I have been digging around The Atlantic website and came across an old but wonderful article, "The Bitch is Back" but Sandra Tsing Loh.
Considering this article is a review of a book about menopause, The Wisdom of Menopause: Creating Physical and Emotional Health During the Change by Christine Northrup, M.D., I was surprised I laughed so hard I couldn't breathe. The main idea is that estrogen makes women uber nurturing, and menopause is just returning to normal. It was something that I had suspected all along, and I am glad to see that my assumption has some basis in reality.
Here is a great passage from Northrup:
A woman once told me that when her mother was approaching the age of menopause, her father sat the whole family down and said, “Kids, your mother may be going through some changes now, and I want you to be prepared. Your Uncle Ralph told me that when your Aunt Carol went through the change, she threw a leg of lamb right out the window!” Although this story fits beautifully into the stereotype of the “crazy” menopausal woman, it should not be overlooked that throwing the leg of lamb out the window may have been Aunt Carol’s outward expression of the process going on within her soul: the reclaiming of self. Perhaps it was her way of saying how tired she was of waiting on her family, of signaling to them that she was past the cook/chauffeur/dishwasher stage of life. For many women, if not most, part of this reclamation process includes getting in touch with anger and, perhaps, blowing up at loved ones for the first time.
"Woo-woo! Duck, Uncle Ralph! Go, Aunt Carol!" says Tsing Loh. "IT’s INTRIGUING TO ponder this suggested reversal of what has traditionally been thought to be the woman’s hormonal cloud. A sudden influx of hormones is not what causes 50-year-old Aunt Carol to throw the leg of lamb out the window. Improperly balanced hormones were probably the culprit. Fertility’s amped-up reproductive hormones helped Aunt Carol 30 years ago to begin her mysterious automatic weekly ritual of roasting lamb just so and laying out 12 settings of silverware with an OCD-like attention to detail while cheerfully washing and folding and ironing the family laundry. No normal person would do that—look at the rest of the family: they are reading the paper and lazing about like rational, sensible people. And now that Aunt Carol’s hormonal cloud is finally wearing off, it’s not a tragedy, or an abnormality, or her going crazy—it just means she can rejoin the rest of the human race: she can be the same selfish, non-nurturing, non-bonding type of person everyone else is. (And so what if get-well casseroles won’t get baked, PTAs will collapse, and in-laws will go for decades without being sent a single greeting card? Paging Aunt Carol! The old Aunt Carol!)"
Thank you, Northrup and Tsing Loh! John and I were reading this and reflecting on my moments of rage in the past few months. He could see the correlation between my hormonal condition and my mood.
"But you had good reason to be angry," he conceded. "You weren't just flying off the handle." Yes, these hormones make me a docile sheep for 27 days a month. One day, typically called PMS, was actually my day of clarity, the day when the fog cleared. The bullshit in my life became apparent, as did my ability to call it.
I think I might be looking forward to "the change," even if no one in my family is.
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