MENOPAUSE: BOOMERS GIFT TO WOMEN
As a woman looks ahead to the Change, it is natural to focus entirely on the loss of powers one has taken for granted in previous stages. The youthful looks you could always trade on, and the magical powers of procreation that connected you to the cycle of all lifethese are the God-given, gloriously unfair advantages of being born a well-formed woman. Suddenly, in the mid-forties, one must face the fact that these powers are ebbing. What will replace them?
The women who attended the luncheon meeting in Beverly Hills were ready to confront such issues. They were a mix of professionals who had left a mark on their respective fields: A top state politician, a mayor, and a judge were interspersed with well-known screenwriters, entertainment producers, and social activists. All but three of those present were in their mid-forties with still-young children.
"So many of us know each other," Annie Gilbar kept remarking, "and we talk about a lot of thingschildren, sex, everythingbut this subject has never come up. Not once." Two of the creative talents in today's film industry were among the group: Meg Kasdan, co-screenwriter with husband Lawrence Kasdan of Grand Canyon, and executive producer Carole Isenberg (The Color Purple and This Is My Life). Both were flabbergasted when they couldn't think of a single reference in a film to a woman going through the Change and the impact it had on her life. "I'm always sneaking messages in about women's lives, but never this," said Carole. "It's a sorry statement that shows how unwilling and uncomfortable we have been to deal with this issue." Meg added, "Mature womenthat is, over fortyare almost invisible in Hollywood movies."
Once people began to talk about menopause as more than a matter of spigots and pipes and secretions involving our organs, an important issue surfaced. Losing the magicthat was the deeper mutation to be accepted. The graduation from our fertile years resonates in our psyches as deeply as the squirm and throb in the belly of our first pregnancy signifies our awesome powers of creation. Like most graduations, it is the occasion for both relief and sadness.
"For many of us who waited until we were well into our thirties and even early forties before having children, the physical power of giving birth is still palpable; it touches something very deep and instinctual," ventured Suzanne Rosenblatt Buhai, a psychotherapist. "That flame of the instinctual being extinguished is not as readily dealt with as one might think.''
Dealing with loss is one of the tasks we struggle with in every passage, but it is particularly poignant as women notice the first skips in a fertility we have probably taken for granted. The feelings were brought out by a woman who has obviously delighted in maternity. Joyce Bogart Trabulus has two children and a quartet of stepchildren in her life, and is further fulfilled by community caretaking in the form of running charities for cancer and AIDS research. She has no desire to have any more children. No daylight world desire.
"And yet I really feel sadness every time I think about it," she admitted. "I was forty-one when I had my last child, who's three years old nowI almost feel like a grandmother to my own kid. And I sometimes catch myself thinking, Oh, God, this is fabulous, I'd love to do this again. It's a great loss to know that it will be impossible for me. It's not like I want another one. And I'm not menopausal, or even premenopausal. But I look at a baby and say, 'Oh.'"
Suzanne mused out loud, "Given our generational narcissismwhether it's because of our sheer numbers, Dr. Spock, or the dominant influence of psychoanalysisI just wonder if this concern with self is now being focused on menopause. Are we getting all worked up over something that is, in fact, quite normal and has been experienced since time immemorial? Perhaps the best gift we can give society at this stage is to see this as something very positive. If we can normalize this experience, as Gail says, it will help women deal with it. Otherwise, women will take on the responsibility of this somehow being their faultthey are supposed to be pulling out of this funk."
One of the few women in the room over fifty, Vicki Reynolds, mayor of Beverly Hills, looked around the group with eagerness and some envy. "I am almost a generation ahead of most of you," she said. "I have seen women my age go through menopause without the benefit of any medical enlightenmentignorant of all you have been saying. Now we look to you, the baby boom generation, to talk about this openly and explore the effects and benefits of menopause. That's so exciting."
It was agreed that the vestigial attitude surrounding menopause"I'm no good anymore"would be changed by the way women like themselves handled it. I suggested, only half seriously, "If every woman in menopause told five people in the next week, those five people would have an entirely different view of it. This dish is in menopause? Well, maybe it isn't so terrible.' " Dr. Allen observed that at this stage we have responsibilities to the world, not just to our tiny communities. She is excited every day by finding new channels to educate women about their bodies. "That's my public passion," she said. "But we also need something for ourselvesnew passions all the time."
I added wickedly, "And they may include a twenty-five-year-old lover."
"Yeah, a blind twenty-five-year-old lover!" amended one of the California women.
With a whooping and shimmying of laughter, the session ended. Seventeen women went out into the world to resume their balancing acts among careers, husbands, children, car pools, social and spiritual lives, too busy to worry much about menopause, but better prepared for the future. Laughter and forgetting . . . two of the best gifts women of any age can share with one another.
But something hopeful, something even incendiary had come out of those two sessions with California women. Their need to know was beginning to overcome their fear of knowing. It convinced me that the pacesetting women of this generation will shift the boundaries as well as the meaning of menopause: They will redefine it, and live it, as a mid-life experience of minor importance in the scheme of a long and lushly various life.
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Womens health
