Before I had kids, I never noticed playgrounds. They must have always been here in the city where I live, but other than the playground where I learned to play tag in Riverside Park, I never took a second look at any swings or climbing structures until Jacob was born. They have faded from my view again, but for a decade and a half, I knew where all of them were, and what joys and perils they each offered. We called one of the kids’ favorites ‘the armpit playground’ because there were parallel bars which my kids loved to slide down, hanging by their armpits. I never even noticed how gross our name for it sounded, because the armpit playground was holy ground.
I have experienced the same phenomenon with other things that are irrelevant for much of a lifespan, and then become central for a time. This happened over the decades with comic book stores, bars that served underage drinkers, maternity fashion and pilates studios. For a few months my kids and I knew exactly where we could find pokemon cards, and then crazy bands, and then bey blades. Now I can't even remember what those things looked like - let alone where to find them.
Another thing I never knew anything about until it became relevant to me was menopause. I had heard that there were some hot flashes involved, but that’s all I knew until my mid-forties. Now I see references to it everywhere - certainly in my Instagram feed that tries to sell me workouts and drugs and clothing and even hairstyles that are menopause appropriate. A friend recently introduced me to the work of Melani Sanders, who founded the We Do Not Care Movement for perimenopausal and menopausal women who have no more fucks to give. It turns out that in menopause, women can be funny, powerful, punk, and if you watch just 5 minutes of the unbearable ‘And Just Like That’, you will learn that we can be just as overdressed and terrible in our fifties as we were in our twenties and thirties.
Even with those sign posts, menopause is a quiet phenomena, though it impacts half of the population. I knew when all my friends got their periods, and I had about a million conversations about preventing or achieving pregnancy over decades of my life. But the conversation about menopause is muffled - even amongst people who are comfortable talking about themselves and their bodies.
Maybe that is in part because humans, toothed whales, and wild chimpanzees are the only animals that experience menopause. Other than the three of us, female animals generally do not outlive their reproductive capacity. This essentialism of purpose is painful to contemplate - and I think underlies much of the misogyny that is bedrock to our society. But there are splashes of hope….
Female killer whales live for up to 90 years in the wild, and most live an average of 22 years after menopause. Previous studies have revealed evolutionary benefits, with post-menopause killer whale mothers boosting the lifespans of their offspring and grand-offspring by sharing the fish they catch and leading their pods to the richest fishing grounds.
“The similarities with humans are intriguing,” said Prof Darren Croft, also from the University of Exeter. “Just as in humans, it seems that older female whales play a vital role in their societies – using their knowledge and experience to provide benefits including finding food and resolving conflict.” (The Guardian)
Like many other human females, I have outlived my reproductive capacity. I entered menopause at the same moment that my family responsibilities lessened. It was not causal, of course - but correlational. I am 56 years old, and less encumbered than I have ever been as an adult. For the first time since I was 20, I don't go through a buzzing daily, first-thing-in-the morning review of the logistics of other people’s lives.
Given this extra capacity, and with the University of Exeter’s confirmation that our whale sisters play a vital role their society, I am thinking about what is it that this moment in my lifespan allows for me to do? Like any good child of the upper west side in the 70s, I went to Ms. Magazine for some answers, and found Omisade Burney-Scott ‘s take:
Another…way to frame the menopausal experience is to see it as a rite of passage that is present to the liminality of the experience. In anthropology, liminality is “the quality of ambiguity or disorientation that occurs in the middle stage of rituals, when participants no longer hold their pre-ritual status but have not yet begun the transition to the status they will hold when the ritual is complete.” It is believed that during liminal periods of transformation, social hierarchies may be reversed or even temporarily dissolved. The constancy of cultural traditions can become uncertain, and future outcomes once taken for granted may be thrown into doubt.
This I like. I have been doubting future outcomes once taken for granted - as I imagine you have been. I also have been experiencing twin phenomena that turn out not to be contradictory: a release of ambition and a commitment to purpose. Put in whale terms, I don't need to lead the pod all the time, but I do want to use my experience to resolve conflict and keep them away from danger.
In Lisa terms, I don't need - or crave - positional power. But I do believe - even more deeply than ever - that I can be useful in figuring out how to get out of this horrendous moment in history and to a new way of being. I have experience, knowledge, relationships, and learning from my mistakes and those of others that I can apply to surviving this moment and creating a new one. And I have time, fluidity, and energy to do that in different ways than in the past. I don't really know what this looks like yet, but I am excited to find the richest feeding grounds.
And Maria continues to create and inspire with her tiny landscapes:
