Flash Count Diary. Darcey Steinke
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wanted to get back there.
There are things I miss about my old self: the ferocity of physical desire, the sense of well-being (aside from the days before my period) that appears to have been in part hormonal, and the fantasy, no matter how ephemeral, that I might have another child. Now I am dinged up, less “moist,” as Sheehy so annoyingly points out. But the brokenness that the hot flashes and sleeplessness have wrought feels real—a realness that encompasses a wider emotional sweep, a larger sense of the world, and a keener awareness of my own self. Dr. Pauline Maki, of the Center for Research on Women and Gender at the University of Minnesota, told me that one unexpected side effect of hot flashes is greater empathy: “The hot flash comes unbidden. You can’t control your body, and this makes women more empathetic to others who are suffering.”
The suffragette Elizabeth Cady Stanton, a mother of seven, writes in her memoir that the best part of a woman’s life is the back side of fifty, when her energies are not scattered in housework, “when philanthropy takes the place of family selfishness, and when from the depths of poverty and suffering the wail of humanity grows as pathetic to her ears as once was the cry of her own children.”
Many women feel during menopause that an old self is dying and, as one woman, an actress and a health coach, told me, “a new creature is trying to get out.” Another woman, a young-adult novelist, told me that her flashes begin with her heart hammering so hard and fast that it feels like it’s trying to batter its way out of her chest: “I feel like I’m going to burst out of my skin and roar like the Incredible Hulk.”
During a recent sleepless night as a flash came on, I got so frustrated that I kicked the stack of books by my bed and squeezed my fists together; then out of my mouth came a deep and guttural roar. “Don’t make me angry,” Bruce Banner, a.k.a. the Hulk, often warns those around him, knowing that high emotion will raise his pulse and bring on his transformation. Ang Lee’s film Hulk opens with Banner trying to cure his condition (Banner was blasted with radioactive gamma rays while testing a bomb for the military) with two natural remedies often suggested to menopausal women: herbs and meditation. Later in the film, when his girlfriend asks him what his metamorphosis feels like, he replies, “It’s like someone has poured a liter of acid into my brain.”
The Hulk was created for Marvel comics by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby in the early sixties, but it’s Bill Bixby’s and Lou Ferrigno’s portrayals of Dr. Banner and the Hulk, respectively, in the seventies television show that most relate to my experience of the change. The show, with its barren-desert landscapes and makeshift sets, is permeated with alienation and sadness. Banner’s melancholy suggests to me that while the Hulk is make-believe, his burden is real. He struggles to control his out-of-whack body chemistry and also “the raging spirit that dwells within him.”
YouTube has hundreds of “Hulk Outs,” short clips from the TV show in which Banner changes into the Hulk. Banner is in a variety of situations: held against his will in a small-town jail, chasing pickpockets, trapped in a car in a demolition derby, tied up in a wax museum. The situations are different but the steps in his mutation are always the same: his face flushes, his forehead gleams with sweat, and there is an expression of panic, of his not wanting this to happen. Before he turns green, his face is open, tentative—an expression similar to my own when I watched myself flash in the bathroom mirror, troubled features flooded with animal longing.
The Hulk, monsterly kin to both Frankenstein’s creation and Mr. Hyde, differs from other superheroes. He goes after bad guys and saves damsels in distress, but his violence is also chaotic. He’ll bust up any room, even his own bedroom. His rage is inchoate, what with his dead mother, his messed-up childhood, his chemical imbalance, and his inability to control his own body. The flash is chemical and emotional, encompassing past and current frustrations. It is also a means of self-expression. After years of docility, Banner can reveal his rage. Greer writes in her book The Change that some of our negative feelings about menopause are “the result of our intolerance for the expression of female anger.” In menopause women come up, as never before, against their own mentality.
The change for decades has been a euphemism for menopause, whispered behind the backs of aging women: She’s going through the change. It sounds sinister and surreal but is actually accurate. Like the Hulk, I don’t have symptoms or a condition; I am in the midst of a rupture, a metamorphosis, an all-encompassing and violent change.
I watch Bixby’s chest bloat, the buttons fly off his plaid shirt, his green skin expand like the stem of a gigantic plant. Seams split, his belt pops, even the leather of his boots explodes. He is out of control but also free. And while he may break down a few doors, he also acts with an inner integrity. “The woman who lashes out at menopause,” Greer writes, “has found the breach in her self-discipline through which she may be able, finally, to escape to liberty.”
Freedom is on the horizon—freedom from child care and domestic duties, from trying to be beautiful, from the leering male gaze, from derailing sexual desires. First, however, my body must evolve. As a woman, I should be used to the seismic changes of flesh and blood. During puberty my skin got greasy, my breasts popped out, and I started, to my astonishment, growing black hairs under my arms and between my legs. During the last month of my pregnancy, the creature inside me often jammed a toe into my stomach and dragged that toe across the curved plane of my protruding belly. In both puberty and pregnancy, I was often mystified, but there were also solid gains to look forward to—a grown-up female body, sex, a baby.
The bodily changes the flash forewarns—vaginal entropy, wrinkles, bones crumbling with osteoporosis—are less hopeful, even grim. “So we die before our own eyes,” Sarah Orne Jewett wrote in 1898. “We see some chapters of our lives come to their natural end.” The Bulgarian-French philosopher Julia Kristeva locates horror, which she calls the abject, in the moment we are reminded we are living in a body. “Abjection is above all ambiguity. Because, while releasing a hold, it does not actually cut off the subject from what threatens it—on the contrary, abjection acknowledges it to be a perpetual danger.” What frightens me most—decay, death—is me.
It would be hard to find a structure more abject than the Port Authority Bus Terminal in New York City. It reminds me of what purgatory might look like: smeared glass, grubby tile, exhausted souls slumped on plastic chairs and waiting on line. I’ve just taught my class at Columbia, and I’m going back up to our little cottage in Sullivan County to help my husband close down the place for the winter. The bus is full of slack-faced men in ill-fitting suits and women in polyester floral dresses. Walking down the bus’s center aisle, I pass a large lady in a pink tracksuit and a bald man wearing Elvis sunglasses. I find a window seat near the back. The elderly man beside me is talking on his cell phone about his appointment in the city. He got mixed signals from his doctor about whether he is going to live or die.
For now the bus door is open, but once it closes I’ll be sealed in, and though I have on three removable layers, not counting my sports bra, I know I am bound to flash.
I knew so much more going into both menstruation and pregnancy than I did going into menopause. Part of this is because secrecy, shame, and fear still stigmatize the change. But the other part is that so little is known for certain about menopause and the science of hot flashes. Because there are few good animal models—the only creatures that go through menopause are human women, female killer whales, narwhals, and short-finned pilot and beluga whales—most of what we know about how the body works in menopause is speculation. Studies have found that flashes are associated with decreased levels of hormones and that these decreases confuse the vasomotor system.
The vasomotor system includes the brain’s brain, the hypothalamus, as well as the stomach, the central nervous system, internal organs, the spinal cord, and skin. Cilia and fibers in all these systems send information to the hypothalamus about our body temperature. Think of the hypothalamus as the main control center of the New York City subway system and of the outer vasomotor system as the various stations and miles of track. Hormones make this system run smoothly. During our reproductive years, our brains grow addicted to synchronized changes in hormone levels or, to use the subway analogy, there are established frequencies of communication and well-worked-out rules of travel. In menopause, hormone levels become