Midlife is a mixed bag. On the one hand, there is a freedom that comes with getting older. You trade being cute for being yourself. You piss folks off without feeling guilty about it. You stop shoveling other people’s bullshit. That’s the fun and liberating stuff. The scary parts are the changes in the mind, memory, and body that will have you thinking you’re literally going out of your mind, getting ugly, drying up, or worse – the rocks and bumps that no one else truly understands unless they’ve been through it themself.
The writers of Black and Menopausal: Intimate Stories of Navigating the Change have been through it and lived to tell the tale. Their up-close and raw accounts of the overwhelming ocean known as menopause are breathtaking bursts of Black vulnerability, sadness, humor, joy, and beauty. They are radical, almost revolutionary acts of defiance in a world that still struggles to see darker-skinned people as anything other than inconvenient, abstract, complaining, and repulsive. They are necessary, potentially life-saving stories for people who feel alone on the menopause journey and who need some helping hands and encouragement to survive it.
Black and Menopausal‘s contributors hail primarily from the UK and the Caribbean, though one is based in the United States in Kentucky. Their ages, life experiences, and professional backgrounds are as varied as the menopause symptoms they have endured and the strategies that have sustained them. Hot flashes, good sex, bad sex, itchy skin, debilitating anxiety, mood swings – you name it, they’ve had it, and they are not afraid to talk about it all in detail. “I am going to get a little bit graphic here, but this is just to emphasize how things were and not to cause any sensationalism,” states Tashini Jones in the chapter “My Fluctuating Libido.”
Jones’ forthright statement captures the honest layeredness of all the stories in the book. A lot of them do not begin with menopause itself but with the relationships, conversations, and beliefs that preceded it. This allows us to see the storytellers as whole people while also positioning us to contemplate menopause, and health more broadly, as both a personal and a social experience.
“We, the daughters, were left to come to terms with the various complexities of menstruation while they began to navigate the minefield of menopause. Thus continues a cycle of fortitude, presenting a facade of stoicism to the world while covering the cracks beneath the surface (150).”
– Contributor Myrle Roach from the chapter “The Invisible Cracks”
Menopause affects how people perceive us and how we perceive ourselves. It also compels many people to form new social bonds and to deepen (or sever) existing ones. It often takes a supportive village to get through the menopause journey intact, a fact that stands at odds with the myth of self-sufficiency so many people in the West have been socialized to believe, or the “strong Black woman” ideal that many Black women feel pressured to live up to.
“For too long, it was easier to wear the crumbling professional mask rather than seek help, but it was the final acknowledgement in hospital that I was too sick to work that led me to make the valuable changes to my life (115).”
-Contributor Sandra Wilson from the chapter “The Mask of Professionalism”
Unfortunately, the places where people should expect the most support are not always safe or validating. In the chapter, “Black, Trans, and Menopausal,” Austen Smith relates what it felt like being prepped for a hysterectomy in a heteronormative healthcare environment as a transmasculine, nonbinary, and queer Black person in a society where the messaging surrounding menopause centers “white, cisgender, and heterosexual” women (p. 88):
“I needed my physician to trust me the first time I stated I was confident that I would not regret the procedure and want to be pregnant in the future. I needed the sonographer to not rant and rave about my ‘beautiful and textbook uterus and ovaries’ during an ultrasound to have those organs removed (88).“
The book’s contributors include people who practice or make use of alternative therapies, some of which are referenced in their narratives. However, as the book’s editors themselves point out, readers should not assume that the alternative remedies described are suitable for everyone. People who are experiencing menopause should discuss any healthcare concerns they have with their own healthcare providers.
Despite the harrowing nature of some of the medical encounters and personal experiences the book’s contributors describe, I, a perimenopausal traveler, felt encouraged after reading their stories. The contributors to Black and Menopausal have struggled, but their struggling alone does not define them. They roll with the punches, sometimes awkwardly, but often gracefully, and with a lot of humor (there are some seriously funny moments in this book). They are fully alive, living and loving life. This confirms what I have heard people say, which is that the menopause journey is tough going at first, but it does get better. Life really can be fulfilling on the other side.
Stacy Torian 