The Freight Train
Picking my limbs off the track in midlife
No one tells you. Well, I guess they’re starting to tell us now, but the freight train that is perimenopause came at me at breakneck speed, without even a tiny warning. One day, I put on my asymmetrical red dress for my video “Valencia,” and as I watched the footage back, I saw it. I was a corpse lying on the tracks. It had come for me. Weight gain, a sort of rumpled look to my skin, my hair was thin, something felt off in my moods day to day and as I twirled on the beach, no amount of four-over-five chords could save me.
For someone who prides herself on her appearance, who has measured her worth in applause and admiration, much of it physical, the train wreck that is midlife is more than just a physiological change. It is a redefining of all that is important. It is a questioning of meaning. It is a reckoning with the self.
Then, there are the lightning bolts hormonal changes send through your relationship. I know, in hindsight, that partners should probably know that a fucking hurricane is about to bring change to every aspect of life. I envy the couples who have weathered it, and become closer.
Throw in a little bit of unresolved trauma, and you have yourself quite a sinkhole on your hands.
So picture this. It’s 2022. Here I am, dealing with it all, brick by brick. The heaviness of each brick falling unapologetically on my former self. I feel the light in my being disappear. I feel the way I’d dance across the nonsense of life all but vanish. I’ve made a yacht rock record, so it’s the universe’s little joke. I’ve made happy music weaving in the lyrics of my poet husband, but I am rapidly changing inside. I later won’t be able to remember any of his lyrics. It’s not because I didn’t write them. It’s the neurological pummeling of perimenopause.
I meet an astronaut’s wife who is a menopause expert. Not only is she an angel and a visionary for good in this world, but she also happens to start me on my road to recovery with hormone replacement therapy. I had blindly been slathering testosterone cream on myself, with no fucking clue about anything. I think I had ordered it from a virtual healthcare provider in its early stages. “Healthcare” in quotes.
She, Catherine, sets me on the right path. Gregg, an OB-GYN in Stratford, who I am able to see in person (Catherine being in the US at this time), sets me on an even more helpful path by diagnosing the right estrogen replacement for me. I am suspicious of him, because I’ve had a lot to be suspicious about in my life, but it turns out Gregg knows what’s right for me and my body.
This takes one big brick off the pile. But then there is everything else perimenopause has left in the wake of its unannounced visit. Migraines that make me want to die. I have never had these before. My family practitioner finally prescribes something so I can actually leave the house (and the country) without fear of becoming debilitated. The headaches continue, but not with the same severity.
My rage, which is completely feared and misunderstood by almost everyone around me who isn’t female, I know is the culmination of unresolved trauma and perimenopause. I turn to the work of Marshall Rosenberg as well as a very simple webinar that teaches me about the jackal and the giraffe. The jackal has unmet needs and therefore responds with cruelty, name-calling and criticism. But the giraffe asks, with compassion, “What do you need?” Somehow, this using-animals-to-describe-human-behaviour resonates with me. I take the immense guilt I have carried for screaming at my son the day he refuses to go to school and decide I can change.
And I have. But I am still gathering my limbs off the track.
I have done this with a lump in my throat, knowing I need love around me. Simple acts of care, like slowing down. Letting go of the hustle of keeping up with the archetype of the musical artist. Knowing that I’m enough in some of the small things I do.
I look at the shape of my face. The last three years, the chronic stress, the hypervigilance I have carried for too long and the deep desire to love through this seemingly impossible labyrinth have created this downturn at the corners of my mouth. Instead of playing a big festival in Germany or proving to everyone that I can have a show-stopping artistic comeback at 50, I make this my next goal: to turn those corners of my mouth up. Up, up, up. So that one day, as Peggy Lee says, when that final breath comes, I look like I spent the last twenty years cheating the darkness and having the time of my life.