Nova Infernos of Doom and Other Fun Ways to Enjoy Your 40s (and 50s)

I’ve been in perimenopause for the last few years. It probably started when I was 38 or 39, but it’s hard to say. I went to three OBGYN practitioners who failed to diagnose me with early perimenopause, as if it were some rare, hard to identify condition rather than something that every woman experiences. When I was diagnosed, it was by my primary care physician. My husband and I ran to a fertility specialist, but it was already too late. My eggs had mostly flown the coup.

Menopause, and perimenopause, are strange. Not because they’re rare, but because no one wants to talk about them. People get uncomfortable. Awkward. And part of this is probably because I can’t have children, and no one knows what to say to that. Which is okay. I get it. It’s hard to know what to say to that. But most of the time, I just want to vent about how I can be sitting at home, minding my own business, when suddenly a nova inferno of doom ignites in my torso and radiates out of my entire body as if I, and not the furnace, regulated the temperature of the entire house.

Because we don’t talk about menopause, I didn’t know the difference between menopause and perimenopause until I started going through it. Menopause is when you’re done. It’s when you haven’t had a period for an entire year. And your body has basically shut down your egg processing plant. No more eggs. Your ovaries finally get to rest and go on vacation. Maybe to the Bahamas.

Perimenopause, however, is the entire shutting down process. It takes a while. Just like when any business closes and holds a clearance sale, perimenopause is your body’s Everything Must Go Sale. All the eggs that are left, the ones on the back of shelf gathering dust, the ones that have been turned so no one could see the cracked bits, even the expired eggs, are finally ready to be processed. This process seems endless. But your body has to adjust to this new situation, this clearing out of inventory before packing for that vacation to the Bahamas. Everything has to be just right. Hormones adjusted. New inventory discovered. New sale signs made. Eggs processed. Hormones re-adjusted. Still more inventory back there. Still more sale signage. Body adjusted. Everything gets tweaked in increments, over and over and over and over and over.

This is the part everyone knows about. Hot flashes. Tears. Rage. These generally aren’t symptoms of menopause, but of PERImenopause, the big clearance sale. And there’s more. Fatigue. Muscle weakness. Aches. Brain fog. Forgetting whatever that thought was. Or that one. And oh shit, did I mention crying? Excuse me, I have to take off my light hoodie and go and crawl inside my freezer for a minute.

This can go for years. I’ve been experiencing all of this, in varying degrees, for the last five years.

Which is why I deserve presents. We all do honestly. We have engagement showers (getting married and about to make/adopt some babies!), baby showers (that baby is on it’s way, get ready!), but no menopause showers (no more babies coming, time to plan for the Bahamas!). And the point of all these showers is to get some things to prepare you for the next stage of life (which probably has something to do with babies). But not everyone gets married or has babies. And dammit, when you hit perimenopause, you need some things. You need a lot of things. You DESERVE lots of things. So I would like to propose menopause showers, where your friends and loved ones can get you stocked up for The Change. Here are some registry suggestions:

A cooling gel pillow, so you can sleep for at least 30 minutes at night, aka the time of a thousand hot flashes.

A punching bag, so that you don’t hit anyone you actually love in your burst of inexplicable homicidal rage.

Kleenex. Lots of it. So when you begin weeping while watching fish leap out of the ocean and eat seagulls during a documentary, and then refuse to eat the rest of your chicken dinner, as least you don’t have snot on your face.

Tank tops. A lightweight hoodie. Layers, people. It’s all about layers. You gotta be ready to throw off those layers at any second. This goes for socks and shoes. Mules, slingbacks, you need shoes you can kick right off. Because, for some ungodly reason, your feet also experience the hot flash fires of hell.

A voodoo doll. Again, for the rage. That guy who just cut you off in traffic? Yeah. He’s gonna get it now.

Face creams, sheet masks, lotion. Watch your skin alternate between parchment and acne. You thought that shit ended after middle school. HAHAHAHAHAHA. Sucker.

Water bottle. Who doesn’t love a water bottle? Hydration is awesome. Plus, you can pour it over your head in a hot flash emergency.

Paper towels/more Kleenex. For cleaning up the floor after you pour the contents of a water bottle over your head.

Tea. Some calming tea. Some don’t cry so much tea. Don’t be so angry tea. MY GOD THE SUN IS RADIATING OUT OF MY CHEST. Maybe some iced tea. Maybe just some ice. Bonus: throwing ice cubes at people when you Hulk out!

Menopause acupuncture. Oh, but needles are scary? Not anymore. Nothing is scary anymore. Because every day is hormonal chaos and you haven’t slept in two weeks. Where the hell is that gel pillow? Did no one give you a gel pillow? BURN THEM WITH YOUR INTERNAL FIRES. Oh, thanks for that calming tea. Ahhhhhhh. Now, yes, let’s do that acupuncture and have a good night’s rest.

Books. But that brain fog is a real thing. You need something engaging. Something funny. Or something light and fun, where you don’t have to pay too much attention. Because you literally can’t. This essay is too long, isn’t it? If you’ve made it this far, you deserve a treat from this list for sure.

Chocolate. Always. For everything. And you’ve already gained ten pounds anyway, and it makes no difference what you eat. Salad makes you gain weight. You’ve been nagged and bullied and harassed about your body by the entire world for your whole life. Eat the chocolate. Put chocolate on everything. Put chocolate in your calming tea. It’s good. I promise.

Alcohol makes your hot flashes worse. So ask for wine (or whatever), but expect to have to find that sweet spot of not caring about the hot flashes the will burn you mercilessly. Know trying to find the sweet spot is a fool’s errand going in. But brain fog makes you sound drunk most of the time anyway. Screw it. Drink what you want. Layer. Have the water bottle ready. Maybe a bowl of ice. Maybe drink frozen margaritas or daiquiris.

Was that list too long? Did the brain fog kick back in? Wake up! Here’s something important! If you go looking for menopause support, or menopause relief, or products to help with menopause, you’ll discover that there is a lot of quackery out there. Some of it is legit. Black Cohosh can indeed help with hot flashes. But the long term effects aren’t well studied. And this is true for much of menopause. Women, as per the usual, aren’t a priority when it comes to medical research (and while this is changing, it’s a slow change. Much like the menopause of America). And to complicate that further, supplements aren’t well regulated, so who knows what you’re getting in that pill? And it’s even worse when you think about how we don’t talk about menopause, or support each other through menopause, or even normalize menopause and the aging process. Because let’s face it. Nothing you do is going to stop it. Period. (Or, really, no period).

Which is why we need menopause registries, and, in the future, showers (parties! With real people! In your house!). We need menopause conversations. And conversations about aging. Because no matter when you start perimenopause, it’s going to change your life. Literally. You will be older. You will be becoming infertile. You will be tired and forgetful and angry and sad and anxious and spacey and unsettled and pimply and thirsty and hot. You will not feel powerful, or strong, or goddess-like. You will feel a bit like a crone, especially if you start perimenopause early while the rest of your friends are still flush with fertility. But you will be hotter than you’ve ever been before.

And all of this is okay. You don’t need to anti-age. In fact, you can’t anti-age. Nothing, absolutely nothing you do will stop it. Aging is going to happen. Accept it. Enjoy it. Who the hell wants to be stuck in stasis forever? Change is inevitable. And the entire anti-aging industry is designed to sell stuff that reinforces stupid ideas about women. Fuck that shit. Don’t buy the hype! Buy the stuff you like, the stuff that makes you feel good, the stuff that comforts you. Cooling towels, books that you really want to read but haven’t yet, sheet masks that make you feel soothed and lovely. You don’t need that expensive eye cream (unless you like expensive eye cream). You don’t need that dubious weight loss pill. And you definitely don’t need anything that promises to make you younger. You’re not younger. Tell that shit to get off your lawn! And buy the things that make you feel good, not the things that make you feel broken and in need of repairs.

Better yet, get someone to buy it for you.

So here’s my registry link. Go make yours and add it in the comments!

And Soon You'll Turn 43

No one tells you how to be middle aged. It just happens one day. You wake up and realize that you’ve lived half of your life. For most of your life, your life was ahead of you—a mystery, an unknown variable. You could be anything, do anything. You had so much time left, you couldn’t even imagine living past 30.

And then you did. And you lived further. And some of your friends died. A shocking number of your friends had cancer. You tried to reach out more, and you became a better friend, and you let go of the people that weren’t very good friends to you. And you thought about cancer so much that becoming diagnosed with cancer became one of your biggest fears. And your parents got older, and ill (with cancer), and your friends’ parents got older, and some became ill, and some died, and you felt mortality coiling around you and squeezing. You’re not ready for your parents to die. You’re not ready for your friends’ parents to die. You’re not ready for your friends to die. And there is nothing you can do to stop the inevitable tides.

You develop a prevailing awareness of death.

And you always thought you had time to have kids, and then you found yourself in a fertility clinic listening to a specialist, one of the best in the state, tell you that it was too late. You had gone into early menopause, and the only option was a donor egg, IVF, and hormones that would cost over $30k for an 11% chance of carrying to term. And you couldn’t stop weeping for the loss of something you never had. You wept at your friends’ children, and you wept at Shazam! (of all things), and you wept at old home movies, and you wept to your mother and your husband, who told you that it was okay, that you weren’t defective. But you still aren’t sure you believe them.

Your body continues to betray you, and although you knew it was going to happen, although you knew that things would start to hurt and creak and crack and pop and stiffen, you didn’t expect it to be your left knee. Or the ball of your right foot. Or that place beneath your left shoulder that becomes so knotted that when you hold things over your head, you hold them at an angle.

You expected to have a mid-life crisis where you would buy a ridiculous car or go on an expensive trip or at least get a completely different sort of haircut, and instead you question if you’ve done enough, if you’ve done it well, if you’ve done the things that you wanted. You question how much time you have left to do all the things you still want to do, and realize that you’re going to have to choose between them. You’ve reached a strange place where the opinions of other people matter less, but your aren’t sure what you think of yourself and your life and how your values have changed and how your goals have changed. You think things like if you adopt, is that a mid-life crisis? If you don’t adopt, is that a mid-life crisis? And since adoption starts at about $30k anyway, and you’re already in the hole about $130k for student loans, and you have a mortgage, then you think that maybe mid-life is about realizing that not only can you not take anything with you when you die, but how much you’ll actually owe instead.

And on second thought, maybe it’s a really good thing you didn’t have a mid-life crisis where you bought an expensive car or went on an exotic vacation because you couldn’t afford any more debt anyway. Retirement isn’t going to save up for itself.

No one prepares you for mid-life. No one is interested in mid-life accomplishments. Everyone is focused on the 30 under 30, or the 40 under 40, but no one writes about the 45 at 45, or the 50 in their 50s, the 60 in their 60s, or the 70 in their 70s. And no one cares if you’re 80 or 90 or 100, but if you’ve managed to live the longest, 104, or 108, or maybe even longer, then you get a feel-good news story about how you did it, and you can attribute your lucky longevity to whiskey and scrambled eggs and always owning a dog.

Sometimes, you find yourself writing in second person even though you always hated when people did that. Weirdly, it’s not so bad now.

You are surprised at what you know. You know how to argue against companies, and you know how to demand fair treatment, not just for yourself, but for the people around you. You’re very good at wrangling. You’re fairly savvy with money, and surprisingly organized, considering that once upon a time you never wrote anything down (who were you then?!). You have a strange affinity for rules and order that shocks the everliving ebejezus out of you when you find yourself complaining about jaywalkers.

You seek out seats at concerts and are delighted when bands start early. The idea of being out past midnight exhausts your soul.

You sometimes wonder if you will ever develop confidence in yourself.

You also sometimes wonder if you will ever develop a taste for anchovies. You are surprised that Skittles don’t taste as good as they used to. You marvel at some of the things you used to eat, and are not surprised that your tooth enamel isn’t better.

Your range and breadth of emotion has deepened and expanded, and you feel things now that are so complex and nuanced you cannot find adequate words to describe them. You find a picture of your old living room and you feel happy/bitter/sweet/nostalgic/yearning/loss/forgiveness/gratitude/delight and you don’t know what to call it. You feel things like that all the time now. You are surrounded by this nuanced ocean of emotional sensation and resonance. You are overwhelmed by the constant complexity of it.

You weren’t prepared to discover that old friends that you had lost touch with became addicted to drugs and are homeless.

You realize that your grandparents died 20 years ago. You have never stopped grieving their loss. At the same time, you can still feel them with you.

And you realize that everything from your childhood has changed. Your grandparents’ house. Your grandmother’s condo. The house where you grew up. The magnolia tree that your mother planted is gone. The fence that your father built is gone. And although these things are gone, you remember them, bright and vividly, like you could travel to where they were and they would still be there, exactly the same.

But you can never, ever remember to wear your reading glasses.

And you realize this is all okay. Life is more beautiful and precious and ephemeral than you ever realized. And although you already knew that life was amazing and precious and brief, you didn’t know that life was amazing and precious and brief. Only the accumulation of time has been able to teach you that in way that reaches the bone of your bones. Every moment matters more than you could ever have possibly realized before you were middle-aged. Life has a different savor. Like learning to taste the different notes in coffee. No one told you that time is transformative. You had no idea that mid-life would be a time of growth. You can feel the uncomfortable shifting of being in chrysalis, and you are delighted that you have the capacity for so much more change and potential than you ever knew.

Memory piles up thick and deep, like stacks of books. Little things remind you of other little things, and before you know it, you’re knee deep in the past. And every time, the past pulls you deeper into the present. Into this miraculous, flicker-short life. Into the sheer fantastic impossibility of existing as a being of consciousness. Becoming middle-aged is like becoming a banker, but not one who deals in currency, but one who invests in the daily miracles of being alive in this world. The miracle of breath. The miracle of grass. The miracle of rain. The miracle of motion. You have so much more than you ever thought you’d have.

And you’ve lost so much more than you ever thought you could lose.

No one told you that time is cleansing.

No one told you that mid-life was a time of incredible growth. That it’s painful and heavy and glorious and liberating and sad and adaptive and strange. But most of all, it’s learning. And accepting. And being.

You have no idea why people don’t write more about mid-life. Or make lists of accomplishments from middle-aged people. Or, perhaps more appropriately, lists of insights.

Being middle-aged is nowhere near as boring as you thought it would be.

And no one told you how grateful you would be to be here for it.

And you begin to think that, regardless of the amount of time you have left, it doesn’t really matter. Because the only time that matters is now. And now is all you have.

Now is all you ever had.

Mensa

In 2003, my friend Thaddeus and I, on a lark, took the Mensa test. We went to some public school that I can’t remember the name of, and we bubbled in the bubbles on a few Scantron sheets in response to a small battery of IQ tests. It felt horribly like the GREs or SATs, and I had to keep reminding myself that nothing was at stake. We took the precaution of telling no one what we were doing. My scores weren’t being sent anywhere. And the questions, or, at least, the language questions, really weren’t that bad. We laughed after the test, and went to the pub, and that was that.

We both got in.

And for the past 17 years, I have continued to renew my Mensa membership, despite the fact that I have been to exactly two Mensa functions since 2003. One was a lecture. Thad and I both went, and we both went to the pub down the street before the talk, for social lubrication purposes, and walked in fairly drunk. I remember talking earnestly to a good many people after the talk, all of whom invited us to various local chapter activities. They clearly thought we were extroverts. (So much for high IQs.) Of those invitations, we accepted one. We reviewed essays for scholarships. That was the second Mensa function. The experience was so surreal, an odd combination of contentiousness, formality, and zealotry, that I remember it all occurring by candlelight (which surely couldn’t be right) in a formal dining room (possibly right). Next year, at essay review time, we were “busy.”

For at least five years (and probably longer, because I’ve reached the age where everything that I think was five years ago was actually 15 years ago), I have been determined not to renew. I don’t need to spend the money on a membership I don’t use. I have no stakes in the organization (although it is a fine organization). I don’t need the validation (as much as I once did). But just as the deadline is about to slip by, I renew. Even when I had no money as a graduate student, I managed to renew my membership.

Because 17 years ago, when I received my acceptance letter to Mensa, I told my father, who guffawed and said, “Well that’s just funny.” I told my mother, who was suitably impressed. And I told my grandmother Gigi, my father’s mother, who was ecstatic. “Oh my goodness!” she exclaimed, “Mensa! Why that’s wonderful! How simply wonderful. Oh, tell me all about it. I want to know everything. Were there any cute boys? Hee hee!” We talked on the phone for an hour, and I promised I would let her know how the first meeting went.

A week later, she had a stroke in Costco, went into a coma, and died.

I had just started knitting her a scarf when my father called to tell me she’d had a stroke. “No need to come to the hospital,” he said. The hospital was in Northern Virginia, and I was in Richmond. “We’re going to wait and see how bad the damage is.” I kept knitting. I was new to knitting, and I knit slowly and carefully. The next day, my father said the damage was extensive, and she would not recover or wake up. The next day, the decision was made to take her off life support. Later, I would learn that my aunt, my father’s sister, had protested this so vehemently that my great-aunt, my grandmother’s sister, had to side with my father to overrule my aunt. My grandmother had no living will, and my aunt remembered her wishes differently from everyone else. (My aunt typically remembers most things differently from everyone else.) After my grandmother died, my father had to drive back to Northern Virginia to sign the paperwork releasing my grandmother’s body to the funeral home for cremation. My aunt refused to sign the release. Because my father had gone ahead with the funeral proceedings, my aunt stopped speaking to him for over a year.

The service was in Northern Virginia, where my grandmother had lived. At the service, my aunt blithely introduced my mother to my father’s new wife. My aunt’s son, my cousin Buzz, who hadn’t spoken to my aunt in nearly 20 years, was surprisingly there. At the reception in my grandmother’s condo, he cornered me in the kitchenette after finding out that I working on my Master’s in English, and mercilessly needled me for not having thoroughly memorized Milton. (“I should probably be the one getting the Master’s degree! Hahaha! But I’d rather have a job.”) My aunt held court in the back bedroom, and mourners were brought singly or in pairs to pay their respects. When the lights flickered and momentarily went out in the condo, my father looked at me said, “That’s Mother. And she’s pissed about all of this.”

The interment of her ashes was in West Virginia, where my grandmother grew up. My father drove, and I sat in the backseat of the car, with my grandmother’s urn resting on the floorboard, still knitting her scarf. I have almost no memory of the interment. Instead, I remember my stepmother in the front seat, getting a paper-cut on a book she was reading, and insisting we stop at a drugstore for antibiotic ointment. She hopped back in the car and slathered the ointment on her finger. Thirty minutes later, she began to feel strange, and decided to check the ingredients in the ointment—after all, she was allergic to sulfa drugs. And lo, the antibiotic ointment did indeed contain sulfa drugs, and she began to go into anaphylactic shock. My father sped down the windy mountain roads in search of a hospital, and when he finally found one, 20 minutes later, he pulled up to the ER entrance. He helped my stepmother into the ER, and the ER staff whisked her into treatment. My father came back outside and parked the car in a parking space. He stood outside the car, locking the car again and again with the key fob. The mountains echoed the repeated half-honks.

“After all,” he said, pressing the button on the key fob, “my gun’s in there. And Mother.”

I finished knitting the scarf on the drive back, and then I read in the back seat. I put the scarf in my knitting bag. I tried to wear it once, and wrapping it around my neck felt like suffocating in memory. But I couldn’t give it away, or throw it away, or do anything with it at all. For 17 years, I’ve carried the scarf with me, from home to apartment to home, from Virginia to Georgia, and every winter, when I pull out my hats and mittens and gloves and scarves, I find it again. Off-white cream, feathery, with soft watercolor pastels here and there. Sassy and soft and subdued all at once. She would have loved it. And I put it back in the box.

I know that this year I’ll probably renew my Mensa membership again, even though right now, I tell myself I won’t. But I don’t throw away the notice either. I hide it on my desk until March, and when my membership is just about to expire, I’ll have it waiting. And I’ll have it waiting because I don’t have her. Because I never drove up to the hospital to see her one final time. Because she always believed in me and treated me with kindness. Because she always loved and encouraged my writing. Because when my father shook me and knocked me down and called me stupid so many times I thought I was going to die, I snuck into his bedroom and called her, because only his mother, my four-year-old self reasoned, could tell him what to do. “Please,” I begged, “please tell him to leave me alone. I promise I’ll be good, please tell him that I don’t want to be hurt anymore. Please spank him so he knows how it feels to be hurt. Then he won’t hurt me. And break his toys so he knows not to do that. Okay? Please?” She asked me to put my father on the phone, and I refused, because I would get into trouble for using the phone without permission. So we hung up, and she called back. I held my breath and hid in my room. When my father found me, he told me never to talk to my grandmother without his permission. But he also left me alone. For an entire week.

When my grandmother died, I had already lost both of my grandparents on my mom’s side. My grandmother Boo died in 2000, my grandfather Man in 2001. My parents divorced in the fall of 1998, and my father married the woman he’d been having an affair with a few months later. She came with two young children, and my father gave them all the things he never gave me or my brother. He went to their soccer games. He bought them bicycles. I watched them closely for signs of abuse. But they never had to call my grandmother in secret, begging her to stop my father from hurting them.

After I got into Mensa, and after my grandmother died, I applied to a PhD program in Atlanta. I got into that, too. And I moved to a city where I didn’t know anyone. It never felt like starting over. It felt like starting. My mom supported me and came to visit often. My father never visited. And time covered the holes and gaps of loss. The loss of my grandparents. My hometown. The father who would never be a father to me. Living far away from my mom, my friends, my brother.

But the holes are still there. And sometimes, when the stars align just right, and the right scent or right sound or right memory surfaces, time whips the cover off those holes and I fall in. Time is a fickle bitch. After 17 years, I think I’m safe. I think I’ve had enough time. And then memory knocks me down and shows me that really, I don’t know anything at all.

And that’s what Mensa is, a defense, an homage, a blessing, a protection. It’s the sound of my grandmother’s voice, soft, thrilled, quivering with excitement. It’s my mother’s pride. It’s my decision to change my life and start my life, to stop letting life happen to me, and to start making my life happen.

I’m still not sure what I’m going to do yet. Will I let go, because 17 years is long enough? Or will I keep holding on, carrying my membership card like a talisman of remembering? Maybe I’ll renew, and finally attend another event. But I’ve told myself that before, too. I’ve been in this limbo before. I’ve been awash in the tides of memory and past and future, rolling like oceanic dreams that I can’t quite wake up from. But I know one thing for sure. Soon enough, it will be March. And I’ll decide.