Is menopause merely the cessation of your period? is it about losing your memory and having hot flashes? losing your fertility? Or is it a mid-life reorientation project?
This a journey you are embarking on, a deeper phase to your woman's journey, a developing and a continuing and an unknowing. It feels to me like being in a labyrinthe in the woods, a circular path that branches out and leads in so many different directions it's easy to get lost.
What is the path of a woman's life? especially a woman who decides to have children, who gives over her body to create another body. How does she regain her centre (if she has lost it)? and how does she keep those boundaries clear - me, us, them? How does she find herself again? Menopause is part of that journey.
Menopause is not an overnight thing. It creeps up on you slowly. You don't notice it happening until one day you realize your period hasn't come this month, and your pregnancy test comes back negative. Then it comes back the next six months so you forget there's something going on. Or your PMS increases to two weeks out of the month, and if you really stop and look at it, you see your emotional landscape is a little out of control. Or maybe you aren't sleeping well at night and not even Chamomile tea or hot milk helps calm the little gerbil on its cage running all night long in your brain.
There are many many symptoms, and lots of websites to describe them to you. What this blog tries to point to is not the symptoms, but the journey. It's as if you are on the highway to Ottawa from Montreal, and took a side road without realizing it. You look up and wonder where you are, the landscape doesn't look familiar, the trees are in the wrong place, and the road signs post names of towns you don't remember or recognize. You need to figure out where you are.
Honour your not knowing by standing still. The first thing to do when you feel lost, is to stop. Stop running in circles, stop pretending you know where you are. Stop and ask for help.
Someone who has been there before may help you. Someone who has been lost and found the way again.
This mid-life woman's way has been largely uncharted till recently. The women who came before us were told they didn't matter, or they were second best. Or their uterus was hysterical. The male hero story describes the quest of the masculine, but where are the stories of the feminine quest?
There are wise women who are writing now about women's cycles, women's journey, woman's life trajectory, especially about menopause. Browse this website for some of their articles, for reviews of their books, for mention of the sacred journey.
It is time to honour your own knowing. Begin with admitting you don't know, and stay with the question. Questing. Know that the way out is the way in. Going down and in will lead you up and out.
And watch www.questinggirl.blogspot.com for all new postings. I am working on a book for women in mid-life called The Tao of Turning Fifty, and a new website and classes to go with it, sometime in 2011.
Take good care now,
Musemother/Jenn
