Hag

I haven’t bled in five months. Each time this happens I wonder, am I done? Was that it? Have I finally crossed the threshold into after, whatever that means?

So far, the answer is no. So far, I find that I am, and have been for five years and counting, in the in-between time. Neither mother—still possible but unlikely—nor crone, not yet. And like that liminal space between maiden and mother, girl and woman—I’m daily, hourly, continually trying to determine who I am, and what on earth is going on with my body.

Nobody sits you down and gives you the “becoming a crone talk,” even those of us lucky enough to have had the “becoming a woman talk” from a scientifically informed and minimally awkward mother, complemented with biologically accurate, judgement-free human physiology and sex ed in school. Underneath all that awkwardness, the anxiety around dealing with the changes of puberty and cultural norms on keeping our monthly bleeds and hormonal upheavals secret or only confided among girlfriends, underneath the unspoken shame was also a certain pride. A badge of honor in becoming a woman. A woman, i.e., a potential mother. Same same.

So, at forty-three when I started having the first signs of another change, biologically inevitable if a little early, I didn’t recognize it. Didn’t understand that certain symptoms might be connected, might have more to do with internal hormonal upheaval than the various external causes I sought and sometimes failed to identify. Unexplained weight gain, hypersensitive rashy skin, increasingly intense and erratic mood swings akin to my PMS symptoms, but any old time. All the time. A couple years later when a female doctor learned of my erratic periods and finally said the word perimenopause, I was told only that I should eat less and exercise more. Congratulations, you are in the process of un-becoming.

I understand that for many women, this is the part where we might grow wistful at losing the capacity to grow a new life. Beyond the cultural significance, the expectations and norms of motherhood, there is something real, something powerful in marking that transition out of it, of losing that superpower, that creative force that no man will ever have and in my opinion is the root of all misogyny, all patriarchy, the original inferiority complex that incited/incites men to wield their muscle mass to dominate us, to swear by and kill for a holy father/son creator, to compensate for the fact that every one of them was formed by and born out of a woman’s body. Meaning, I do recognize that motherhood is a big deal.

And yet, for a variety of reasons, not all women possess or use that superpower. I will never know what it is like to grow another human inside my own body, to bring that human into the world, watch her grow and care for her like an extension of my self. Unlike some women, I also have no misgivings or regrets about that. I truly believe that motherhood wasn’t my path in this life. That I wouldn’t have been a good mother, not the kind I would have wanted to be, and that choosing not to bring another human into this world was the best choice not just for me, but for that child. So while I am in awe of and grateful for my potential capacity to mother, I am not mourning that physiology as it slips away. Maybe that’s why it’s going so early: use it or lose it.

As for the physical changes, I’ve never been beautiful in that media-reinforced Caucasian American ideal of porcelain-skinned doll-like face, skinny girlish body with padding permissible only around the mothering parts—breasts and a hint of mothering hips. My muscled, sturdy girl body grew into burly, husky adult body, collecting pounds and scars by the year. So unlike some women in midlife just beginning to lose the male—or female—gaze, I’m also not mourning some recent loss of attractiveness; that ship has sailed.

And finally, I’m not suddenly becoming aware of my mortality as I’ve heard the change can trigger, having been an introspective brooder since my introspective brooding teenage years, always perfectly aware that this life is finite and I am going to die. Based on physical health and family history, I could either live well into my nineties and am only halfway there, or die unexpectedly of aggressive cancer any day now, and in either case there isn’t much to be done about it.

So, then, chugging along toward menopause should be easy, right? Should be a relief, even. Why bring this up at all?

Because outside of all those socially constructed roles and judgements, outside of who I am or am becoming to anyone else, I’m finding my own, intimate self feeling more than ever unstable. Physically, emotionally, mentally, all of who makes me, me, feels suddenly, increasingly, precarious.

As adolescents that wasn’t quite so strange, because we hadn’t had so long to get used to anything; as children, we were always growing, always changing. Our families, schools, and society made us constantly aware of that in all the age/height/grade level benchmarks we aimed always to surpass. Puberty was just a magnification of those changes, the final push into adulthood, where we would be done growing, fully formed humans. Any turmoil after that was simply situational, external, existential. Once I’d reached adulthood I did sense a growing feeling of equanimity in my self, a comfortable familiarity despite whatever might have been going on in the world around me. I expected that would deepen as I aged, the turmoil fading completely. It hasn’t.

Who am I, and what on earth is going on with this body?

I am on fire. Hot flashes, crimson flushes, and night sweats surge through my body at random intervals. This only occasionally visible sign of perimenopause and the only part addressed in jest on television and movies but generally hidden or ignored in real life is more complex, more bizarre, and more intense than I’d ever imagined. Ten second burning fevers, brief personal dry saunas, or sometimes, sweat lodges. Inconsistent and changeable for the past five years, so that I can never predict, never know when or how the next one will arrive.

One month they came on multiple times an hour, all day long. Another month I couldn’t stop sweating, dripping puddles on my yoga mat like a teenage boy lifting weights, and all I was doing was warrior pose. Sometimes they seem to emanate from my core, around my heart, but more often I can feel my face burn first, then my ears, then it creeps down my neck until I know if I looked in the mirror I would appear as a freshly seared lobster. The latest addition to my repertoire is chills—cold flashes?—that are equally intense and confusing and when combined with the hot flashes have me putting on and throwing off sweaters and blankets so often it might be comical if anyone else was around to notice, which they’re generally not.

Sometimes they’re preceded by a sudden pang of dread, as if death herself is hovering, hot breath on my cheek, considering whether to take me this time. Other times they’re accompanied by a sudden zen-like calm, as if transported to my own private beach on a hot summer day and I can almost hear the waves. Rather than an out-of-body experience, hot flashes are uniquely in-body, drawing me instantly back, entirely in, briefly aware of nothing else but myself, alone and on fire.

I’ve always had a lot of “internal fire,” as they say in naturopathy or traditional Chinese medicine, and my pale skin has always been prone to blushing. But I know now, a youthful blush is about as similar to a perimenopausal hot flash as a lizard is to T-Rex. My internal furnace is not ticking away anymore, it’s utterly on the fritz, blazing out of control, starting and stalling out like a tired engine, heading toward burnout.

And then, what? I don’t know. I guess I’ll just be cold.

Also, I am awake. Hello darkness my old friend. Hello 3 a.m. Again. I never used to have trouble sleeping, no matter what was going on with me. Sure, sometimes, busy-brain obsessing kept me from falling asleep for a spell, eating or drinking too late could wake me in the night, leave me tossing and turning for a while, but never this. Never, full on, give up and turn on the light and read or maybe even get up go outside and stargaze for a while because it’s going to be another long night with capital I Insomnia.

If I could adjust the rest of my life to my body’s changeable schedule it wouldn’t be so bad. Sleep for a few hours every evening, wake in the night, then nap again late morning, afternoon too. Live like a housecat. That sounds nice. Maybe, one day long in the future when I can actually afford to retire, I’ll get to try that.

For now, though, locked in to the eight-to-four job that cares not whether I’ve had a wink of sleep the night before, my body and mind are at odds. Literally out of sync, and short of succumbing to the slippery slope of sleeping pills, there doesn’t seem to be a single thing I can do about it. Awake—sweating, shivering, sweating—and blinking in the darkness.

I am crawling out of my skin. My skin, dry and scaly despite twice or thrice daily lotions, creams, and salves. My skin, itchy and reactive, rashing up under my waistband, bra strap, glasses on my ears. Rashing from sunshine, from seasonal allergies, from too much junk food, from an unrealistic workload at the day job, the state of the union, the fascist ex-president, the fascist ex-president’s followers, from something inside of me itching to get out. I scratch my skin, the visible rash, but the itch goes deeper.

I clean, everything. Dust, vacuum, sweep, polish, scrub until it shines. I organize, and reorganize my house, my garage, my office, my life. I buy things; stock the cupboards with food, hit the thrift stores for more clothes, dishes, knickknacks. I plant things, pull weeds, trim shrubs, arrange and rearrange the lawn chairs. Sometimes I even go jogging. And though I scratch, the itch remains.

Sometimes, I am an animal in rut. Like a teenager. Like when I was a teenager, with the teenage boys who were right there with me ready to tear off our clothes and hump like rabbits. Except there aren’t any men now. Or, for that matter, women.

When I used to teach adolescents, I would joke that they have hormone poisoning. Everyone knows this about adolescents. They don’t tell you about this other time, when hormonal shifts cause the same sort of drives but stronger, with adult longings and know-how. I think if I actually had someone in front of me lusting back I might tear them apart, devour them like a praying mantis and lick my lips afterward.

Other times, I am inert, this body and its urges dried up completely. A preview of what is to come, when I finally cross over? Which is equal parts sad—all that ferocious desire gone to waste—and a relief.

I am, often, angry. The fledgling wrath of a teenage girl matured into the rage of a middle-aged woman with nothing to lose. No longer dependent daughter, nobody’s wife, nobody’s mother. A whirling dervish with no restraints. Last month I lashed out at a neighbor whose dog came into my yard, barely, once. I’ve become that neighbor. I never know what might unleash the beast—callousness, injustice, misunderstanding, apathy, confusion, clumsiness, stubbed toe, spilled milk, no external cause whatsoever and I’m suddenly instantly consumed by a searing white-hot fury, a mental hot flash capable of emotional and potentially even physical violence to anyone who dares stand in my way. No socially-accepted mama bear protecting her cubs, I am, instead, a solitary, stark-raving wolverine. And if you come too close at the wrong time, I will slash you.

Some studies suggest that estrogen is an aggression-dampening hormone, that it, in consort with other estrogen-regulated hormones like serotonin, makes us docile, more likely to roll over and expose our necks to the males of our species, to be agreeable mates, gentle mothers, level-headed matriarchs. And now, no longer in need of that softness, of that submissiveness, we shed it like tired old skins. So maybe, I am not broken. Maybe, this is who I really am, free of my shackles.

I am hungry. Or maybe I’m not actually hungry in terms of needing vitamins, minerals and calories—long done growing and soon to be shrinking—but this deep desirous yearning needs . . . something. I want. I crave. I salivate for some thing to satiate this corporeal desire. Food is what I can get my hands on, my mouth on, to swirl around on my tongue, to chew and swallow and fill at least my belly, for a while. A warm cinnamon scone and hot cup of coffee from the local bakery. Basil pesto tortellini salad with cherry tomatoes from the local farmer’s market. Creamy vanilla ice cream swirled with tart red huckleberries picked fresh from the yard. Honey-balsamic roast duck from a friend’s farm that I gave up attempting to carve and picked up whole with my bare hands and tore into with my teeth, juices dripping down my wrists.

I am crying. Again. It doesn’t feel like sadness, not depression. Not that gauzy slow darkness that descends on others I know. My tears simply a sprung leak, all that emotion bottled and swirling—burning/anxious/exhausted/itchy/lusting/furious/ravenous—never fully expressed, never fully satisfied, seeping salty hot rivulets down my scarlet cheeks. Emotional overwhelm distilled to pure grief. For all the hateful heartless apathetic humans, all the harm we continue to cause to each other and the more-than-human world. When all the other emotions are spent and all that’s left is clear, crystalline mourning for what is and what could be.

It doesn’t last long. I’m too alive, too full of wonder and delight and gratitude for this beautiful, miraculous life on this beautiful, miraculous planet. And that I get to live, for a while, in my own feral little corner of it among ancient trees, a cheerful creek, comical squirrels, fascinating birds, colorful wildflowers, tart berry bushes, cleansing rains, and on and on ad infinitum and though I realize we are all connected to everything else, all the good and bad going on out there in the greater world, and how precarious it all is and is becoming more so as we bring on the havoc of climate change, right now, right here, in this woodland at the end of the gravel road, in relationship primarily with myself and this land, I am fiercely alive, and intend to remain so for a long, long time. I may be losing the capacity to create new life, but I plan to fully inhabit this one.

So, then, let’s just get this out there. I am a witch. Not by the modern definition—no prescribed rituals, no spells involved—but in the original sense of the word. I think, perhaps, that I have been becoming her my whole life, and am only now arriving. Collecting wrinkles, scars, unsightly folds of skin. Barefoot and wild-haired, red-faced and unapologetically ranting, raving, emoting. Immersed in the natural world, friends with animals, making medicines of plants, self-sufficient and content, on my own. Most assuredly without need of male company or assistance. And, society tells me, no longer of any use to men. Possibly, someone to pity or even fear. The unapologetic, archetypal witch. My male ancestors slaughtered more than nine million women over five generations just for being as I am. Once upon a time, they would have burned me too. Maybe they still will.

Or try to medicate me. But I don’t want hormones to mollify me, to keep me wet and ready, to stave off the inevitable. I’m changing, done growing up into the woman society said I should be and metamorphosing into the human animal, the witch, the hag I really am.

I haven’t bled in six months, spring of this year. Heavy cramping, deep scarlet blood, big chunky clots. Almost as if I was miscarrying something, the final push to clear out what no longer serves me. It lasted nearly three weeks. I would like to think of it as the big finale. Clearing the way, cleaning out the cobwebs, opening the portal. The way forward, the way home.

-Heather Durham

Heather Durham is the author of the 2022 ecopsychological memoir Wolf Tree, and the 2019 nature memoir Going Feral. Heather holds degrees in psychology, ecology, and creative nonfiction, and lives, writes, and plays on the traditional lands of the Coast Salish tribes in Washington state. Learn more at heatherdurhamauthor.com, and find her on Instagram @feralheatherdurham and Twitter @feralheatherd