therapy in perimenopause is an invitation to take all these moments seriously, to take yourself seriously. If you are in Washington and this is a journey that is calling you to a new heroine’s journey, to reclaiming menopause for yourself, I invite you to explore more about my specialty work with women in perimenopause and menopause.
