Guest post by Mer Monson, who lives with her hubby and three sons in Springville, Utah. She loves poetry, word games, reading 10 books at once, and playing in the world of effortless change as a master transformative coach. She is the author of Reality Bathed in Hope: A Cancer Blog and was recently published in Stories From the Muses. You can learn more about her at www.mermonson.com.
I crashed into menopause, all at once, while I was out cold on the operating table. No one asked me if they could take my ill-looking ovaries out, if I wanted to leapfrog into being an old woman at 42. The surgeon told my husband it needed to be done; my ovaries were filled with cancer. The word menopause didn’t even enter their conversation in the hospital hallway. I don’t feel angry about it as I get they were trying to save my life, but I am still in awe that it all went down behind my back and beneath my unconscious eyes.
As I woke from surgery, I heard my husband’s gentle voice next to my face: “They took your ovaries, hon. It’s cancer.” Cancer, with its six-scar surgeries and endless IV bags of chemo, barreled its way into my world before I even had a breath to think about living without the juice of ovaries. Becoming a barren woman was drowned out by having to be a bald one. The only conversation about menopause I remember happened with my oncology surgeon in the midst of a hot-flash sweat bath while my feet were up in the stirrups. She offered an estrogen patch to curb the heat, and told me there was no clear evidence if it would wake cancer back up or not. I lay on the soaked exam paper for about six seconds before my gut said, “Yep, I want it,” grateful for a stream of relief in the midst of a wild river of symptoms.
As the fear of cancer has faded a few years down the road, there is room now to explore what it is to be a woman with a dry and empty belly. There are tears to mourn the loss, energy to play with how I can feel better, and space to unravel all the stories buried under the intensity of just trying to make it to 50. In all honesty, I’m grateful I didn’t have to crawl into menopause in slow motion, that I didn’t have to bleed and stop bleeding 30 times along the way, or fear a surprise baby. And yet the greatest gift of moving beyond the mess and minutia of fertility has been a whole new landscape of intimacy, truth and tenderness with my own body and soul. Even in a wrinkled body of scars and missing parts, I have fallen into a space where nothing can unwoman me. I have come face to face with an ageless woman in my bones who is golden and ever-ready for birth.
Her touch is familiar to me now. She entices me to sink into the sensation of the moment, whatever its flavor. She strips me of the urge to hide, to behave, to mask myself as someone who doesn’t make waves. She stokes the fire in me for raw, unfiltered truth. She breaks off each crusty layer of I am not worthy or good. She tunes me to the resonance of my own voice and opens my mouth when there is something to say. She does not care that I can’t make a flesh-and-blood baby, that my bones will brittle early, that my skin has taken a fast-forward leap toward looking like my mother’s. She’s still all in on moving me to create, and she does not let me shove my light aside the way she used to. She demands, in a steady stream of permission, that I reclaim my own knowing, my own desire, my own way of doing life and God. Her bidding often terrifies me, and yet I love her for never letting me off the hook.
There are moments I miss my smooth skin and all the other cool things that came with it, but I treasure having the depth of presence to stand in my own strength, to surrender to pleasure, to mother myself, to walk my son through a dark passage with steady arms. I relish having eyes to see a God that is always here, now, in an unbroken resonance of love. And there is nothing I’d rather do than play this new, older woman’s game of birthing my own flavor of light to cradle and rock the world in a way only my arms can do.
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This post is part of the series Menopause and Me.
Fellow surgical menopause woman here! I had six years to mentally prepare. I can only imagine what it was like to wake up from surgery and learn your ovaries were gone and that you had cancer. Thank you for writing this essay and sharing some of your experience!
This is beautiful, thank you for sharing.
Ah. Beautiful: “I have fallen into a space where nothing can unwoman me. I have come face to face with an ageless woman in my bones who is golden and ever-ready for birth.” Your thoughts and writing remind me of Clarissa Pinkola Estes’s book, “Women Who Run With the Wolves.”
Ahh, what a compliment. She is one of my favorites 💜
Holy cow Mer, this is AMAZING!!!!