Quotations about Perimenopause and Menopause
Of this great change in Woman, from the Maternal to the Post-Maternal period, it has been read as a sign of her descent from a full to a limited life — from capacity to incapacity — because no material compensation appears to take its place in the circuit of her corporeal capacities. This misinterpretation of the annulling of a set of bodily functions has cost the sex countless ages of dread of the inevitable, such humiliation, and nameless martyrdoms.
It is actually a transmutation of power, a transfer of capacity to enter into a more exalted department of life; the winding up of a physical series, and the opening of wider channels for the outflow of the affectional and spiritual nature; the closing of one set of avenues, and the broader opening of another, lying above them. ~Eliza W. Farnham (1815–1864), "The Organic Argument," Woman and Her Era, 1864
I'm furious. I'm exhausted. I don't really sleep anymore. Like, at all... I'm not even totally sure what I'm mad about... ~Catherine Newman, Sandwich, 2024, catherinenewmanwriter.com
A woman must wait for her ovaries to die before she can get her rightful personality back. Post-menstrual is the same as pre-menstrual; I am once again what I was before the age of twelve: a female human being who knows that a month has thirty days, not twenty-five, and who can spend every one of them free of the shackles of that defect of body and mind known as femininity. ~Florence King, "Fiftysomething," Lump It Or Leave It, 1990 ["The New-Old Me," King calls her post-menopausal self.
Boris kissed her hand for this, and reflected what an excellent arrangement it might prove to be, and then all at once he got such a terrible impression of strength and cunning that it was as if he had touched an electric eel. Women, he thought, when they are old enough to have done with the business of being women, and can let loose their strength, must be the most powerful creatures in the whole world. ~Isak Dinesen, "The Monkey," Seven Gothic Tales, 1934 [pseudonym of Karen Christence Dinesen, Baroness Blixen-Finecke (1885–1962)
Woman is now delivered from the servitude imposed by her female nature.... she is no longer the prey of overwhelming forces; she is herself, she and her body are one. It is sometimes said that women of a certain age constitute "a third sex".... Often, indeed, this release from female physiology is expressed in a health, a balance, a vigour that they lacked before. ~Simone de Beauvoir (1908–1986), The Second Sex, 1949
The adolescent, according to Erik Erikson, is one who is not deep-down sure that he is ever going to grow together again... In [a] sense the two age groups are comparable. As we grow old, one of the unknowns is... our bodies... Once again they are producing in us new reactions that frighten and stir up concern and curiosity. ~Jean Beaven Abernethy, "The Life-Cycle Vantage Point," Old Is Not a Four-Letter Word!: New Moods and Meanings in Aging, 1975
Men and women, I pray you at your change of life avoid self-pity like the plague. Do not let gloom surround you, but use your brains to steer your bodily course and shift the weights intelligently when you find it necessary. The key to health is intelligent cooperation with one's body... ~Marie Carmichael Stopes, Change of Life in Men and Women, 1936
Menopause, it's the best form of birth control. Face it graciously and brag about it. It's great. ~S. F., quoted in Paula Weideger, Menstruation and Menopause: The Physiology and Psychology, the Myth and the Reality, 1977
There is no medical term to designate the time included between the first indications of the failure of ovarian energy, and cessation of menses, but women call it "the dodging time," as it happily expresses the uncertain and erratic appearance of the menstrual flow. ~Edward John Tilt, The Change of Life in Health and Disease, 1870
The biggest lesson was that I had to advocate for myself and my health... I can't highlight this enough: women are still experiencing dismissive medical care, leaving us feeling all sorts of crazy, simply because our symptoms aren't readily recognized... Women are given very little information about menopause.... one of the most frustrating things that I hear from women is that they have no idea what the hell is happening. ~Amanda Thebe, Menopocalypse, 2020, amandathebe.com
My acquaintance with women has convinced me that many a woman has experienced a secret joy in her advancing age, and been in herself capable of receiving it gladly, as a privilege, who nevertheless has been so overruled by the universal masculine judgment as to see in it only a loss of power, and a condition, therefore, that ought to be deplored and commiserated.
That day is forever past for enlightened women, thank God, and will be, in no long time, for their less fortunate sisters. For women developed enough to have opinions and take any ground, teach each other very rapidly. Their presence in the field of masculine errors is like sunlight to the mists of early dawn. Let the idea once go abroad among the sex, that the stages of feminine life are each an advance and growth — not diminution — and we shall soon cease the wailing and lamentation over the first gray hair and the first wrinkle at the eyes.
Let women of all ages remember these three periods and their character: first, the human, or youthful, in which the feminine is least diverged from the masculine; next, the generative, or maternal, in which it has taken its exclusive path and is walking towards its own kingdom; third, the regenerative, or spiritual, in which the others culminate, and where the ultimate brightest glory of earthly Womanhood alone is seen or enjoyed. Who can dread to reach this? Surely none who see what it truly is. ~Eliza W. Farnham (1815–1864), "The Organic Argument," Woman and Her Era, 1864
"Maggie, was it this hot when we were kids? I don't remember it ever being this hot."
"I hate to break this to you, but you're getting older. Have you had your estrogen checked?... The first indication of menopause is a broken thermostat. It's either that or your weight. In any case, if you don't do something, you could be dead by August."
"God, middle age is an unending insult." ~Dorothea Benton Frank, Sullivan's Island: A Lowcountry Tale, 1999
Menopause, can I get through it without collapse? Men don't have that damned inconvenience and discomfort. God must have been a man — a woman would have done a better job on women's bodies. ~B. B. W., quoted in Paula Weideger, Menstruation and Menopause: The Physiology and Psychology, the Myth and the Reality, 1977
Probably the most disconcerting view of the change of life for the average, normal woman is the erroneous idea that it implies she is passé — that her capacity for real usefulness and activity is practically over, or that her sexual charms will forthwith fade away. Nothing can be more fallacious. Among countless numbers of women the climacteric has been the beginning of a golden period of achievement. Nor is there any reason why women, normally constituted, should lose their sexual charms at this time. As a matter of fact, many women are more attractive at fifty than they were at twenty-five; and if their personality has been developed and enriched by the passing years, they may be more charming at sixty than they were at thirty. ~William J. Fielding, Sex and the Love-Life, 1927
The terms "Climacteria" in Latin, "Climacteric disease," "Change of life," "Critical time," "Turn of life," in English, "Temps critique," "Age de retour," "Ménopause," in French, and "Aufhören der Weiblichen Reinigung," in German, are understood to mean a certain period of time, beginning with those irregularities which precede the last appearance of the menstrual flow, and ending with the recovery of health. ~Edward John Tilt, The Change of Life in Health and Disease, 1870
...senile changes in the genital organs... ~Robert Saundby, M.D., Old Age: Its Care and Treatment in Health and Disease, 1913
In the ménopause, women are no longer hampered by a bodily infirmity periodically returning. ~Edward John Tilt, The Change of Life in Health and Disease, 1870
Let's not forget the menopausal blessings of thrift. My heating bill has gone down by more than half over the last few years. So much, in fact, that a compassionate soul from the utility company called me last winter to see if I was in dire economic straits.
"If you've had financial difficulties we can enroll you in our special payment plan," she said.
"I haven't had financial difficulties, I've had the Change. My hot flashes keep me warm now. I've turned into my own furnace." ~Florence King, "Fiftysomething," Lump It Or Leave It, 1990 [Amen, Sister.
The invigoration of health after the ménopause is sometimes accompanied by a very great improvement of personal appearance, when bones become covered by a fair amount of fat; which "suave incrementum" is both comely and conducive to health. Others do not recover health without some sacrifice of feminine grace, their appearance becoming somewhat masculine, the bones projecting more than usual, the skin is less unctuous, and tweezers may be required to remove stray hairs from the face. ~Edward John Tilt, The Change of Life in Health and Disease, 1870
It will ever be a matter of surprise how so many phenomena of health and symptoms of disease can be determined by two little oval bodies, whose structure does not appear complicated, but it is unquestionable that these organs influence the system. ~Edward John Tilt, The Change of Life in Health and Disease, 1870 [ovaries
Here's the thing about menopause, though, that I don't entirely understand... rage fizzes up inside my rib cage. It burns and unspools, as berserk and sulfuric as those black-snake fireworks from childhood: one tiny pellet, with seemingly infinite potential to create dark matter... ~Catherine Newman, Sandwich, 2024, catherinenewmanwriter.com
After the menopause, a woman may find life taking a smoother course than before, and experience a new and welcome peace. ~William J. Fielding, "The Menopause — Beginning a New Epoch of Life," Sex and the Love-Life, 1927
The suspension of this function in Woman marks her life by a physical change — an experience peculiar to herself. The masculine life is divisible, physiologically, into two periods, youth and maturity — ante-paternal and paternal; the feminine into three, Ante-Maternal, Maternal, and Post-Maternal — and the transition from the second to the third is a physiological experience exclusive to Woman, which is balanced by nothing in the functional experience of man.
Now what is the language of natural physiological change? It is advancement — never degradation... we must acknowledge that it marks a stage of growth in the ultimate, if not in the present, powers of life... ~Eliza W. Farnham (1815–1864), "The Organic Argument," Woman and Her Era, 1864
A true woman remains a true woman to the day of her death, even if she be a centenarian. The three main periods of the life of the human female should be:
(1) Childish growth developing feminity.
(2) Potent fertility in feminity.
(3) Wisdom in feminity.
A healthy woman should expect to pass quietly through these evolutionary phases. However, many women suffer a good deal of menstrual pain while in their prime of life. For such women the menopause, instead of adding terrors, removes this pain, and once the menopause has set in they gain a marked improvement in health. Thus strength and vitality may be increased and not diminished at the climacteric. It has been described as the youth of wisdom. Even Dr. Kisch acknowledges that many women "rejoice in their now uninterrupted state of well-being."... Of the sensual puberty of the climacteric Professor A. Lacassagne writes: "It creates a fresh spring-time, and brings about a second youth..." ~Marie Carmichael Stopes, Change of Life in Men and Women, 1936
And then I am 47: yes; and my infirmities will of course increase. To begin with my eyes. Last year I could read without spectacles, and now I can't read a line (unless held at a very odd angle) without them. What other infirmities? I can hear perfectly; I can walk as well as ever. But then will there not be the change of life? Possibly a difficult and dangerous time, but one can get over it by facing it with common sense — that it is a natural process. These curious intervals in life are the most fruitful artistically — one becomes fertilised — a little madness, and all the little illnesses. ~Virginia Woolf, diary, 1929 September 10th
When the last census was taken in 1861,
She stands now at this portal which separates her past and present from a future that is unknown to her, and that is made forbidding by the theory she has received of it. No wonder that she looks upon these gates as the condemned upon the door which opens to his scaffold; that she counts sadly every step which brings her nearer; that she would fain convince herself and the world that she is yet far off, thirty-five instead of forty-five. For that awful future! Wherein it is not mysterious it is worse; insulting, neglectful, chilling. All this does not take place without perturbations of the heart, and nerve, and brain, hard to bear at the best — appalling at times, in the darkness wherein she has to grope her lonely way as the function of Maternity is to pass away from her. ~Eliza W. Farnham (1815–1864), "The Organic Argument," Woman and Her Era, 1864
As you go through perimenopause, your estrogen starts to decline, but not in a linear fashion; rather it fluctuates up and down, which can lead to a myriad of symptoms. Its erratic nature during perimenopause can leave women feeling as though they've been hit by a truck that's then reversed and run them over again for good measure. ~Amanda Thebe, Menopocalypse, 2020, amandathebe.com
There are many females between the ages of forty and fifty, whose recoveries may be expected when the uterus shall have fairly resumed its original inaction, and when also the brain shall have lost a fertile source of irritation and disease. Unfortunately it happens that the poorer classes are much too unmindful of the health of women at the critical periods of life, and pay too little attention to the means whereby the uterus may be assisted in its efforts to preserve its due influence on the human economy; and therefore is it, in a very great measure, that insanity is of so frequent an occurrence among women.
Forms of climacteric insanity are delirium, mania, hypochondriasis, melancholia, irresponsible impulses, and the perversion of moral instincts. ~Anna M. Galbraith, M.D., The Four Epochs of Woman's Life: A Study in Hygiene, 1901
Esquirol has seen many women remain maniacal so long as menstruation lasted, who immediately and spontaneously recovered after the ménopause. ~Edward John Tilt, The Change of Life in Health and Disease, 1870
Climacteric decay is less frequently observed in women than in men, not only because women lead a less tumultuous life, but because their constitution has been so remodelled by the change of life that the causes of this decay have less hold over them. ~
There is a also larger sense in which Woman is maternal than the functional sense; in which the maternal soul is generative when the body has ceased to be so; embraces humanity as its child; travails in pain with it for its sufferings, hindrances, darknesses, perversions, and yearns over it, when born into the higher life, with a maternal solicitude and affection. Here Woman takes on a less concentered, more divine Motherhood. ~Eliza W. Farnham (1815–1864), "The Organic Argument," Woman and Her Era, 1864
And for true Womanhood arrived here there is no growing old. Age refines and enriches, warms and illuminates, expands and exalts her. She is more and more Woman through it; not less and less. The noble life that has led her hither is her grand cosmetic. Her intellect, loosed from the golden bonds of corporeal Maternity, rises to the grasp of higher truths. ~Eliza W. Farnham (1815–1864), "The Organic Argument," Woman and Her Era, 1864
There are two basic problems the woman has to meet in undergoing the climacteric. First, there is largely the physical problem, resulting from the functional changes throughout the whole organism. Second, there is the purely psychological problem that is involved in the woman's attitude toward the situation. This is a matter of insight, understanding, enlightenment. If she knows just what is transpiring, and is prepared for it, and accepts it as a new experience — what interesting reactions may be had from even commonplace events in viewing them as new experiences! — her personality will be enriched as a consequence. ~William J. Fielding, "The Menopause — Beginning a New Epoch of Life," Sex and the Love-Life, 1927
Nine-tenths of all the sickness of women is due to some derangement or disease of the organs distinctly feminine.
It is commonly thought that many women go insane at the menopause, but this is not true. The menopause itself never causes insanity in a normal woman. Of course, if there is an extremely unstable nervous system and a tendency to insanity in the woman, the menopause may be the crisis which shows it up... The better the general health, the less liable are any of the symptoms of the menopause to be over-exaggerated. So all known measures of health — correct diet, sufficient sleep and rest, mental poise, some system of regular exercise — should be practised. One should remember that the menopause is a normal and natural process and it should not be dreaded. Realizing that the condition is a natural occurrence which all women experience — if they live long enough — and a philosophical calm acceptance of this fact, will help lessen the nervous symptoms. ~Lulu Hunt Peters, M.D. (1873–1930)
There is a common superstition to the effect that insanity is liable to occur at the menopause. A great deal of unnecessary worry and mental suffering have resulted from this fiction. An obsessive belief in this has probably driven some women insane... The normal woman, however, has nothing to fear with regard to the possibility of insanity at the change of life; in fact, the idea is so unwarranted that I would not even mention it if there was not a wide current belief in this possibility. ~William J. Fielding, "The Menopause — Beginning a New Epoch of Life," Sex and the Love-Life, 1927
Since I first began to look into the sex life of men and women, I have exploded a number of bogies, and let sunshine into murky dwellings which much needed the searchlight of truth. An abominable idea has echoed round the world from the unwholesomeness of warped theological minds — the monstrous idea that after the menopause is completed a woman is morally bound to refrain from any further sex union with her husband. This is remorseless tyranny and barbaric silliness masquerading as "religious virtue."
One need go no further than the famous Dr. Kisch to find an instance of the domination of the medical mind by theological misconceptions: for instance, "Among the stimulating influences which during the sexual epoch of the menopause are as far as possible to be avoided we must unhesitatingly include the practice of coitus... And yet precisely in women of the climacteric age... there often exists a strong desire." Could anything be more fantastic, more likely to breed the very neuroses, tensions, and physiological difficulties which the physician should relieve, than to deny the woman of the climacteric age and her husband the natural, soothing relaxation of a coitus desired by them both! ~Marie Carmichael Stopes, Change of Life in Men and Women, 1936
By the old school of humoral pathologists, the cessation of menstruation was looked upon as a matter of serious consequence, often causing serious disorders and calling for the operation of blood letting. Perhaps these old observers are in part responsible for the great dread with which the menopause is even now looked forward to by a large proportion of womankind. ~Emil Novak, M.D., "The Menopause," Menstruation and Its Disorders, 1921
Menopause is hard. It's like going through a rebirth. ~Amanda Thebe, Menopocalypse, 2020, amandathebe.com
The menopause (climacteric), or "change of life"... is a period of readjustment in which the organism adapts itself to new conditions in the cycle of life. ~William J. Fielding, "The Menopause — Beginning a New Epoch of Life," Sex and the Love-Life, 1927
The change is usually not a sudden one, the symptoms making their appearance gradually, and the decline of the reproductive processes taking place slowly but continuously. The resultant disturbances, of course, involve the whole body, affecting temporarily the functions of many of the organs, and causing other distressing reactions.
The thoroughness of the change is analogous to that of puberty, when the whole being — body and mind — undergoes a fundamental change, preparing the individual for another stage of life... The specific manifestations of the menopause are so striking that they have, from very remote times, led to the belief that the climacteric period involved more or less danger to woman's life. ~William J. Fielding, "The Menopause — Beginning a New Epoch of Life," Sex and the Love-Life, 1927
The change causes disturbances, such as flushing of the face, confusion of ideas, mental restlessness, and other symptoms of similar character. The woman often finds herself thinking and acting unlike her normal self, perhaps not enough to be noticeable to others, but quite apparent to herself. This state of mind is conducive to vexation. The uninformed woman is sorely at a loss to account for her unusual feelings. Other associated symptoms include flushes of heat, chilliness, dizziness, unsettled stomach, nausea, and profuse perspiration. There is also a tendency to take on flesh, which may be moderate, merely rounding out the figure, or it may become pronounced. General nervousness may assert itself, often temporarily localizing itself upon some particular organ or part of the body. Heart symptoms, such as palpitation, are not uncommon, causing the woman much distress and worry about their cause. Nervous reactions in the form of tingling, twitching, itching, or sensations of numbness may appear. There may be sleeplessness, anxiety, digestive disturbances, disorders of the skin, sensitivities, and dryness. Unusual sensory experiences — optical, auditory, disturbed equilibrium — may be due to the over-sensitive state of the nervous system. All regularity of flow may be lost: appearing now early, now late, now scanty, now profuse. ~William J. Fielding, "The Menopause — Beginning a New Epoch of Life," Sex and the Love-Life, 1927
Menopause feels like a slow leak: thoughts leaking out of your head; flesh leaking out of your skin; fluid leaking out of your joints... something is seriously amiss with your head gasket...
Activities that might injure you include ping-pong, napping, and opening a tub of Greek yogurt. Your hairline is receding in such a way that, in certain cropped photographs, you look like somebody's cute, balding uncle... You have under-eye bags. Jowls.
Your gums recede. You are covered in weird growths, as if a toddler has gotten a sheet of mole stickers and stuck them all over... You have so many nipple hairs and most of them are white now. And your period does a kind of horror-movie swan song as if it is finally realizing its Freddie Krueger aspirations...
You're so damaged by age, but so beautiful too, all wrinkled and rusty... ~Catherine Newman, Sandwich, 2024, catherinenewmanwriter.com
...intestinal gases... a bane of the menopause... ~William J. Fielding, "The Menopause — Beginning a New Epoch of Life," Sex and the Love-Life, 1927
There are definite, as well as quite intangible physical and psychological, factors associated with the menopause. The various strange effects that usually accompany the climacteric are the results of physiological readjustment, adaptation, or
After the menopause, women as rule find new sources of vitality working to their advantage. ~William J. Fielding, "The Menopause — Beginning a New Epoch of Life," Sex and the Love-Life, 1927
The restlessness — physical, mental, and spiritual — of women at this age is proverbial. Our shortcoming has been in failing to recognize the trouble. A diagnosis of the actual conditions would have automatically supplied its own remedy. We can successfully cope with a situation only when we have an intelligent understanding of it, and not until then. It is only a dangerous age to the unprepared woman. The best advice that may be given is to stop, look, and listen. "The Dangerous Age" will always have its casualties among the heedless, as will all other ages. ~William J. Fielding, "The Menopause — Beginning a New Epoch of Life," Sex and the Love-Life, 1927
The climacteric woman may even outshine the more superficial beauties of half her age — which not infrequently happens. ~William J. Fielding, "The Menopause — Beginning a New Epoch of Life," Sex and the Love-Life, 1927
But you would understand me best of all then, for you are a woman, nearly my own age... ~F. W. Robinson, The Wrong That Was Done, 1891
Menopause zombie brain sucks big time. ~Amanda Thebe, Menopocalypse, 2020, amandathebe.com
My mother often went
Up and down those selfsame stairs,
From the room where by the window
She would sit all day and listlessly
Look on the world that had destroyed her,
She would go down in the evening
To the room where she would sleep,
Or rather, not sleep, but all night
Lie staring fiercely at the ceiling.
~John Gould Fletcher, "The Ghosts of an Old House" [Far be it from me to diagnose her a hundred years later but it sounds so much like perimenopause to me, or menopausal depression and insomnia.
She felt as useless and cast away as an old broomhandle in the world's back yard. ~Rupert Hughes, The Old Nest, 1911 #emptynester
Oi-oi, the thin quail voices of the old women. The dry old women, past childbearing, with the dry eyes and the dry breasts and the dry tears. ~Fannie Hurst, "Seven Candles," 1923
menopause is dry
as wood chips but it's kindling
for warm winter fires
~Terri Guillemets, journal, 2022
...her eyes are dry and burning, her head feels confused... ~Katharine S. Macquoid, "Mathurin's Wooing," 1885
All day a strong onion promotes the tears pouring,
With dry eyes all night she is pleasantly snoring...
~"The Seven Ages of Woman," Sixth Age, in The Sociable Songster, edited by J. E. Carpenter, 1867
but on the bright side
middle age aridity
concentrates essence
~Terri Guillemets, "Wizen," 2022, terriguillemets.com
There was no good reason for me to be angry but my body was filled with it... ~Katherine Paterson, Jacob Have I Loved, 1980, katherinepaterson.com
freed pubescent girl
finally crawls out of time
into middle age
~Terri Guillemets, "Perimenopause," 2023
Old ladies, bless their hearts,
Are contented as house-flies
Dozing against the wall.
But you,
Imprisoned in the forties,
Delirious, frenzied, helpless,
Are a fly, drowning in a cocktail~
~Elijah Hay (Marjorie Allen Seiffert), "Of Mrs. Andsoforth"
Why don't we call our menstrual time of each cycle — a monthly pause in fertility — a "menopause," and call menopause "the period" at the end of our menstrual sentence? ~Terri Guillemets, "Tripping on our senses," 2003
Here in the steep green twilight of the wood,
a sudden pool of mellow light is flung
over the copper spires of fern, upon
the hare's nest in the grass, and on the wrung
dry-blossomed ghosts of spring. Let not this time,
whose either boundary is an equinox,
confuse you with a hint of years that climb
to frozen streams suspended in the rocks.
~Frances Frost, Woman of this Earth, 1934
The mind is cool and clear
and knows the worth of love;
it swings within a groove
as rigid and austere
as that of any star
exact upon the sky.
But the hot heart is assailed
by anguish and by war;
the heart that is at most
scarce-balanced on the dark
must cry into the wind
and hear its crying lost.
~Frances Frost, Woman of this Earth, 1934
I breathe freedom. I drink it in long, deep draughts...
It is the answer to the drought of me, to the parched years, to the earth of me that was bare and sear.
It is the rain to the desert of me...
~Muriel Strode Lieberman (1875–1964), "Songs of Life-Freedom: I," A Soul's Faring, 1921
No matter how long he lives, no man ever becomes as wise as the average woman of forty-eight. ~H. L. Mencken, A Little Book in C Major, 1916
Sandra's anxiety, with its telescoping of the next thirty years into a single grim tomorrow, is typical of the climacterium. We had both sailed through our forties with very little awareness of growing older... Suddenly something was slipping away so fast that we had not had time quite to register what it might be. All we knew was that it was irreplaceable. ~Germaine Greer, "The Undescribed Experience," The Change: Women, Aging and the Menopause, 1992
In Self-Help, I flip to the index in a suspiciously slim book about menopause. There is no "vaginal atrophy." No "atrophy, vaginal." The fact that there's a chapter called "Moods and You!" makes me want to actually bludgeon someone to death with a bottle of Zoloft. I slam it shut, return it to the shelf. The book I'm looking for would be called something like Gynecological Trauma and Bitterness: Your Vagina Is a Fucking Husk, but they don't seem to have it. They do, however, have the memoir I read last year by the robustly menopausal writer who trashes her career and fucks up her marriage and alienates all her friends and ends up living alone in her car. Absolute legend! ~Catherine Newman, Sandwich, 2024, catherinenewmanwriter.com
the world may see dried-up and
they may not even see me
LOOK! i’ve re-blossomed with beautiful new
strength, focus, perspective, poetry, silver
i am roaring out all that i have
taken on, and put up with — for all
i roar for myself and for all women
i roar at the top of my lungs with all my midlife
LISTEN! no longer can i do it all, nor do i want
i may be getting old, but also i am
~Terri Guillemets, “See me, hear me,
I am middle-aged. Fifty is upon me. And I am faced by a grim reaper. But it is not youth I want. It is time. And there's too little left. What shall I do about it? Shall I waste these remaining years on people who bore me, squander them on employments that satisfy no desires, sacrifice them to the ideas of others? No. I have wasted hours upon hours on nothing but waiting, days upon days on routine that led nowhere, and a tally of weeks on nonsense and
I had an idea that in middle age somehow I should reach a hill and beyond it would lie a promised land. Enough merely to be climbing up. Suddenly now I realize the crown of that hill is age fifty. And I know that if there is a promised land it has got to be in front of me. If I don't find it now I never shall. So I had better face this fifty, acknowledge it is gone — whether squandered or treasured — forever, and plan what to do with this promised land, how to spend these last precious years left to me.
From the brow of that fifty hill, suddenly I am beginning to compute time. Do I wish to spend so much of it in my remaining years on the pursuit of youthful looks, on this cult of youth? Perhaps I am a miser with my years, but I must confess that I can no longer see value received from pursuing youth. It will bring me no higher price for my work. It will make my husband no fonder; for affection after fifty rests on something other than complexion. It will not add to my emotional satisfaction nor to the pleasures of my mind. No, I shall not waste any of my remaining years on the pursuit of smooth pink cheeks. Nor will I waste my time or worry with weight, counting calories, or other such psychological-gastronomic engagements!
Frankly, I do not feel the same as I did twenty years ago. Moreover, I do not want to feel the same. These new feelings — may they not be an asset instead of a liability? I will not be satisfied if my remaining years are a mere repetition of those that have gone before. I want something different. I will not spend this time in an effort to produce an illusion to myself. I will be content to look my age, to dress my age, to live my age. I will appreciate all that life has brought me. I will face fifty cheerfully.
Do not take this to mean that I am negating its challenges. Fifty does not mean freedom from family demands nor from the things that we are tied to by duty. Fifty brings no alchemy that enables one to plan one's life as one might try an uncharted sea. We will always have personal and financial limitations, and we can only alter our course according to the wheel in our hands, the craft under us, the shoals and currents around us. But what we may do is decide which direction to steer and how to get the maximum of enjoyment in the steering.
I must be economical of time. Each day must count. I must plan for the satisfaction that is possible here, now. In youth, always before us was that will-o'-the-wisp, perfection, because there was always the hope of time to reach it. That it was always to be
May the acceptance of the truth of fifty bring its own joys. No longer do I need to pretend. I may say things frankly. I can accept myself as middle-aged, and therefore enjoy myself. I can squeeze the utmost out of what I am and what I have. I can relax from the struggle. I shall no longer punish myself. Instead of competing, I can create. I may choose what I like, including the colors that please me — that do something to my brain, if not indeed to my soul — rather than attempting to express the best in taste and fashion. No longer do I need to try to take everything as it comes, but select what I want. And please understand: I am not retiring — I am attaining. ~Emily Newell Blair (1877–1951), "I Prepare to Face Fifty," 1926