I
My Friend: I don't want to say anything, because I don't have specifics, but--someone on my List posted something about a New York Times article on menopause.
Me: Oh, yeah? What about it?
MF: You know how when you're a young mother you have this ability to say the same thing to your child 10,000 times and stay patient and tolerant and all?
Me: Yeah.
MF: Well, you lose that ability when you go through menopause.
Me: So there's a biological basis for the impatience and the intolerance?
MF: Yup. They don't have a pill for it yet, but I'm sure they will at some point. They'll make it into a disorder, and they'll make a pill for it. “Nurturing Deficit Disorder” or something.
Me: It’s definitely not a disorder. It's the organism rearranging things biologically so that, for the first time in decades, it can put its own needs first. Which means it's not really my problem; it's the problem of the people around me.
MF: Yeah. That's why they'll make a pill for it.
II
Me: OK, so I told the same menopause story to two different women and one of them totally got it and the other really didn't.
My Friend: What’d you tell them?
Me: I told them how I was feeling different about my many household and family responsibilities. Less desire to do it all, basically. Way. Less. Desire. I told them how it came to a head last week. On Monday, I was out with my daughters in the afternoon, I forget where, and we got home around six. [My son], A, comes up to me and says, “What's for dinner?" I say, “Tonight we're having Every Man For Himself.” The next night, oddly, same thing--out with the daughters, got home around dinner time, A asks me “What's for dinner?” I say, "Catch As Catch Can." He says, "Oh, I get it. The same thing as last night.” "No", I said. "Last night we had Every Man for Himself. Tonight we're having Catch as Catch Can. It's different.” Then I went into the family room with my daughters to watch old episodes of Buffy the Vampire Slayer.
[My husband], P, gets home around 8, 8:30. [My son], R, goes up to him when he gets in the door and says, "Did you bring any food? I'm starving." P comes into the family room, all befuddled and puzzled, and recounts to me what R just said. “And you're in here watching Buffy!” he says. Well, the whole thing strikes me as hilarious, and I just start laughing. I couldn't stop. P looks all baffled and muddled and clearly annoyed, and leaves the room.
I pull myself together and bring R into the kitchen where I make him three quesadillas and four celery sticks. [My son], S, reaches for one of the quesadillas to take a bite out of it. "Oh, no,” I say. “That's for R." “Mom,” he says. “It's just a quesadilla. You can make another one." “No, you don't get it,” I tell him. “I've exhausted my maternal resources for tonight. Nothing left. You can make your own damn quesadilla. I'm gonna go watch Buffy.”
MF: So one woman got it and one woman didn't. Tell me about the woman who didn’t.
Me: She has three young children. She reminds me of myself, about 15, 20 years ago. Earnest, takes her job as a mom seriously. I could tell she was befuddled like P. I mean, I didn't make dinner. I didn't feed my children that night. From her perspective, how does it get more fundamentally irresponsible than that? I'm shocking her because she has a certain idea about me, about what a mother of nine children does, thinks about, emphasizes. I totally get it. Probably if I had heard a story like mine 15 years ago I wouldn't have gotten it either.
MF: And now?
Me: Now it's a different story. There's a new mama in town. Menopause mama. And you can make your own damn sandwich.
III
My Son: All my friends that I've talked to about it say that their mothers became crazy after menopause. N's mom ran off to Italy and got a PhD in some kind of crazy historical shit. Where the hell did that come from? N's like, My mom used to cook me dinner every night.
Me: I’m changing; I'm not going crazy.
MS: That’s what menopausal women don't understand. For them, they're changing. For everybody else who's not them, they're going crazy. We have this reference point before you were menopausal, and now it's gone, and there's someone else where that person used to be.