Renewal
This summer, we traveled for five weeks visiting family and close friends, dedicating focused time to small groups of people from different facets of our lives. We reconnected with old friends who used to live in Taiwan, attended a four-day family reunion, I went on a weekend girls’ trip with my childhood friends to celebrate our collective 50th birthday, and we spent time with family in my husband’s hometown. Because we live “abroad,” this type of multi-week, multi-city family & friends tour is not uncommon for our summers. When the kids were young, and we had to navigate jet lag and nap times and summer camps, adult conversations were fragmented and harried, often left unfinished, mid-sentence. Now that the kids are grown, a lot of our adult time has been restored and we are able to luxuriate in meaningful – and uninterrupted – conversations with our family and friends.
Most of our peers have either recently turned 50 or are about to, so it was natural that much of the conversation this summer revolved around monumental life transitions – children going off to college, becoming empty nesters (or free birds, depending on how one perceived it), being laid off or intentionally ending careers and considering “second acts,” marriages being tested, perimenopause, hormone replacement therapy, dreams (or fear) of retirement, and taking care of aging parents. Being middle-aged doesn’t merely mean we are in the middle of our own lives, but we must toggle between the practical needs and emotional demands of our grown children, on the one hand, and our parents, who are in their twilight years, on the other.
It is no wonder, then, that for many people, mid-life issues can feel like seismic quakes rupturing the ground beneath. For men, it’s commonly known as mid-life crisis, the response to which can be the clichéd red sports cars and infidelity as an effort to reclaim youth and virility. For a woman, mid-life crisis is compounded by the often-intense physical discomforts of perimenopause, which, from my various conversations with female friends, can also make a woman feel/realize she is not in the life she’s meant to be in and urgently wants out. At the 50th birthday celebration with my childhood friends, we invited a sound healer to guide us through a meditation one afternoon. As she was setting up her crystal bowls of varying sizes, she shared that she had just turned 50 herself and that she created a mantra for her half-century birthday, which she wanted to gift to us. Her mantra was: “Fifty and fuck it.”
I do not want to trivialize people’s unique and individual stories. I hesitate to even use the word, “story,” because I know it’s so much more than that. What we experience can only be narrativized after the fact; in real time, we live the everyday, moment-to-moment challenges of holding a life together. I think it is natural to come to this point in adulthood and suddenly feel unmoored. It can be startling to be over the hill, making one’s descent towards death. But I think we can simultaneously feel the unease of these tremors and learn to listen to its vibrations, and sway into its energy.
In English, menopause literally means the cessation (pause) of one’s menses (meno), a matter-of-fact description of a biological event. In Chinese, menopause is 更年期. 年期 refers to the time period (of years) and 更 is the adverb that intensifies and deepens a verb, but it can also mean to change (更換) and to renew (更新). How fortunate that as women, we have a time marked for transformation and renewal. It can be terribly painful and uncomfortable – metamorphoses often are – but we can choose to view menopause as a wintering, a time to shed layers that no longer serve us. In some ways, this period of mid-life is a kind of death as we bid farewell to the egocentric desires of youth, the scrambled busyness of adulthood, and refocus, instead, on the softer, but farther-reaching tentacles of awareness of one’s part in the greater whole. What if we reframed menopause completely and treated it, not as the beginning of the end, but as the ending that births a beginning?
This beginning can mean dramatically different things for different people – it could mean ending relationships and careers that no longer align with your values and energies, reconnecting with a passion that had been cast aside for too long, simply taking a pause, or it could mean re-committing, with renewed intention, to the life you inhabit right now. However it looks, both men and women can benefit from the emotional and psychic wintering of 更年期 and view this as an opportunity to be re-acquainted with oneself. Mid-life, not as a descent towards death, but an invitation towards one’s truest self.
My mantra: Fifty and feel it.