How THE CHANGE Changed Me

Life After Menopause

When I first started my career as a teacher as a whippersnapper at the age of twenty-three, I saw an older colleague in our lounge, fanning herself and sweating. I thought she was having a heart attack. Her face, neck and chest were flushed, and her hair literally dripped sweat. I asked if she was okay, and she gave me a weak smile before telling me she was fine. “It’s just The Change,” she explained. I put The Change in mental capital letters, giving it a gravitas and heft that seemed to go along with the conditions of women I began to recognize as being in the trenches of menopause.

These women had a common look about them. They wore loose-fitting clothes. They fanned themselves with anything readily available: menus, floormats, a flip-flop. They looked haunted. In one memorable case, a science teacher I knew and admired as a bastion of strength and authority, started inexplicably weeping during class one day, and I heard later that her breakdown was attributed to “The Misery.”

I was sympathetic but wondered if perhaps it wasn’t as bad as it looked. Maybe, I thought, it wasn’t such a big deal. Maybe the women I knew were just weak or overly dramatic. What a fool was I…

As soon as I turned forty, my body decided that it was going to completely shut down the baby-making branch of the plumbing department. First, my periods trickled down and then just stopped. I received this downgrade with no small amount of satisfaction. I don’t know any woman who really enjoys her period (except maybe now and then when there’s a pregnancy scare at a particularly inopportune time), but I was especially glad to see it dwindle and disappear.

But then things took a turn. My OB-GYN called it “flooding” and assured me that it was typical. “You’re pretty early to be going through menopause, but this is totally within the range of normal,” she said, trying to make it sound like I was precocious or something when what was really going down was a literal bloodbath. I tried to explain to her that what she characterized as a heavy flow was what appeared to be my uterus screeching its way out of my body, dragging its bitter claws into everything on its way out.

This wasn’t a “flow.” It was a gush. A geyser. A downpour. There were chunks, for God’s sake. Not…

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