It’s 23º out here tonight. I am sitting on my porch with a light t-shirt and sweater and I can’t feel the cold at all. In fact, I feel flushed. 

Sometimes it starts in my chest, centered between my breasts and radiates out to my shoulders and down my arms to the center of my palms, jittery and electric. There is so much power there, all gathered in the palms of my hands that I think I could throw bolts of energy.  Sometimes I try to fling the power outward like a super hero, but so far, nothing has exploded. 

Other times it starts centered between my ovaries, radiating down to my vagina, down my legs and ending on the soles of my feet. It a buzzing, electrical effect that feels like I’m hooked up to a live wire and I’m conducting the current throughout my body.  Sometimes it starts in both my chest and my vagina; my whole body vibrates, and I know this is a big one. 

The buzzing tapers off and I know to go outside and quickly. I run out into the cold night, tear off my sweater and roll up my pants. I have to expose all my skin to the  air. I am a heater, radiating wave after wave, like a solar flare against the black night. I feel like I could raise the temperature in a room, just by standing there. 

The heat subsides and I feel weak, as if I’ve transferred this supernatural power to the stars.  I have to sit, lie down, recharge because I’ve just powered up the universe. My heart is pounding, irregular. It’s passing. My breathing is normal again. The whole episode lasted maybe 10 minutes. 

There’s a Star Trek TNG episode that I think of when this happens, about an alien who is going through a radical change in physiology. He bursts into flames, in agony. Then he realizes that his race is evolving into another level of existence. For me, this is how my change feels, like my body is mutating into something else. 

both photos from Star Trek TNG, Season 3, "Transfigurations." 

I’ve just had a hot flash. I have them 15 or 20 times every day and night. It will be 10 years this fall that I started having them. And the culture in this country doesn’t have a powerful metaphor for the unmentionable change that happens to women of a certain age, the big M, Menopause. No, it is not spoken of. No, we deny it and take pills to avoid it. No, we don’t tell our children and hide it from our husbands. No we will not get older. NO, we will not recognize the natural change of life.  

So I am making up my own powerful allegory for the experience, because I’m on my own here. My mother didn’t tell me about menopause, she didn’t warn me what would happen. She had already passed away when I started to get the first signs of change. I was married to a much younger man, 13 years difference. We were totally on the same wavelength in so many ways, especially in bed. Then I got hit with the big M and the age difference became all too relevant. It scared him. I don’t blame him; it scared me too. 

Back when 13 years didn't seem to make that much difference.  

So he left and now when I look to men my age, I see they are more interested in nubile twenty-somethings. It’s a cultural joke, but it’s often a cruel one for women who feel they’ve lost their reason for life when they lose their men.  I see this stereotype often in my area - scores of classy, slim, silver-haired goddesses going out with girlfriends while their ex’s decorate bar stools and sports cars with barely legal babes. 

But let me disclaim here - not all women lose their men, nor do all experience drastic physical or emotional changes during this time. But it happens often enough that the self-help industry and the pharmaceutical companies are the only sources of information for those of us it does affect. Our suffering is their profit margin.  And we buy their books and religiously take their pills. 

I took Hormone Replacement Therapy (HRT), a pill every day for a year, til I decided that there was something wrong with the concept of messing with my body chemistry to cover up a natural physiological change. This was 2 years before they discovered that the most common types of HRT were so dangerous that even Big Pharma had to admit it. 

I find something even more wrong in women taking these dangerous drugs to pretend to be something they are not - young and fertile - to keep their men happy.  Is getting Breast Cancer a good trade off for keeping their pussies wet? Does it make sense to take SSRIs to soften those sharp hormonal edges when they also suppress the sex drive? 

I am not taking bio-identical hormones either, though I tried them for awhile. They didn’t really work for me, and I kept coming back to the issue of covering up what is a natural phenomenon, not a disease. Women are supposed to change. But why? 

There’s something about some men’s attraction to the physical characteristics of  fertility that is beyond thought, that lives in instinct. Even though these older men might have little interest in having more children, their ideal woman still has big tits and curvy hips. Meanwhile, menopause has changed their female counterparts physically and mentally to be less tied to childcare, less distracted by sexual demands, less competitive with other women, and maybe more aware of the world around them. 

So my theory is that we have graduated into another level of being, like that alien race discovering their new powers. We have more access to our anger, less patience for foolishness. We can choose to live our lives for ourselves and our families, and explore new ways of being partners with our men. 

This isn’t scientific, but science is currently dominated by men. Science still seems to be clueless about exactly why and how menopause happens. We have to interpret this for ourselves, because the culture we live in will medicate, discard and ignore us otherwise. Isn’t it conceivable that women are supposed to stand separate, but equal to men at this time of our lives. There are ancient paradigms for the leadership of the elders, and they were most frequently women. 

Maybe we aren’t becoming super heroes but we are coming into our power. We have knowledge and experience. Men are busy completing their mission of populating the world, even if it is only symbolic. I say we are meant to lead. We are meant to step in to community. We are meant to be the wise women of our people. Menopause is our rite of passage, and we fairly crackle with energy.  Let it shine sisters.