I WAS more outraged by my perimenopausal symptoms than I was by my cancer, diagnosed 18 months after my periods stopped. The pain of cancer and its gruelling treatments is explicable: it’s a disease, it needs to be treated, and everyone sympathises. I wrote letters to my friends telling them what was happening to me and asking for their love and prayers. Most of all, as I tried to breathe my way through the years of treatment, I prayed that the experience might transform me.
In contrast, the menopause happens as a matter of course to half the population, has none of the cachet of disease because it is natural, and, running alongside my chemotherapy like a tub of salt ready to rub into sore wounds, it was something that I simply couldn’t write about in the same heartfelt way.
I pray for understanding. Why does this rite of passage have to be so utterly horrible? All I have come up with is that it is teaching me patience. So when I finally emerge on the other side, I will be . . . more patient.
And then I picked up Jayne Manfredi’s Waking the Women (Feature, 18 October). In the time that it took to read it, over two train journeys — no more than three and a half hours — my feelings about and even my physical experience of my menopausal symptoms were transformed. This romping, tear-jerking, laugh-out-loud read that pays absolutely no attention to split infinitives offers, at last, a spiritual context for this testing time.
The book is crammed with good things, but, for me, the best bit is Manfredi’s suggestion that the rite of passage through menopause is a return to the child that I was before puberty. “I’m nine years old and my body still belongs to me. . . I don’t care that people might be watching me. I jump and splash [in the sea] with the kind of unbound abandon that only a nine year old child can experience, and the watching middle aged me began once again to know what I had come not to know” (author’s italics). What an offer! What a prospect of a new life to lead, not as a bent old crone who is . . . patient . . . but as a laughing, unburdened soul, who can imagine hitherto unimaginable things and is entirely at ease about speaking them out aloud!
Other life-giving insights, offered poetically, dramatically, and with tremendous warmth, include: dropping our burdens as we say goodbye to youth for ever, and in so doing receiving life in abundant, extraordinary fullness; praying through the valid anger that we feel so as to “speak one’s mind by telling all one’s heart”; hearing of recent studies that show that hot flushes “might result in the brain becoming more flexible” — and, dear readers, now more than ever is the time for flexible brains, as AI closes around us, because we must be as unpredictable as possible. Plus, in vaginal dryness, thinking of Sarah conceiving (actually orgasming) in her old age, and the living God bursting through the arid desert of our prayer.
And oh! how I loved the suggestion that we emulate Ruth, who comes alongside Naomi’s depression instead of trying to solve it. We don’t want our biological rites of passage to be solved like problems. We “want to have the freedom to name what’s happening to [us] without feeling embarrassed or ashamed . . . and feel like [we’re] not suffering alone”.
This is a book for Christian readers, but it is a superb offering to a secular world whose understanding of the menopause remains puddle-deep. If you read and recommend nothing else in relation to the menopause, read this.
Dr Claire Gilbert is the author of Miles to go Before I Sleep (Hodder & Stoughton, 2021). Her latest book, I, Julian: The fictional autobiography of Julian of Norwich (Books, 6 April 2023), is available in paperback.
Waking the Women: Faith, menopause and the meaning of midlife
Jayne Manfredi
Canterbury Press £12.99
(978-1-78622-575-7)
Church Times Bookshop £11.69
Read an extract here.