loving menopause

This is my personal story. I totally get that it may not be like this for other women. I believe in the power of stories, which is why I want to tell this one.

This is me on Saturday 15th April, 2017. Two days after my 53rd birthday, preparing to spend an evening drinking wine, laughing with friends and dancing our socks off to loud, live rock.

Three years ago I was recovering from the urgent hysterectomy I'd had to have that February, following a winter of almost constant bleeding. It stopped the night I held my daughter and son-in-law as they birthed my gorgeous butterball of a grandson, and waited until I had encapsulated his placenta for her, and with permission buried a small piece under my tree, where my babies' placentas are, before returning with vengeance. (I like to tincture the leaves of that tree. I recon they will have sucked water up from that rich root soil, which will contain the essence of all of us...what a powerful healing that could be.

I didn't want to have a hysterectomy. All my life I that was the one operation I didn't want to have. My mum had one, when she was 22, 23 years before I was born (there's a story) and I thought it was so cruel to take away such a precious and magical part of a woman. When I was a nurse in the '80s and 90's we hysterectomized women left right and centre. The youngest I saw was 25. Nobody was going to do that to me. Until they had to, of course.

In August 2013 we went to Devon for a few days of sun and sea. I was mindful of a placenta not yet due, because I had a strong intuition it would arrive early, whilst I was on my holiday. (It did) Thinking about the placenta lead me to think about tincturing my menstrual blood, for my menopause, for jewellery, to honour the deep, impossibly magical, synchronous mystery of my blood cycle, which I could not imagine life without. She was due, there would be one of the deepest tidal swells in the world and a full moon. I packed my tincturing kit. How could I have known this was our last time? Bless my dear cycle for loving and guiding me so much, as I loved her.

At first she didn't come. I laughed at the irony...late because of the holiday maybe. The lovely days crept by and I agonised over the thought that she had left me. Left me without the chance to say goodbye, without a last exploration of her muddy depths, or magical heralding dream (fireworks in the night, the hot, sweet dragon's breath, warm soft grass on my feet, soaked with blood, stained-glass windows blazing beauty with a midnight sun) That dream last year, of a spectacular, majestic sailing ship on a red sea...that ship has sailed...preparing me for the loss of her.

The weather was hot, and the skies clear. One afternoon when the tide was out, we went down to the beach in the sunshine, the sea stretching away, a pink-blue mirror of timelessness. We swam and played for hours in rock pools with shells. Drunk on the lazy warmth we wandered back to our rooms and behind the old Victorian bricks and the sunny net curtains waving in the breeze we made hot and sweaty love. Afterwards in a tangle of sheets, my mind roamed over the lives, the love, the birth, and death this room had seen. Would she come back to me? How would love be without her?

'and the dry stone, no sound of water..'

How would it be to be old, and barren? No longer fertile? Desirable? Desiring? Dry, old?

What lies ahead for this body that has loved and lost and lived and borne and suckled five babies?

After sleep, and much, much later into the evening, we went back down to the beach. It was now below 10 feet of angry boiling slate grey ocean. We stood beneath the lowering clouds and a blood red gold sunset, and she came to me suddenly. One last normal time. And later still in the night, I did get her into my tincture bottle. I placed it on the tiny window sill, full moon blazing the window glass and cracked old tiles on the shelf, sounds of the late night pub below. Life, ever proliferating human life, cells dividing all the time. Time.

Back home, two weeks later on a glorious September morning, I was on the floor cutting out designs when I thought I had spilled my coffee. My legs were hot, wet, soaked. It was my blood. They finally stopped it in December, in hospital, as yet another bag of some kind soul's blood dripped into my arm. And she had to go. So did my ovaries.

Straight after the operation, back home, I could feel the hormonal difference. My dreams were quiet, my upper body flushed, and my head ached. After a month or so, the headaches went, and three of nana's 'power surges' a day became my new normal. As my body healed I gave thanks for my habits of weight training and good food in the last few years, this helped me to get back to myself. You'll never return to weight training, said my surgeon. I'll see you in three years for your repair. I returned to extremely gentle training six months later, and now sling heavier weights than ever. (I didn't return) If I do that, and feed her well, and rest her when she wants, which is a lot, she lets me dance through the night, stack torches on the rack at bonfire time, ride on a ZX9 at 150 miles an hour round the M25 at 3am with the other lunatics.
I swim for hours in freezing sunny Devon coves with my crazy children, and dream new dreams. She is calm now, without the glorious drama on the high seas of hormones, but she is deep. I am still exploring the hidden depths now my ship is in harbour. I'm climbing those cliffs, and loving my new view.

And do we still make hot, sweaty love?

What a journey that was. Is. I couldn't lose my love life, I just couldn't, but I could feel that nerves had been cut. There was no pathway for my feelings to be felt. I decided that I would grow them again with time, with utter determination to not say goodbye to this part of me. And this despite the trained nurse inside my head telling me that 'nerve cells cannot regenerate' I simply refused to listen. The urgency of keeping this part of my life pressed like a weight. We got back to that at six weeks on my gentle, subtle, desperate insistence, just like years before, after the babies...six weeks...always the magical date. 'Am I hurting you?' Just like back then. No, no, I'm fine. So much to delicately negotiate in both our psyches, I couldn't be delicate with my body, it would just have to cope, which it did, and does. It isn't the same, my body has been through so much, too much, but it's deep, so deep to have such history. My feeling sensations is returning, my desire is returning.

I care for my body, determination, and I believe in the power of the female. With love to menopausas everywhere... your body shows your life history and this is where true beauty is to be found.

I am Muma to five, nanny to three. Natural habitat is the woods and fields and dark warm birth rooms, sea coves and open roads. Separated from my mother and family and culture at birth, now privileged to facilitate early breastfeeding and bonding, with so much love, and gratitude.