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I’m sitting at a tiny desk in a tiny, one-woman nail salon in a tiny Blue Mountains town. Mel is holding my hands in hers, running her thumbs critically over my fingernails. Linda is sitting to one side of us, waiting for her treatment. She’s just been to have her hair done to get rid of the grey.
I had my nose pierced a month or so ago, consciously (self-consciously) opposing the march of age, putting a ring in my 55-year-old nose as a way of saying, well, this is my body now. Or something. It came from the same urge that drove me to get a tattoo and cut off my hair. And it came with the same awareness that these are classic cliches of menopause.
Some advice I give to my writing students: here’s how to work on a cliche. Let your mind rest for a second. Close your eyes and reimagine the scene, what you saw and how you felt. Listen to your thoughts. You’ll find that when you slow down you don’t think, see or write in cliches.
Here’s what happens when I take my own advice: I let my mind rest. I close my eyes and reimagine myself at those moments. Dreamily baring my wrist at the tattoo studio. Watching my hair fall on to the concrete floor. Gritting my teeth at a western Sydney piercing salon, feeling the rush of tears and wondering why I’d chosen that burning, shining needle instead of the piercing gun.
I listen to my thoughts and I realise the cliche still stands. I did have all these things done to my body because of menopause. Because I wanted to tell the world that it was my body now, and I wanted to tell the world to fuck off. And I wanted to feel pain. I wanted to feel pain whose moment and method I’d chosen; different to the pain of labour or grief or depression.
A fortnight or so before I had my nails done, my partner and I had to fly to Belfast for a family emergency. It turns out 24 hours in three different planes, twice in a week, isn’t good for a newly pierced nose. When I got to Mel’s salon my nose was swollen and sore and I wished I hadn’t been such an idiot. A 55-year-old cliche with a pierced nose; worse still, a pierced nose that really wasn’t working out. This was maybe the third time I’d had my nails painted by someone else – I’m not really that kind of woman, what I used to call a “proper woman” – but I’d been looking forward to adding to my decorated self. Instead, catching sight of my infected nose in the salon mirror, I hated myself so much that I wanted to scream. The same feeling I’d had as a 19-year-old, eating an entire packet of chocolate biscuits in order to get them out of temptation’s way – and later, standing in front of the mirror and tearing at the fat on my stomach. The disordered logic of self-hatred. I’ve always been excellent at body-shaming myself. Call it a gift.
Mel has a nose ring and, as she clattered through the polish bottles for the colour that she’d put somewhere but couldn’t remember where, she gave me advice about how to manage my piercing. Linda didn’t have a piercing. But she did have menopause and, very quickly, the three of us began to swap information about our Menopause Experience™. To wit: we walk into rooms and stop, looking around, with no idea why we’re there. We start stories and forget why we’re telling them. We lose things. We’re angry and tearful; we’re telling people off at work, in shops, at home. We are so sick of people telling us things that we already know. And if menopause has a birthday, on our birthdays we woke up with five, maybe 10 kilos of extra weight around our waists and on our thighs.
I can’t speak for my trans sisters and brothers, experts in the pleasures and miseries of hormone fluctuation, or my friends who have survived cancer and the hormonal ravages of chemotherapy, radiotherapy and oestrogen treatment. And some of my cisgender menopausal friends have very few symptoms. Others have flooding periods that go on for weeks, costing a fortune in period products. Some have no periods at all. Some have furniture-shifting orgasms, the best of their lives. Others – well, you know that feeling when you think there’s an extra step but there isn’t? We’re braver, we’re pissed off, we’re badly depressed, we’re losing hair, we’ve never felt so good, we have hot flushes, we’re battle-axes so get out of our way. We’re leaving our partners; we’ve never loved our partners so much. Our kids are leaving school or home; our parents are old, or dead. We’re taking HRT and it’s made such a difference; we tried taking HRT and it did nothing.
Last week I had lunch with a couple of women I’ve loved since 1987. Yikes. One of them arrived late, flushed and sweating, tearing off layers of winter clothes and telling us how furious she was with the fucking cab driver, who’d overruled her because he knew the “right” way to a street she’d lived in for years. Then she told a story about another woman taking her to task for her chaotic behaviour. And then, chaotically, we got drunk. Menopausal women often have drinking problems, and alcohol is especially bad for hot flushes. Bravely we sweated our way through several bottles of wine. Bravely we endured the indulgent smiles of the young staff as they cracked the top off another bottle of pinot grigio. See what I mean about cliches?
Maybe a cliche is there to remind us that nothing is as simple as a cliche wants it to be. Should I be outraged that there’s not enough known about menopause? Should I feel bad about feeling bad about menopause? Should I celebrate my curvier self? Should I hide her or flaunt her? Was I an idiot to get my nose pierced?
My nose isn’t better yet. And I don’t feel like a warrior woman, a woman who no longer takes shit, much less a woman who glories in her new body. But I don’t feel bad either. I actually don’t know how to describe myself. My 24-year-old self’s most-played album was Björk’s Debut. Am I violently happy, am I daring people to jump off roofs with me? There’s no map, and a compass wouldn’t help at all.
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