Aging Shouldn’T Have To Be So Hot And Cold

I’m having a little trouble with this aging thing,” my friend says to me. Her doctor has just informed my 43-year-old friend that she has officially entered peri-menopause, that “neither here nor there” state of hormonal flotsam/jetsam preceding menopause. She is not taking the news well.

“What’s next?” she wonders aloud. “Floppy purple hats? Tea parties for cats? Selsen Blue?”

Hmmm, I think. Tea parties for cats. Now, that’s a lovely idea. Maybe a little messy, but sort of comforting, too, in a Beatrix Potter kind of way. I nod my head, trying to look sage.

Her face is flushed a gorgeous pink, something that, 10 years ago, might have been attributed to her falling in love. Now, it’s regarded as her apocalyptic hormones. (Of course, a case could be made for the notion that falling in love is also the result of apocalyptic hormones. But I digress.)

“I’m hot, then cold,” she says. “I sleep 12 hours one night and three the next. I cry when I watch bad made-for-TV movies. I don’t have the same capacity to be agreeable. Sometimes, I just feel nuts.”

Whoa, I think. That means I’ve been in this peri-stage since I was roughly, oh, maybe 12. I wonder, silently, how I will know when I’ve reached this milestone if all the markers point to what I have always considered to be just my regular life.

I meet another friend for lunch. She stares at her hands for most of the meal.

“In the old days, we’d be dead by now and wouldn’t have to deal with this stuff,” she says, examining her “liver spots.”

While I agree with her basic premise that dead people generally don’t have to deal with a lot, I can pretty easily fight off the urge to become one of them. Medical advancement has its privileges, one of them being the chance to live long enough to examine my old friend’s hands.

I have known her since we were both 7. She had these same freckles on her hands then. We used to play connect-the-dots with them. But now, these freckles are the harbingers of doom, the skin-deep proof that we are no longer 7. This, to anyone who remembers being 7, is good news. She, deep in the throes of peri-something, has forgotten this.

This whole pre/peri/post approach to women’s lives leaves me cold (and, of course, alternately hot). While it’s often a relief to know that changes in one’s mood or body have a “perfectly normal” explanation, sometimes those explanations (and the ubiquitous “treatments”) can leave us feeling less than perfectly normal. You know, the whole horse urine/yam jelly/chanting hag regimen.

Besides, normalcy is highly overrated. The happiest people seem to sense this from an early age. The next happiest people learn it in midlife. In fact, it seems to be one of the fundamental lessons of the middle years, when genteel women get uppity and uppity men grow gentle.

The experts tell us this shift is all due to a general decline in our hormones. Women have menopause while men have the relatively recently coined andropause (coming soon to a marketing group near you.)

But with all due respect to the undeniable impact of hormones (and some of the truly beneficial aids for regulating them), I think some of “the change” we go through in midlife has another explanation.

Part of it might be that after a couple of decades in the trenches, women just get tired of being terminally nice, and men get tired of being terminally driven. And while traversing these crossroads can be problematic for all concerned, it may not require a full arsenal of treatments. Maybe just a few will do.

After all, life is not primarily a disease process, it’s an ease process: the fine and acquired art of falling into the comfort of our own skins, trusting our instincts. This, it seems, is the essential change. Maybe that’s why when all the procreation stuff is over and done, men take up quilting and women take up tractors.

And, at least for some of us, the occasional fur ball tea party, too.