Flash Count Diary. Darcey Steinke
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lie, one leg out of the blanket, calf pressed against the cold wood. I must always be a little cooler than is comfortable in order not to flash.
I have found flashes to be desperate, uncomfortable, sometimes even sublime, but never funny. On TV and in film, if they are shown at all, hot flashes are comedic bits akin to a man slipping on a banana peel. As a child, I remember watching Edith Bunker on All in the Family redden, fan herself, get discombobulated, and dash into the kitchen as the laugh track roared. Menopause is often filtered through male bafflement and repugnance. In Mrs. Doubtfire, Robin Williams catches his fake breasts on fire and, using two pan lids, eventually puts out the flames. He stands disheveled, his chest smoking. “My first day as a woman,” he says, “and I am already having hot flashes.”
Kitty Forman on That ’70s Show is menopausal, complaining about the heat and snapping at her family. Her husband, Red, refers to “the horrible thing that has taken over your mother.” When Red looks up menopause in the encyclopedia, he is repelled. “Good god, I didn’t think they’d have pictures.”
Jokes about menopause abound.
Q: What is scarier? A puppy or a rational woman in menopause?
A: A puppy, because a rational woman in menopause does not exist.
Q: What is ten times worse than a woman in menopause?
A: Two women in menopause.
Q: Why do women stop bleeding in menopause?
A: They need the blood for their varicose veins.
Women, too, make fun of flashes. On Etsy you can buy buttons that read BEWARE OF TEMPERATURE TANTRUMS and OUT OF ESTROGEN: APPROACH AT YOUR OWN RISK.
Humor can be a way out. A means to exalt and redeem what might otherwise be unbearable. I get that. Humor, as in the work of Samuel Beckett, can show the absurdity of life, of living in a body. “Nothing is funnier than unhappiness,” Beckett once said. “It’s the most comical thing in the world.”
The laughter around hot flashes, though, is not life-affirming. It’s thin, strained, and often mean-spirited. Some men are bewildered by the changes in their partners’ bodies. They suffer a parallel loss, but their honest grief is too often channeled into misogyny. Many women are fearful that the loss of fertility will take away their femininity. This unexamined shame rushes headlong into self-abasement and produces a brittle humor that is more a symptom of humiliation than actual catharsis.
None of the women I spoke to thought flashes were funny, but all were surprised, as I was, at the severity and isolation of the flash.
—At 3:00 p.m. it hits you like a ton of hot charcoal.
—Hot flashes for me are so severe that I fear I will have a heart attack and die.
—Mine start with … fear. It’s a quick burst of heat and nerve endings igniting in fear.
—They are like four-minute surprise anxiety attacks. I want to grab at my clothing, find a fan, open the fridge, whatever I can do.
Heat and panic drive many women out of doors for relief. One told me she often finds herself standing in the yard, flapping her pajamas in the middle of the night. Another puts on a sundress and stands barefoot in her freezing garage, surrounded by the tools on her husband’s workbench.
I often grab stuff out of my freezer—peas, pita bread, strawberries—and plunk them on my forehead, chest, and stomach. I’ll admit that the manic way I run to the fridge, pull out items, throw myself onto the couch, and lie with a slab of frozen ham balanced on my forehead might appear funny. But my flash is much more than a comedic skit. Though no one wants to say it out loud, menopause is about loss; it’s about departure—each flash reminds me of my corporeality, my mortality. With every flash, my psyche is pushed to grasp what it does not want to let itself know: that it is not immortal. This is terrifying. It’s also a rare opportunity, if faced directly, to come to terms with the limitations of the self.
Looking beyond boilerplate misogyny, I’d argue that the flash has been debased because it’s a sort of conduit, a profound crossing to the older stage of life. The sensation I have in the aura before the flash is elevated, possibly even hallucinatory, though that does not diminish its power: I feel I will soon find out knowledge no one else possesses, something to do with the boundary between life and death.
Of the spiritual dimensions of the flash, I find little to nothing in the scientific and self-help literature of menopause. Most of the writing deals with how to get rid of hot flashes, not how to understand them. Premarin, a hormone replacement made out of the urine of pregnant horses, is the most common suggestion. Natural remedies are more humane but vary in effect. Herbalists recommend black cohosh, nettle, soy, rose hip, creams made from wild yam, vitamin E, and vitamin B. One website suggests taking a tablespoon of apple cider vinegar twice a day and another drinking 10 percent of your body weight in water. Belinda Carlisle, the singer from the Go-Go’s, recommends putting a magnet in your underpants.
Many online essays urge me to laugh at myself more and complain less. Nobody wants to hear about menopause, even menopausal women themselves. Other female milestones are of more general interest. There is a whole literary genre, the coming-of-age novel, that addresses the move from girlhood to womanhood, and both men and women write about birth as a liminal event. Outside sex, men are never keen on hearing how our bodies feel, but both the onset of fertility/sexuality and birth are of interest to them in a way that menopause is not.
But what of my feelings—embodied for the first time in a flash—that I am divided, split into soul and body, that there is a me, lonely and frantic, who wants out of my corporeal form?
Charles Finney, leader of the First Great Awakening, detailed his religious conversion in language similar to how I and other women describe a flash. In his memoir, he says that his heart seemed to be liquid fire: “My feelings seemed to rise and flow out—like a wave of electricity.” Another convert reported that she felt a presence traveling over her: “Suddenly there seemed to be something sweeping into me and inflating my entire being.”
Some describe conversion as pleasurable, but for most it’s eerie, even frightening. In Varieties of Religious Experience, William James collected conversion testimonials: “Suddenly without a moment’s warning my whole being seemed roused to the highest state of tension or aliveness, and I was aware, with an intention not easily imagined by those who had never experienced it, that another being or presence was not only in the room, but quite close to me.”
In an earlier era, I might have felt the flash as wicked as easily as divine: a witch’s spell that sends waves of heat into my body, makes my tongue blaze, gives me the feeling, just under my right elbow, of a strong electrical shock. James, being a psychologist, believed religious conversions were caused by “an underground life,” which led a “parasitic existence, buried outside of the primary field of consciousness.” During a flash I reside in the liminal; I feel that the membrane between me and another world is worn thin. James felt his scientific explanation of conversion was also compatible with the idea of a higher power: “The notion of a subconscious self certainly ought not at this point in our inquiry be held to exclude all notions of a higher penetration.”
Religious conversion, if we believe in it, is an experience of divinity unmediated by doctrine, hymns, or prayers. Those conduits that the transcendentalists thought blocked our relationship with divinity also serve to protect individuals from the full scourging force of the godhead. In conversion that safety filter is blown off its hinges, and believers feel unnerved, nauseated, filled with lava-like heat.
I’ve been having flashes now for nearly two years. Their onslaught has wiped out the composure and integrity of my old self. “Everyone wants to be the person she was before,” Gail Sheehy writes in her book about menopause, Silent Passage. But I am no longer my old self, and I can’t go backward. Why would I want to take hormone supplements, as Sheehy both advocates doing and did herself to start menstruating again, to dupe my body back into thinking it can still make babies? The feminist Germaine Greer has said that during her brief period on hormones, she didn’t like the feeling