Editor’s Note: This is a short story submitted by Tracey O’Connell, MD. If you don’t want to read about “puberty to menopause” then just scroll on by. Otherwise, please enjoy this heart-felt and personally intimate story that weaves into it the emotions and life changes on this natural journey many women travel, unique to all, but with overlapping similarities in our collective experience. I personally appreciate the wisdom part toward the end. Thank you, Dr. O’Connell, for sharing your story!
A few summers ago, my extended family was spending a week at a beach house on the Outer Banks of North Carolina. As the raindrops splattered the windows, strong winds caused the rental house to sway a bit on its pilings. I was zoning out on the couch doing needlepoint when my niece, Meghan, 18, suddenly threw her book down and popped out of her lounge chair.
“Shit! Oh man…ugh! I knew this would happen on this trip! While wearing white shorts even!” Meghan ran to the bathroom.
My daughter Ellie, 10, was concerned. “What’s wrong with Meghan? Is she okay?”
“She just got her period and wasn’t expecting it,” I answered.
After the storm passed and the kids were all coming in from the beach, I was in the basement laundry room when Ellie came in.
I threw the wet clothes into the dryer, asking, “You know Meghan’s fine, right? That it doesn’t hurt to get your period? She was just annoyed because she wasn’t prepared and wasn’t wearing a pad or anything to protect her white shorts.”
“Yeah. I know.” Ellie said. “It just seems like such a drag. How long does it go on?”
“Oh, usually for 5-7 days and only a few of those days is there really much bleeding at all.”
“No. I mean, how many years does it last. Like, how old will I be when it stops happening at all?” she asked, fiddling with her wet bathing suit straps.
I turned to look into her sweet little face, “Oh…well, it happens every month until you get close to 50.”
“EVERY MONTH FOR 40 YEARS?!!!” She was visibly horrified, her brown eyes wide, her lashes still wet with ocean.
I laughed and told her not to worry, that menstrual periods wouldn’t keep her from doing anything she wanted to do with her life.
After she skipped away, I got to thinking about my own menstrual journey. I’d started my period around the 4th of July before 7th grade. I thought large volumes of blood would come pouring out of me and embarrass me during the neighborhood parade so I kept sneaking off to the cement-walled bathroom pavilion at the local park to make sure blood wasn’t seeping out of my underwear.
My parents had divorced when I was 4. The summer before 8th grade I flew to California by myself to visit my dad for a family camping trip. I wanted to go swimming in the river next to the rustic screened cabins, but I had concerns about wearing a pad with a bathing suit.
I asked my step-mother what to do.
“You’ve never used a tampon?” she replied, sounding exasperated. I made up stories that she was shaming and blaming my mom for not teaching me anything.
“No.”
A few hours later she returned with a box of Tampax. “Here,” she said, shoving the box at me before heading out the screened door.
I was left to my own, pulling the folded paper instructions out of the box in the tiny room with just a toilet; reading by the dim natural light coming through the small window close to the ceiling; trying to understand the diagram of the imaginary woman’s half-pelvis viewed from the side, no knowledge of the relationship between the vagina and the uterus. Somehow, I placed it but must’ve done it wrong because it was terribly uncomfortable. I remained self-conscious the whole day while everyone else was splashing, carefree.
Considering how all-consuming it is at first, oddly enough having a monthly menstrual period just becomes part of life’s routine. I have no memory of dealing with my period at all in college or medical training, but monthly menses start to become all-consuming again when one is either trying not to have a baby or trying to have one.
I was fortunate to have no trouble conceiving and certainly didn’t miss having periods during pregnancy or nursing. But somewhere along the way, I’d come to believe that by the time I stopped menstruating for good, I would be “old.” I don’t know that I ever had an exact age in mind but I thought I’d be decrepit and grey once I no longer had to purchase feminine hygiene products.
As I approached 40, years of pent-up performance anxiety centered around perfectionism at work and home caught up with me and led me to a holistic therapist.
“I’d like to see if maybe your lack of sleep and overall exhaustion are affecting your hormone levels,” she pondered aloud. “Let’s check your saliva for levels of cortisol and other factors.”
Apparently, she wanted “data” to see just how anxious I actually was. I had to spit enough to fill up a tiny test tube with saliva every 4 hours for 24 hours and then mail the specimens to a special laboratory in Seattle. Without my knowing, she’d also checked the box to search for antibodies to gluten within the saliva specimen.
The lab results arrived to me by email and when I saw that the anti-gluten antibodies were elevated, I was furious enough to pick up the phone and call the lab myself. “You don’t understand,” I spoke tersely to the innocent technologist on the other end of the phone. I sat criss-cross on the floor of my closet so that my kids wouldn’t find me crying. “My best friend has just died of peritoneal implant disease and my psychiatrist of 15 years has just closed her practice. I’m hanging by a thread. And now I have to give up bread and pasta?! I didn’t even ask for this lab test! Ugh!”
“I understand you’re upset,” the gentle female voice responded. “It’s just so good you learned this before going through menopause. Eliminating gluten from your diet will reduce inflammation and make menopause so much less troublesome.”
Menopause? Are you seriously talking to me about menopause at my age? It seemed ridiculously irrelevant to discuss such matters given all the other more critical issues I was dealing with at the time. Begrudgingly, I stopped eating gluten, which was easier to do when soon thereafter, two of my kids also tested positive for celiac disease. I’ll never know for certain if being gluten-free made menopause easier for me but I tell myself it did because it was the first of many big sacrifices I began to make on behalf of my own sustainable well-being.
Although premenstrual syndrome mood swings worsened after each of my three children were born, once my periods became more irregular around age 47 it was harder to predict my moments of “temporary insanity” before I randomly started spotting again. I’d get so frustrated when all the mindfulness techniques I’d been practicing would go out the window when one of my teenagers would talk back to me or my spouse would make an innocent comment about all the dishes in the sink and I’d fly off the handle.
I began to have real respect for hormonal shifts when I started to see them manifesting through my daughter, Ellie, when she also started cycling. The relentless crying fits akin to a toddler were much easier for me to understand through the lens of my own emotional instability.
Thankfully, I have a wise friend who is a licensed clinical social worker specializing in Somatic Experiencing, a body-oriented approach to the healing of trauma and other stress disorders developed by Peter A. Levine, PhD. Her life’s work is about gently guiding clients to develop increasing tolerance for difficult bodily sensations and suppressed emotions. Having her tell me that hormonal emotional hijacking is real was comforting:
Mindfulness and self-awareness cannot hold a candle to hormonal emotional hijacking. No one can rationalize or talk themselves out of the normal, natural but intense hormonal emotional storms that come with being female. When you suddenly feel like nothing makes sense and everything in your life seems much more terrible than it was yesterday, just don’t make any important decisions for 24 hours. Keep your distance from others. Don’t act. Stay physically safe. Keep your radius of influence small and wait for it to pass. It always will.
Besides managing my emotions, one of the biggest challenges during perimenopause was an uncontrollable craving for chocolate. No matter what I ate for any meal, all I wanted was chocolate. Many days I consciously decided to eat only chocolate chips or Hershey’s dark chocolate-covered almond block for lunch to “save calories,” rather than eating a proper lunch followed by chocolate.
Eventually, my clothes started fitting differently, and not in a good way. I began to really tune into my body and it’s needs, substituting chocolate-flavored teas for chocolate bars. I also got really curious about what it was deep down that I was really craving. I started a gratitude journal practice, looking for sweetness in my life and, unconsciously, emboldening self-trust.
The unexpected gift of menopause was that, almost like a switch was flipped, I could no longer tolerate anything that wasn’t acceptable for me. After a lifetime of playing by the rules and calculating every step, I became fiercely self-compassionate.
I mustered the gumption to leave a toxic environment where I’d worked for 16 years but had never felt “good enough.” I didn’t know what lay ahead for me but my mantra became “anything but this.” I embarked on a spirited journey of self-discovery, an archeological dig for all the hidden treasures I’d buried when I’d decided to go to medical school. An entire summer was spent in my bathing suit in my backyard, relocating every few hours with the sun, sleeping, reading, writing and sweating so much so that my brother who was visiting for a weekend from Florida told me I “smelled bad.”
I could say I had some brain fog and forgetfulness but I experienced it more like a dream-state because I was no longer driving myself so hard. It was a process of embracing change, rather than resisting; a returning, revealing, revering, remapping, and reprogramming of my hard-drive; a fresh embodiment of my most essential self.
If I hadn’t rerouted, I would’ve been trying to mold menopause around my life but instead, I rerouted my life around menopause. Always cold-natured, I found night sweats and hot flashes ironically pleasant and because I didn’t need to get up early to go to work, I could sleep later if I’d had a restless night.
Formerly riddled with endless worrying, I began approaching my anxiety with curiosity, learning to respect it as an important messenger from my intuition rather than a feeling to extinguish. Without all the chaotic distractions of my formerly manic life, I could hear my own soul’s longings for the first time.
My advice? Save money for menopause. Don’t wait for retirement to live your best life. Menopause can be your greatest adventure yet. Recognize there’s safety in freedom rather than in blind adherence to arbitrary societal rules of what’s okay and what’s not okay for you.
Menopause is a liminal zone between a life of “have-tos” and “shoulds” and a life of “get-tos” and opportunities, when each day begins with the question, “What do I want to do next?”
Dr. O’Connell
Tracey O’Connell, MD is a Mindset & Emotions Facilitator and WholistHealth Mindset Coach, working with adults and teens to help them gain courage to show up more boldly and authentically in everything they do.