Hatching
In the fall of 1979, I was 12 years old and living in Prince George’s County with my family. That fall, I entered 7th grade at Thomas Johnson Junior High excited, anxious, clumsy, curious and mostly ready for the journey from the late 1970s, during which I’d witnessed a post-Civil Rights renaissance of opportunity for Black families, into the early ‘80s, which seemed poised to usher in thrilling sense of hope. I had grown 3 inches the summer before, experienced my first real kiss with a boy from my neighborhood who I had known since I was 4 years old and had gotten one of my “top 3 worst haircuts” of my entire life that had to be fixed by our family beautician. What was supposed to be a Dorothy Hamill bowl style on thick curly kinky hair, left me with a short haircut that took the entirety of the 7th grade to grow back out.
I also started my period. More specifically, I started my period on October 31, 1979 in Mr. Barnes’ math class. I had been waiting for over a year for that moment. I had been waiting for my period to arrive since I read Judy Blume’s Are You There God? It’s Me Margaret in the 6th grade. I felt like I was in a perpetual state of waiting. Waiting for my body to shapeshift from looking like a kid to looking like a bonafide teenager. Waiting to be noticed by the boys in my neighborhood as someone worthy of their immature romantic attention. Wanting to stand out and fit in while waiting for my period to finally make its debut, I was waiting and I was becoming a new version of myself.
Born in the late 1960s, my younger sister and I are the beneficiaries of the Civil Rights Movement, Black liberation movement, women’s movement and sexual revolution in every way. Born in New Bern, North Carolina to older parents who can trace their lineage in Eastern North Carolina back seven generations, we had moved on up like the Jeffersons, relocating from North Carolina to Washington, DC when I was 3 and then to Prince George’s County, Maryland when I was 4.
Every family in our solidly middle class neighborhood was Black, working good government jobs and had 2.5 kids. We were surrounded by exquisite expressions of Blackness 100 percent of the time in our community. Black music, food, fashion, church and culture. It was incredible and ubiquitous, but it did not extend to school. At our mostly white elementary school in Bowie, Maryland where we were bused, there were 500 kids and fewer than 75 of us were Black. This was the first place where I experienced the expectation that I would be the ombudsman for my entire community and culture.
This dynamic would persist throughout high school and college. So much curiosity about what Black people think and do was layered with stereotypes, tropes and what I now know to be microaggressions and racism. Queries about our hair (always our hair), the use of “Black” slang perceived as hip or cool and the proverbial “so do Black people [insert all manner of ridiculousness here]?” questions persisted. It was the ’70s and we were proud to be Black, but we did not want to be specimens in a petri dish.
In our little elementary school, the conversation around sex and our bodies was solid, if embarrassing, for a classroom full of 12-year-olds. I will never be able to erase from my mind my 6th grade teacher talking about “venereal diseases” and simulating how to insert an OB tampon. These candid conversations were one-part hippie-infused “peace and love,” and one-part intentional sex education born out of decades of reproductive health and rights work. Educators wanted to make sure young people coming of age had access to accurate information about their bodies and sex. I don’t remember any of my classmates asking questions during the week carved out for sex education. I definitely don’t recall any of the Black students asking questions.
In retrospect, I don’t know if that was a function of the kind of embarrassment some kids naturally feel when broaching the topic or if it was another example of not wanting to feel that the questions or thoughts shared by any of us as individuals had to represent all 12-year-old Black girls EVERYWHERE. Either way, we all mostly sat in silence as Mrs. Schlerth handed out maxi pads and tampons for us to take home like Halloween candy at the end of the week. Groovy!
Because my mother was a registered nurse, my sister and I also had several books explaining what was going to happen to our bodies, what we could anticipate as we became a new version of ourselves. My mother also was very open and communicative about the changes becoming increasingly apparent in her daughters. Her approach was not what I would call radical, but it was thorough nonetheless. My mother was fairly progressive for a woman of her generation and my sister and I knew we could talk to her about things that some of our friends could not with their parents. She shared with us her story of when she started her period at 15 and was candid about signs we should look out for that gave us information about what our bodies were doing to prepare for the impending arrival of our cycles. She also planted the seeds around consent and told us in no uncertain terms that our bodies belonged to us and that no one, not even her or daddy, should touch us without permission. We trusted her and felt comfortable talking to her. It was a place of safety that not all of our friends had at home. This way of being open, grounded, kind and a great listener, made her very popular in our neighborhood as the cool mom all our friends knew they could talk to, a distinction that persisted with our circle of friends throughout high school and college.
Shapeshifting
In 1979, my mother was 49 years old, my parents had separated, our family structure was shifting. Before the fall of 1980, we would move back to New Bern, North Carolina to begin a new phase of life. In hindsight, it is clear to me that she felt like she needed to make a decision that would be in the best interest of taking care of her girls. New Bern was where we were born, where we had extended family, both blood and chosen. New Bern was safe and could be a soft place to land.
It is also clear to me now that, less than a year after starting my own period, while I was entering a new phase of imminent womanhood, my mother was likely in the middle of her menopausal journey and in the process of also becoming a new thing.
My body’s navigational system was coming online, signaling that I was moving from being a girl to becoming a young woman. This new identity was not just connected to the physical changes of my body, but also emotional changes, how I understood my gender identity, my relationships and my developing sexuality. I imagine that mother’s body was also recalibrating, a system rebooting if you will. In menopause, she was making similar adjustments and stretching her identity, secretly reshaping herself while supporting me through the phases of my own womanhood as it took shape for the first time.
Perception
The naming and framing of “menopause” came online in 1821. The term was coined by the French physician Charles Pierre Louis De Gardanne in one of the very first articles on the subject titled “ De la ménépausie, ou de l’âge critique des femmes” (Menopause: The Critical Age of Women). Clearly, the male naming of what was historically perceived to be a women/woman-identified experience was the beginning of a problematic journey in women’s health. Dr. De Gardanne’s explanations of how people with ovaries experience hormonal changes was reflective of so much of the pseudoscience of the early 19th century. Fraught with stereotypes and patriarchal tropes, menopause became another reason to assert the fragility of the female form in mind, body and spirit. It presented male-dominated culture with another opportunity to oppress women and women-identified people through the science of the growing field of gynecology. Menopause was and continues to be pathologized and problematized.
By 2025, there will be over 1 billion people experiencing menopause in the world, which will be 12% of the entire world population of 8 billion. Because the vast majority of people who will experience menopause, will likely experience it after the age of 45, the changes that occur during this time tend to be closely tied to aging. This is important to note, because how we as a society or culture relate to aging or revere our elders can be reflective of how we perceive aging and our own mortality. Often, when people talk about going through “the change”, it brings up all the images of a tearful, rageful, sweaty and emotional woman. This journey is not seen or held up as a positive transformation with a spectrum of stages and manifestations, but an ending to be cloaked in fear.
Another, more potent way to frame the menopausal experience is to see it as actually another powerful representation of a rite of passage that is present to the liminality of the experience. In anthropology, liminality is “the quality of ambiguity or disorientation that occurs in the middle stage of rituals, when participants no longer hold their pre-ritual status but have not yet begun the transition to the status they will hold when the ritual is complete.” It is believed that during these liminal periods of transformation, social hierarchies may be reversed or even temporarily dissolved. The constancy of cultural traditions can become uncertain, and future outcomes once taken for granted may be thrown into doubt. The dissolution of order during liminality creates a fluid, malleable situation that enables new institutions and customs to become established. It is a transformation to a new iteration of you.
The Motherboard
My mother passed away in November of 1998 when I was 31 years old. In the 23 years since her transition, I have often thought about what was happening in our lives when I was 12. I’ve thought about what was happening specifically to her: divorce, leaving one thriving Black community for another, reconfiguring the meaning of — and her relationship to — the concept of home. She also had a close knit circle of intimates who were a constellation of kinfolks and good girlfriends who were aunties to my sister and I, but I’ve often wondered if she was able to access romantic love and intimacy after we returned home to New Bern. I only ever saw her date one person after the divorce, when I was in junior high. After high school, it seemed all her love was poured into my sister and me as we found our way into adulthood and eventually into our own parenthood. I look at her journey through the lens of my own experience, as a divorced mother of two sons who has long since lost both parents, figured out how to co-parent with the fathers of my children, put one child through college, survived bad credit and separation from work and who is decidedly post-menopausal. I want to stay open to intimacy, pleasure and love as I continue to shapeshift as a single person in my mid-50s.
It is the clarity of this seasoned hindsight that lets me see my mother more clearly in the fullness of all the identities she moved with in this world. The changes happening to her body, identity and family were dynamic and complex — my mother was more than somebody’s mother, wife, daughter or sister. She was more than just one thing. I have made peace with the fact that I will never truly know with certainty how she experienced that phase of her life emotionally and mentally, but I do know there was no “Are you there God? It’s Me [insert name here]” for menopausal people then. No public conversations, instructions or guidance to help you prepare. This is one of the reasons why I started the Black Girl’s Guide to Surviving Menopause to help normalize menopause and aging. I created this space for my mama, aunties, friends and myself. A safe space to center the stories and give voice to the experiences and journeys of Black women, women-identified and gender expansive people through the liminality of menopause…together.
In a multiverse where my mother is 91 and still alive, we have several conversations over a pot of greens, butter beans or a yummy bottle of homemade strawberry wine. We talk about this time in her life. We laugh and cry, together around our respective menopausal journeys. In that existence, she gets to share what it was like to travel that liminal journey down 95 South, leaving behind a different version of herself and our family. In that multiverse, I hold space for my mother and she gets to be vulnerable with me as she wants to be, honoring and sharing her own unique story of menopause. Her story of becoming…again.