The Climacteric

I decided to cut all artifice and finally see exactly what kind of hair I’m generating these days, and also ponder on how well earned its moment in the sun is.  Meanwhile unused yarn is still piled against the walls of my house, and against all the common sense I really should have gained by now (not to mention consistent advice to lay off from the physiotherapist), I’m knitting again.... but only in very short bursts....

One lesson firmly learned, however, is that I'll NEVER ski again - you see, my knitting problem is a consequence of my one and only attempt on a nursery slope (on the basis that before my arches caved in I wasn't bad on roller blades). It ended in a slapstick smash that I would probably have found funny had it happened to someone else, only I'm not quite there yet on my own account. So it's a big no-nay-never to skiing for me again and that's for sure.

Since I was 16, my hair has been short, long, curled, flattened - every imaginable thing and colour (besides black)(which even at my most adventurous I knew wouldn't work).  Coming from such a background of effort, I'm now taking a grisly pleasure in doing the inverse thing and letting nature completely take its course.  So far I don't think it's so bad - I quite like the colour and the consistency is okay: not wiry -  I'm actually beginning to wonder why I bothered for all those years...  

...as I type, I'm having a hair-cut (thank you, Sarah, and also thank you for taking the photo), and simultaneously learning from the health section of today's paper that menopause is still the great unmentionable. This article arose from another in similar vein a few weeks back over which some friends got quite up in arms and keep talking about how it's not spoken of...(which I do find funny). Undoubtedly this is true for them, but my own experience has always been different - no matter what age I've been, I've always known women who barely drew breath from talking about menopause (to a point I occasionally found a bore, especially in childhood).  

A consistent youthful backdrop for me was women over pots of tea saying with gusto -  "She's, you know, At That Time - going through, you know, The Climacteric..",  and more recently there are two friends with whom you’d be hard put to hold a conversation of any duration which didn’t eventually go the same direction … and I mean that would apply to any time over the past thirty years…  They just like having that conversation -  often starting with menstruation actually, and then working onward. Anywhere I ever lived, one thing menopause definitely wasn't was taboo.

I got to know a pioneering doctor of women's health in my twenties and once, after a public talk, I expressed bewilderment to her over what the deal was about menopause - because actually at that point it was seen as political - Wasn't it something that just happened?, I asked. How could politics help with that?  Her response was that in the comparatively reachable past (from then - thirty-plus years ago), often women didn't ever make it to menopause because of multiple pregnancies and accompanying health onslaughts - menopause was in fact quite a new concept at that point.  And I often thought about that, especially when a few decades later I was lucky enough to be able to avail of a life-saving hysterectomy myself.

So we're doing fine as long as we're still upright and for the women for whom menopause can never be ventilated enough... good luck!   And I suppose talking means we're all well prepared for the general downslide (which, according to what I've heard, for me is never ending from here on).  

in fairness to Sarah, I should probably point out that these are the before shots

But if I ever want to talk about it myself (such as now),  I certainly don't feel constrained, and definitely not embarrassed (why would anyone be..?!).  For me, however, there's a limit to what can be said,  unless it happens to be particularly pertinent to one very particular moment: viz saying to someone nearby "You don't happen to have a fan with you - like, an industrial sized electric one? or maybe a jumbo box of tissues by any chance, do you?").

 I've been artificially suspended on hormones to a greater or lesser extent for fifteen years now, but from time to time I do still qualify on the symptom front.  I'm not wholly convinced, though, about how much my recently increased pragmatism and ambivalence on a whole range of subjects (which undoubtedly would once have had me climbing walls, literally and figuratively)  isn't just down to bitter experience (ie the ski trip) rather than the absence of caches of gleaming, quivering, quavering eggs on tap  ….