Category — Menopause in Community

Wave Mo`omomi at Dawn ©lynette sheppard 2010

Jimmy Buffett’s Margaritaville dragged me from the depths of slumber. “Why is there music at five am?” I wondered groggily. Finally realizing that I was hearing a ringtone, I fumbled for my cell phone on the bedside table.

“Big earthquake in Chile,” my husband blurted in my ear. “Sue Nonny.”

“Sue who?” I asked, scanning my mental files to figure out who we knew traveling to or living in Chile.

“Tsunami!” my husband repeated. “Heading to Hawai`i. Get to high ground.”

Lei Venus and I were attending E Pili Kakou, an annual hula conference on our neighbor island of Kaua`i. We look forward to attending nearly every year for girlfriend time, rekindling our joy in the dance, and new adventures.

This year, Mom Nature saw to it that the emphasis was on adventure with a capital A.

A note had been slipped under our door by the Kaua`i Beach Hotel management. Basically, it instructed us to grab our essentials only and be ready to evacuate if the Civil Defense sirens sounded at 6:00 am. We hurriedly dressed, slam dunked a couple cups of coffee and grabbed our purses, cell phones, and computers.

The sirens blared eerily and we headed to the lobby. We were immediately squired to buses and shuttled several miles away to the Kukui Grove Mall.

Much of the mall was closed and deserted. We headed to the courtyard where a stage was setup for entertainment throughout the year. Our wonderful hotel had sent scads of homemade pastries and a cooler full of drinks for us. (Mahalo Maydene, and all the fabulous crew. Mahalo to Roberts Hawai`i also.)

And then the show began. Blaine Kamalani Kia, president of Ka Laua`e Foundation that created and puts on E Pili Kakou in Kaua`i, Sacramento, CA, Japan, Tahiti, and Vancouver, Canada corralled musicians and hula dancers to share with all the evacuees what is meant by “aloha”.

We sang, danced, prayed, and gave thanks as the day progressed. At around 230pm, the all clear was given and our newfound ohana (family) joined hands in a large circle to sing “Hawai`i Aloha”. It was what we in the islands call a “chicken skin” experience. Kumu Kia invited everyone to join us at the hotel that evening for our performances.

The weekend was extended through the next day with workshops since we’d missed our classes the previous day. But we didn’t miss our lessons. Not at all.

The real lesson of hula, indeed that of all Hawai`ian culture is “aloha”. Aloha – sharing with humility, compassion, modesty, and reverence all that you have to offer with family, friends, and strangers. Aloha – an outpouring of love and grace with no expectation of anything in return. Aloha – a way of life Hawai`i can (and does) offer the world. Aloha, a vision for our present and future that we Menopause Goddesses and elders can model.

Lei and I are home now on Moloka`i. We are grateful to have missed the devastating waves of the tsunami. We are saddened that our ohana in Chile are suffering from the destruction of the quake. And we are reminded to be our own waves – waves of Change. Not tsunamis creating havoc and laying waste, but gentle persistent waves. Waves of kindness and connection. Waves of peace and sharing. Waves of aloha. We can live that promise anywhere.

Navigating the net can be confusing and disheartening. When you google the word menopause, you are bombarded with almost 10 million results. (9,680,000 to be exact.) Sheesh! Where does one start? How do we find good information?

Googling menopause blogs is not much more helpful. The top results are blogs that have few or new entries for several months. Sadly, Sue Richards of the top result, My Menopause Blog, has Parkinson’s disease and is unable to blog at this time. Google is woefully behind.

Add to that the overwhelming number of blogs and sites that are moderated by drug companies or selling something and it is no wonder that menopausal women are hard pressed to find good information on the net. The whole process just wears us down and we have to head to the kitchen for something chocolate.

So to save my goddess sisters from frustration and meltdown, I’ve compiled a list of what I believe are the best websites and blogs for women of a certain age. (Besides our own Menopause Goddess Blog, of course.) Here are the first few you will want to check out. Feel free to celebrate with the aforementioned chocolate.

Women in Balance
Women in Balance ( http://www.womeninbalance.org/) is a national, nonprofit organization whose mission is to empower women to take charge of their hormone health.

Education is a mainstay of this site. Not affiliated with any other group, they offer unbiased information from a multitude of sources. Their site also offers a healthcare practitioner finder. Subscribe to their monthly newsletter and watch for their one day Hormone Education days in a city near you. Last year’s hugely successful venues were Portland OR and Tampa FL.

They also publish selected entries from our Menopause Goddess Blog in the monthly newsletter. However, I loved and followed their site long before they asked.

I especially resonate with this philosophy from their Vision statement:
Knowledge is power. Balance is everything.
Hear, hear.

Vibrant Nation
Vibrant Nation (VibrantNation.com) is an online community dedicated to women 50 and older. Here’s an excerpt from their “About Us” description:

“At Vibrant Nation, these women (whom we’ve named “Vibrant Women”) can look for tips, share information, and join in smart conversations about work, style, relationships, wellness, books, and more.”

It’s a very user friendly site, where you can start a discussion or conversation easily. Or you can just “lurk” and read what other women are saying. Topics are broken up into the following:

# work & money
# fashion & beauty
# family & relationships
# love & sex
# health & fitness
# books
# technology & internet
# spirituality
# home & garden
# giving back
# going green
# food & drink
# arts & entertainment
# travel
# news & politics

They partner with all manner of vibrant women bloggers in the Blog Circle and are growing a real voice in the marketplace, making women over 50 a force to be reckoned with.

Lastly, I love the name. Vibrant. Yes, we are.

Minnie Pauz
Humor is what saves us during the menopause journey, so the third site we’ll highlight in this blog entry is Minnie Pauz menopause cartoons. (http://www.minniepauz.com/) Hilarious and all too true, cartoon heroine Minnie Pauz says “If you don’t get it, You ain’t there yet.”

You can subscribe to the newsletter to get the latest cartoon. The moderator also has a good blog and a bulletin board where women can post issues and dialogue with one another. I personally found the bulletin board format a little confusing and “busy”, so it wasn’t my favorite part of the site.

I’ll be sharing more cyberspace gold in upcoming blog entries. For now, check these out and let me know what you think or share your favorite sites with us here at Menopause Goddess Blog

My good friend and sister Menopause Goddess, Saskia, sent me this wonderful email that is currently circulating the web. It’s a must-read and worth reading again if you have seen it.

“Recently, in a large city in France, a poster featuring a young, thin and tan woman appeared in the window of a gym. 

It said, “This summer, do you want to be a mermaid or a whale?”

A middle-aged woman, whose physical characteristics did not match those of the woman on the poster, responded publicly to the question posed by the gym.

 To Whom It May Concern,

Whales are always surrounded by friends (dolphins, sea lions, curious humans. They have an active sex life, get pregnant and have adorable baby whales. They have a wonderful time with dolphins stuffing themselves with shrimp. They play and swim in the seas, seeing wonderful places like Patagonia, the Bering Sea and the coral reefs of Polynesia. Whales are wonderful singers and have even recorded CDs. They are incredible creatures and virtually have no predators other than humans. They are loved, protected and admired by almost everyone in the world.

Mermaids don’t exist. If they did exist, they would be lining up outside the offices of Argentinean psychoanalysts due to identity crisis. Fish or human? They don’t have a sex life because they kill men who get close to them, not to mention how could they have sex? Just look at them … where is IT? Therefore, they don’t have kids either. Not to mention, who wants to get close to a girl who smells like a fish store?
The choice is perfectly clear to me: I want to be a whale.

P.S. We are in an age when media puts into our heads the idea that only skinny people are beautiful, but I prefer to enjoy an ice cream with my kids, a good dinner with a man who makes me shiver, and a piece of chocolate with my friends. 

With time, we gain weight  because we accumulate so much information and wisdom in our heads that when there is no more room, it distributes out to the rest of our bodies. So we aren’t heavy, we are enormously cultured, educated and happy. Beginning today, when I look at my butt in the mirror I will think, ¨Good grief, look how smart I am!”

Let me just say for the record, I’m proud to be a whale. Lady Leviathan – that’s my new self image and I’m feelin’ good about it! Now if I could just learn to sing…

Yesterday, our new rescue dog chewed through the irrigation hose. One of our cats has a mouth infection requiring antibiotics and special food prep, while the other feline family member was screaming at the top of his lungs for no apparent reason. To add to the general household bedlam, the phone was ringing off the hook, the dock informed us that our new-old car shipped from the mainland needed to be picked up, and Dewitt got the news that his knee injury is a torn medial meniscus, which will require surgical repair.

All this was a recipe for menopausal meltdown. My usual equanimity just flat out deserted me. I collapsed in on myself with the gravitational pull of a black hole.

“Are you okay?” asked my hubby, Dewitt. Instead of answering with the usual “Fine,” or “I’ll get over it,” I shared (read spewed forth) my feelings of overwhelm. He listened sympathetically (BTW,a GREAT thing to do for your goddess, men). “Well, just remember, you don’t have to do it all or do it alone. We’re a team here.” was his sage response.

The weird thing is that I immediately felt better. The black hole continued to shrink throughout the day and was completely dissolved in my evening medicinal red wine. I forget that I don’t have to carry all the weight of my feelings of overwhelm, sadness, or general freakout alone. I don’t have to “protect” my husband, even when he is injured or not doing so well himself.

Here’s the thing: misery may love company, but when said company is allied against it, it slinks off to bother someone else. I’ve usually been good at sharing my flip-out times with my girlfriends, but have rarely shared them with family. What’s that about? Being strong? Suffering in silence? Creating calm even when I don’t feel it inside? Because??????????????

Okay, I never make New Year’s resolutions, but I’ll make an exception. I’ll share my feelings with my mate from now on as well as my girlfriends. Supermom doesn’t live at this house anymore. A Menopause Goddess does. And some days, it’ll be a little more Menopause and a little less Goddess. But it will be real. And it will be shared.

My husband injured his knee over New Year’s and has literally been unable to walk. Which means that I now have to do his chores as well as my own, while waiting on him. Sort of caregiving lite, you might say.

Initially, Dewitt was certain that he’d need an MRI and surgery as it wasn’t getting better. Then his brother mentioned that he’d had similar injuries and was on crutches for a time but it eventually healed on its own.

“Oh yeah,” I said. “That could be true. Remember when I sprained my ankle so badly and was on crutches for a few weeks, then hobbling for a while after, but it healed on its own, too.”
“No,”he said. “I don’t remember that at all.”

I stared at him, astonished. How could he not recollect an event that is lodged so firmly in my memory. After all, I was unable to walk for a good, long while.

And then I realized why he had zero recall. This wasn’t a case of elder forgetfulness nor memory lapse. He didn’t remember the event because his life didn’t change. At all. Except for a small detour to the Urgent Care Center, nothing changed for him. I still made dinner, did the shopping, even went to my job as a nurse educator, slowly executing the stairs with my crutches. Luckily I had injured my left leg, so I could still drive.

Why? Why do we women carry on as if nothing has happened when we are ill or afflicted with an injury? All those meals fixed, laundry and errands done, and work done while incubating a fever of 101+, horrific cramps, the stomach flu leads to one question? Are we freaking nuts!?! Or do we have a heretofore undiscovered martyr gene embedded in our feminine DNA?

We goddesses are well equipped for caretaking and ill equipped for the necessary job of caring for ourselves. And at this stage of life, we are looking at some long term caretaking events in our near future (if we haven’t already immersed ourselves in them.)

How will we cope? With caring for aging parents, with unforeseen injury and illness to our significant others? What balancing acts might we find ourselves performing?

Caregiving turned out to be the uber topic this year at our annual Venus gathering. Ironically, two of our very own Menopause Goddesses were unable to make the meeting at the last minute due to caretaking emergencies. Perhaps we should have talked about it last year!

Many hours of discussion and sharing later, we uncovered the main secret to artful caregiving (where you care for yourself as well as those who are in need of your care). It is this: Ask for help. This will save your bacon. Over and over again. And likely the bacon of the one(s) under your care.

People want to help. And we need to let them. We need to ask for their assistance and then accept it with gratitude and grace.
Even those under our care can help, in ways we hadn’t considered. We can ask them too. Everybody gives. Everybody receives. Everybody cares.

We still don’t know the prognosis for Dewitt’s knee. We have to fly to Honolulu on Friday to see a specialist and maybe he’ll have to have that MRI. We’ll know more then.

In the meantime, this evening I called out “Hey gimpy boy, get in here and do these dishes. You only have to stand for that.”
“Be happy to, you only have to ask me,” he grinned as he hobbled the few steps to the kitchen.

New Year’s resolutions. They can be a setup for judgment, stress, and failure. While the “clean slate” of January 1 can certainly inspire us to set goals and intentions, it can also overburden us with expectation.

Before embarking on a future view for 2010, take some time to review and jot down what you accomplished in 2009. Accomplishments need not be lists of tasks completed, milestones reached, or jobs finished. (Although certainly those qualify.)

Achievements might be just as easily be shifts in attitude, changes in self knowledge, feelings of connection, or new worldviews All too often we don’t take the time to savor or appreciate what we have done, seen, or felt over the past 365 days. We don’t allow for the “Ta Da” before we rush on to the next “To Do”.

So for the next few days, Menopause Goddesses, let’s compile a list of all we have done and experienced during 2009. In this eye-of-the-storm lull between Christmas frenzy and New Year’s celebrating, let’s ruminate on the past. Give yourself a great, glorious pat on the back for all that you have done and been this year.

We can work on our walloping To Do list later. For now, shout “Ta Da” out loud and celebrate all you’ve accomplished for the last twelve months.

I’ve started collecting Menopause Moments; real-life vignettes of all the wild and weird sequelae of the Big M. Why?  Because when these RIDICULOUS things happen, we mistakenly believe we are the only ones who have ever been afflicted so bizarrely. And that’s just not true. Thankfully!  Weirdness loves company – especially of the girlfriend persuasion.

Here’s a stranger than fiction Menopause Moment starring my friend M. She just recently began the menopause transition but it already has twisted up her life in unimaginable ways. One normal/abnormal day, she suffered one of those mind-altering, body immolating hot flashes.  You know the ones – where you are boiling from the inside out.

She rushed into the bathroom where they have a pedestal type sink and turned on the cold water. Just splashing it on her face would have been like spitting on a forest fire, though, and she knew it.  So she took off her shoes, climbed up on the sink and plunged both hands and both feet into the sinkful of water.

As her volcanic level temperature was drifting down from eruption to ooze, her mate opened the door to see her all hunched up on the edge of the sink. “Wow!” he said. “You look like a menopausal squirrel.”  She looked down at herself, looked back up at him, and they both burst into  peals of laughter.

I’m telling you; we can’t make this stuff up!  It’s just too outside the normal realm of human experience. Yep, the Big M. It ain’t for sissies and it sure does make us squirrely. The good news?  Squirrels have a sense of humor. So share your menopausal moment – we could use the laugh! It’s the only thing getting us through.  That and chocolate. Let’s hear it for menopausal squirrels!

If life is a dance, Menopause just might be an unwanted dance partner. But we can’t refuse to dance, so we just have to find new steps or laugh when we can’t remember the old ones.

This past week I was attending a Hawai`ian Healing and Hula workshop with Kumu Hula (Hula Master) Kawaikapuokalani Hewett. The workshop was organized by Holistic Honu Wellness Center in Sacramento, California. Yep, hula in Sacramento even though I live in Hawai`i.

Hula is a fantastic discipline for Menopause Goddesses. Firstly, it offers low impact aerobic conditioning. You gain flexibility in your body AND your mind. Learning the songs and chants are a great exercise for training memory – and you have the added benefit of learning it in a new language which stretches the old brainpan even more.

I’ve been dancing hula for about ten years now. I started before the word Menopause ever crossed my mind. While I like to think that my dancing has improved over time, thanks to the Big M, there are occasional glitches I couldn’t have foreseen.

Case in point:  we had just learned a new dance and as is the norm, each row of dancers moved up to the front in turn to practice the full song in front of our Kumu. I was feeling pretty good, I knew the words, steps, and gestures so it was with no anxiety or trepidation that I moved forward with my row of hula sisters and brothers.

Suddenly, as the first strains of the beautiful music began, a volcanic vent opened inside me. Fiery heat spread through my entire body; I began sweating like a pua`a (pig), and my mind went truly blank. It was as if the screen in my mind were wiped clean. I got an image of those gray Magic Slates we had as children where we could write or draw on them with a special “pen” and then pull it up and away from the backing to completely erase all marks. That was my mind. A hot flash had just erased EVERYTHING!

Well, time and hula wait for no one, so the music began. And I limped through the song, praying for snow and for my memory to return.  By the end of the song, the tropical tantrum was easing off and I managed to eke out a finish while my dignity just packed up and left me.

So I did what I always do in these circumstances.  I laughed. Deep in my belly and down to my toes.

And  then I sat at dinner with my hula sisters ( Big hugs to you, Jeane and Janny) and we shared our Menopause stories from blank slates to volcanic hot flashes to memory loss moments.  These fabulous women even wrote a song together a few workshops back about Menopause and memory loss.  Trouble is they can’t remember the words anymore. But hey, they still remember the sentiment.  And we’ll never forget the hilarity.

In hula, it’s much less important that you dance a song with technical perfection than that you dance with your whole heart and soul. The same can be said of life. Including and maybe especially the second half of life. So that’s my goal:  to be fully present to the dance; all the changes and all the new steps, with openness, grace, and a fully developed sense of humor.

A while back, a number of Menopause Goddesses responded to our online survey about revamping the Menopause Goddess Blog. And I’m happy to report that we have launched this new site here at www.menopausegoddessblog.com  (instead of .org).

It looks pretty much the same in terms of design, but has lots more functionality, including the ability to share blogposts with your friends via social networking tools as well as email. (See the bottom of any post.)

Most of our survey respondents wanted a Menopause Marketplace and we are in the process of setting that up so that you’ll be able to access our favorite vendors of all things helpful to Menopause Goddesses.  We’ll have it up and running very soon.

You can now subscribe to our blog via email or RSS. (See right hand column. (If you don’t know what RSS is, don’t worry – about 75% of those who answered the survey picked the “What the heck is this?” response to “Do you use RSS feed for the blog?”  Email subscription is an easier option.  We use RSS for those who like to use it and to feed to other blogsites that we contribute to such as Wellsphere.com.

Because this new platform has great anti-spam capabilities, you’ll be able to comment more easily without having to type those little letters in the box.  (I for one won’t miss them at all!)

You can also follow our updates via Twitter, Facebook, or LinkedIn – and we promise not to tell you where we are or what we had for lunch in our social networking buzzes. With Twitter especially, we can forward links to great articles and sites regarding menopause and midlife transitions – you won’t want to miss them.

Per the survey data, most of you like the length of the postings and don’t want them any more frequently than once per week.  Proving that menopausal women are careful with their time commitments and how they deal with the information overload that seems to BE our world today.

We’ll continue to post to both sites for the next month; after that the old address will take you straight to the new site. All the archived blog posts since the very beginning have been transferred right here to the new site, so we won’t lose anything.

And the “Search” function should help you easily find what you’re looking for. (See right hand column again.) Click on “Contact Us” in the left column under “Pages” to let us know if there are any other features you’d like to see on our new, improved blogsite – we now have a way to grow it as much as we’d like.

Any other thoughts, ideas, complaints or praise, we’d love to hear from you.  Let us know what you think!  And don’t forget to bookmark this new site at menopausegoddessblog.com

“I’m having a hot flash
A tropical hot flash
My personal summer is really a bummer
I’m having a hot flash.”

lyrics from Menopause the Musical.

Theresa Venus and I went to see “Menopause the Musical” the other night. Fabulous, funny, outrageous, and true. We flat out loved it.

To the tunes of songs from our era, four gorgeous women of menopausal age sang about hot flashes, “brain collapse”, weight gain, and emotional meltdowns. We laughed so hard we cried. As did the large numbers of men in the audience. Hey, we aren’t the only ones going through this transition; our loved ones have to take the ride with us.

The only piece that didn’t quite resonate with us had to do with libido. These women were commiserating that their husbands didn’t want to have sex much anymore – and they needed to resort to Mother’s Other Little Helper: a vibrator.

While the segment was uproariously funny, it just didn’t describe the experience of most menopause goddesses I know. Oh sure, there is a rare one like Bobbi Venus who actually had an uptick in her libido with the Big M, but that just does not describe the usual story we hear. And live. Just ask our husbands. One day we lusted for them, the next we couldn’t remember what lust is.

Thankfully, our libido does return, though also thankfully not to the horndog levels of our twenties and thirties.

The musical ended with a celebration of the Change as the four principals walk out in slinky black trimmed with rhinestones. “We have changed,” they tell us – “for the better.” And they called all the women in the audience up to kick up their heels together on stage. A perfect finish.

If you get the chance, go see it when it comes to a town near you. And if you’ve already seen it, heck, call us up and we’ll go see it again with you.

For info, visit Menopause The Musical.