Suppose you’ve been through a pregnancy since the invention of the internet. In that case, you’ve probably found yourself going down the rabbit hole of week-to-week progress of the baby growing inside you, rich with details about the baby’s size (a grain of rice! a pea! a walnut!) and what’s happening to your body. There have also been a million books about it, covering all the symptoms your body might have and what you can do to ease discomfort. There’s also the wisdom of other women, freely and publicly, given in person and online. There’s no one way to be pregnant, and women who’ve been through pregnancy know this; one gets morning sickness while another doesn’t, for example, and one person’s most intense symptom doesn’t happen at all to someone else.
But when it comes to menopause and perimenopause, solidarity is mostly dropped because it’s not okay to admit you’re going through it. Even doctors won’t tell you much about what to expect, what falls within “normal” parameters and what doesn’t, and how to alleviate symptoms that interfere with your day-to-day operations. You know what I want instead? The same play-by-play we get for pregnancy, with all of its variations and all of its community.
What to expect when you’re not expecting
I know it’s easier and more accurate to map out the path of cells-to-fetus-to-baby growth than to chart someone’s journey through menopause. But menopause is much more universal; all women go through it whether or not they ever get pregnant. It’s been happening since dawn, yet it’s STILL hard to find useful information because the medical community hasn’t studied it much. And solidarity? Among good friends, sure, but out in the world, it’s considered a source of shame due to the fact that women aren’t supposed to age—and if we do age, we’re not supposed to talk about it. In that gap, we sit here alone with our symptoms, worrying if they’re “normal,” searching for ways to ease them, and wondering how long they’re going to last.
I’m in my mid-50s, and at no point did any of my doctors talk to me about menopause and what sorts of changes I could expect. If I didn’t bring it up, they wouldn’t have. There I was in my 40s, then my early 50s, and not once did it come up beyond the standard “when was your last period” question from whoever took my blood pressure before the doctor came in.
Been there, done that?
I switched gynecologists after a particularly bad experience with mine. She wasn’t my first pick anyway; I went to a group practice, and one by one, the doctors I had (and liked) left until I got stuck with Doctor Crankypants. Dr. Crankypants said things like, “I don’t even know why there’s a word for perimenopause,” and reacted as if I was hoping for medication every time, I asked her about something, despite having zero history of doing so. When I started asking about symptoms of going off birth control pills as well as menopause itself, she was dismissive, as in, “Yeah yeah, that’s how it goes.”
Can you imagine if your OB-GYN treated your pregnancy that way, as if so many people had been through it already that you should know about it as if YOU were the doctor who’d seen all those pregnancies? It was still MY first one. And this stage of my life is just as new to me. I may be your gazillionth patient with it, but I’m not the doctor.
Can we do something about those symptoms?
Hot flashes. Brain fog. Mood swings. Physical changes. There are ads everywhere for medication that helps men get erections, but all I see for women is the dire, “You may experience dryness or pain during intercourse.” So, I finally don’t need to worry about birth control anymore, and now you’re telling me I’m going to stop enjoying sex? Where’s my million-dollar ad campaign about the solution to that one?
Googling isn’t super helpful when it comes to alleviating symptoms. Most websites suggest talking to your doctor about prescribing hormones and tell you to wear layers, then call it a day. This is where we’ve netted out after all this time? Again, I go back to pregnancy, where one can find a huge range of suggestions to help ease what ails you, from body pillows and diet alterations to treatments for ligament pain, nausea, breast pain, heartburn, and more.
Where is it in pop culture?
For my entire childhood, menopause was a punchline in comedy, which is why most of us grew up thinking it was some line that you cross in an instant… one day, you’re fertile; the next day, you’re not. Pregnancy, of course, is well documented in movies and on TV, even if they haven’t progressed to the point where a birth scene doesn’t involve screaming. (For those of us who fared well with epidurals, the classic scene of a woman screaming at her partner seems woefully outdated and unrelatable.)
Pregnancy is everywhere, but menopause is mostly invisible. There are some exceptions, like Pamela Adlon’s great show Better Things and that glorious scene in the movie Something’s Gotta Give when Jack Nicholson and Diane Keaton are about to have sex, and he pauses to ask her about birth control. “Menopause,” she tells him. “Who’s the lucky boy?” he responds with a grin.
THAT’S what I want to see. Make menopause a turn-on. (And you know what? Could you do it for pregnancy, too.)? Until then, whenever someone uses it as a punchline, I want another character to chime in about the fact that menopause is a phase that can take TEN YEARS to complete, so girls won’t grow up thinking it’s (a) a light switch; (b) a joke; and (c) something you’re not supposed to talk about—or even know about.
Leave a Reply