Sexy and Menopausal

Hey ya’ll. So Auntie is feeling pretty good these days.

Since my divorce last year, I discovered that getting and staying healthy has been an important part of the healing process. So I take care of me. I get my rest, eat healthy, stay active and maintain a healthy weight. The exercise is slimming me down and the yoga is shaping me up.

Here I am at 55-and-a-half and I must say I’m feeling fine and sexy. Yep, Auntie ain’t doing too bad -- for an auntie.

But you know what is driving me crazy? Menopause. There is nothing that says “old” like a coochie that is going through “the change.” My hormones are running things and it is not good. I break out sweating while I’m siting still. I wake up in the middle of the night drenched in sweat. And don’t even talk about the hot flashes. Flashes of hot, in case the first term is not clear enough. It feels like I’m about to internally combust. There’s this fire inside. It starts at the pit of my stomach and spreads over my chest to go up my neck and into my face. The heat gets more and more intense until just when you think, “okay this is what it must feel like right before you explode,” it dissipates. You get thought it. You move on.

But I ask myself, and now I ask you: Can I be hot and have hot flashes at the same time? Is it possible to be sexy AND menopausal? Is this a thing? Is anybody else feeling this? Because this real-life situation is starting to turn a little surreal.

And it’s not only affecting me personally. Being a menopausal professional is a delicate balance.

Like during a meeting at work recently. I wasn’t sick, I just looked like it. Just when I stood up to present our strategic plan, the hot flashes hit. I felt the heat coming, hoping it would be a mild episode, easy to conceal. But right before the first slide, I felt the flush and then the wetness on my face.

“Are you okay?” my colleague asks, concern wrinkling his forehead.

There is a certain panic in knowing that the only two choices you have are to either lie when everyone knows you’re lying or tell the truth and be embarrassed or, worse yet, lose professional cred.

If I said I was okay, I would be seen as lying. The sweat rolling down my temples and a new shade of red filling my melanin was in indication that I was NOT okay. But in all actuality, I was. I wasn’t sick. Just hot flashing. An organic biological process that happens when women become middle-aged and menopausal.

Unfortunately, I was not in a setting where I was allowed to be a middle aged menopausal woman. My ambitious management position required me to be a tenacious warrior, smart, savvy, capable and cunning – at all times. With the full knowledge that I am getting older, I work diligently to fulfill that role. In the office early, energetic, alert and dynamic, active and present.

But the sad reality is to be seen as someone who was old enough to no longer produce eggs is, for the narrow minded, to be seen as old, weak, non-essential. That day at that moment, I knew that no matter what competencies and capabilities I brought to the table, I would never be looked at the same way again.

So I stood before my colleagues and took a deep breath. I dabbed the sweat from my brow and I made that presentation. I talked through all 18 slides with a furnace burning off and on inside of me. Because I had to. I was too scared that my professional career would be affected by letting them see me as “old.”

That fear, and the panic I felt trying to conceal what I was going through, makes me angry. Middle-aged women are hot flashing every day all over the world. In bedrooms and boardrooms, factories and churches, grocery stores and fitness clubs. It's what happens to us when we age. It's a natural process that affects half the population. Yet here we stand - there I stood - being made to feel broken for just being who I naturally was.