True Nature

Your True Nature By Laura Culberg

I read recently that the hormonal composition of a woman after menopause is the same as a girl before puberty. I've been obsessing over this information for weeks. My current reality is this: I am perimenopausal, my partner Nancy is perimenopausal, and my daughter Lucia is smack in the middle of puberty. This means that there are a lot of hormones flying around all the time. In both puberty and perimenopause, emotional lability and fatigue are common. In my household we all share some of this. I’m writing from Chicago, where I've been with my family of origin in my family home for almost ten days. I got to spend several days with my sisters and their kids swimming in the lake, eating meals together, playing games and being fully saturated in all of our old dysfunctional patterns. In our time together there were often very hard moments, moments when I wanted to be back in Seattle, but now that they've gone back to their respective homes and I'm here with my parents without them, I miss them terribly. Something is missing. 

But still, even without my sisters here, I love my old neighborhood. I ran into a bunch of childhood friends a few days ago, women also with teenagers, also entering menopause. In the few hours of spending time with them, I could deduce that they too were experiencing many of the physical, emotional, social and spiritual changes that come along for this middle age ride.What I saw in them was grace and wisdom. Two live abroad and one in California. All were, like me, home to see their families and give their kids some time in the place where they grew up. 

Our neighborhood on the South Side of Chicago is a small one, a tight-knit community where everyone knows each other and each other's siblings and parents. I knew all these women when they were kids so it was special and kind of magical to be with them and their own kids for a few hours.I kept going back to this thought of how hormones pre-puberty mirror those of post-menopause. One of the friends I ran into was Meredith, my bestie from elementary school. When we were kids we were super creative and care free. When we found each other as best friends at age nine, we were each fully in our essence of being who we were born to be. 

We were living in our true nature before getting muddled by pubescent hormones and societal expectations. It was sad to say goodbye to these gals, people who knew me when. I felt, like I did when my sisters left, that I was saying goodbye to a part of myself, a piece of what made me who I am right now. I wanted all of these old friends to come with me to Put Some Claws in Your Pause, to join me for this brave new journey into the next period of life. I hope you can.