Meno-Pause

I have a problem with many words in the English language, the most recent and personally applicable being “menopause.” Apparently, the term is a Greek mashup of “month” and “cease.” I’d have less of a problem if the English term were “menocease,” since “menopause” suggests that something about the female body—my body in this case—is “pausing” and will, ASAP, resume its regularly scheduled programming. But, that’s not the case. My body is going off the air.

How do I know? Other than the bloody physical way? Oh, society has myriad methods of letting women of a certain age know. I do have to say that since more “older” women are in the workforce than ever before, I see a push to rebrand this life phase as more empowering. Terms circulate among a certain society stating as much: peri-menopausal powerhouses, menopausal mamas, ageless wonders, fabulous over forty, mid-life goddesses. But these terms do not permeate all areas of American culture, nor most.

The more pervasive message is that, upon hitting middle-age, “the female human, losing her viability to reproduce, starts her descent into irrelevancy,” as a NatGeo narrator might say.

In case I wasn’t attuned to my physical condition before, when I go to the doctor’s office, the medical assistant, always younger than I, no longer asks, “When was your last period?” She asks, “Do you still get your period?” She has no idea, yet, what that question means.

It means that now, instead of sculpting and adorning my flesh to flashily attract male members of the species (I’m gay, but we’re talking about cultural messages), I must hide or delay my body’s degeneration as long and as forcefully as I can. This, of course, takes time and money. Take it from Nora Ephron, who felt bad about her neck, or Dolly Parton, who said, “It costs a lot of money to look this cheap.”

It also means that I have precious little time left to be an early adopter of technology, if I ever was one. Why? Not because my brain cells are dying at a faster rate than the medical assistant’s, but because cutting-edge products aren’t being created for or marketed to me.

There are exceptions, of course, like wearable fitness trackers with fall detection. There are also products marketed toward my gender and age group that are actually for our (much) older husbands. I’ve seen these glamorous companions in commercials helping their twenty-year-senior husbands connect their hearing aids to their smartphones.

Being menopausal also means that my high school students, who year-after-year are sixteen-years-old while I become fifty, fifty-one, fifty-two, don’t “get” my humor. The widening age gap relegates my “dad jokes,” cultural references, and colloquialisms to the teenage brain’s Hallmark channel. I still haven’t gotten used to their doe-eyed look of vacancy. But then, they wouldn’t know the term “doe-eyed.” It would seem as if figures of speech—along with me—are becoming relics of the past. Students don’t know more than a screenshot full of them. And, perhaps that’s good. Focus on the now! Be your unique self! Avoid cliches! But to not even know what they mean?

I’ve become one of the ‘seasoned’ teachers on campus. New hires, fresh out of credentialing programs, are assumed to bring “fresh blood” to the school, new ideas to the profession. But, after having a student teacher under my tutelage, I see that young bucks want to reinvent rather than improve, re-create rather than invigorate. My methods are regarded as “old school,” even though I go to great lengths every summer to revise my lessons, convinced that the students will respond better if only…

Being menopausal, fading into irrelevancy, is even apparent when I attempt to share the entertainment from my era with Gen Z. I’m not so far gone that I don’t see the pacing differences between entertainment from the seventies and eighties and that of today. Gilligan could spend minutes cutting vines to save Skipper from sinking in quicksand, while today, it would take a millisecond, and probably include parkour. Which came first, I wonder, the public’s desire for faster pacing or the media’s faster pacing? (And, is it a conspiracy against the menopausal female?) Because, I’m struggling to keep up. Some shows, like Succession and Abbott Elementary, have to be watched with subtitles because the actors talk too quickly. Then again, I can’t read that fast either, so I’m forever hitting rewind.

If I ask my high school students to sit through a clip—not a whole episode—but a five-minute clip of Happy Days, or Laverne and Shirley, or The Facts of Life, or Murphy Brown, the room becomes lit by thirty-five cell phones desperately seeking additional stimulation. “I don’t get it.” “It’s boring.” “It’s not funny.” “What does it mean?”

The TV shows, grounded in the history and culture of their time, don’t speak to Gen Z. I get that. But my students can’t imagine a time in which they did speak to people. “Kids today” aren’t interested in knowing what life was like when those shows were what children and adults watched together in the evening and what their values and biases meant for marginalized groups.

Clearly, I’m not the only menopausal female being pushed into irrelevancy by a market-based economy, a culture that puts a premium on youth, and her own opinions and attachments. There are, in fact, many of us out there working, raising children, and purchasing new tech.

I try to advise students to work on their “water cooler talk.” I tell them their co-workers will likely be older than they, and that they’ll need to understand their boss’s references. They ask, “What’s a water cooler?”

Perhaps it’s a moot point. Anyway, it’s the end of a period.

-Cynthia Damon

Cynthia Damon is a writer, photographer, and teacher living in California with her wonderful wife, loving son, and loyal Labrador. Her writing has previously been published in Adelaide Independent Monthly Literary Magazine, Western New York Family Magazine, and Pasadena Star News.