Menopause and Christmas can combine to produce exponential amounts of stress. In our constant desire for peace, harmony, and joy, Theresa-Venus and I have a few ideas for more ease and less pressure this holiday season.

1.  Give the best Christmas gift ever to your girlfriends:  no gift. Theresa-Venus and I did this last year and liked it so much we are doing it again. Let’s face it. Most of us at this stage of life feel that we already have too much stuff. The pressure to buy the perfect gift, then wrap it and deliver it is more than we need and can precipitate menopause meltdown.

2.  Jettison the Christmas card or letter.  Most of us are deluged by either chatty, newsy (read long) holiday letters or a lovely card containing nothing but a signature. Some cards have only a printed signature, which may have you wondering “What’s the point?” If you wish to send a yearly update to friends and family, wait until February 14. Frankly, most of us will appreciate it so much more and it won’t get lost in the flood of holiday greetings.

3. Do not bake cookies. With our metabolic rate slowing down and the sedentary days of winter just beginning, we don’t need the sweets or the guilt that comes with eating them. Buy those packages of little carrots shaped like tubes for snacks. Mmmmmm yummy. If you must eat cookies, know that someone else will be giving you some anyway. Do not bake any. And definitely NO cookie exchanges!

4.  Do not wrap gifts. Purchase Christmas gift bags or boxes from your favorite big box or warehouse store. Place each gift in a bag and voila, all the gifts will be wrapped. You will have reclaimed several hours and taken nearly all the stress out of gifting.

5.  Decorate sparingly. Try getting a smaller tree and let the grandkids decorate it. No grandkids yet?  Consider no tree unless you feel that it isn’t Christmas without it.

Put less (or no) lights outside. Strategically placed Santa, Reindeer, and Angel cloth dolls can make your home festive with very little work or time expenditure. You can find these at your local craft fair, drugstore or even grocery store.

Unless you are preparing for a shoot for Architectural Digest or House Beautiful, a frenzy of decorating just isn’t worth it.

6.  Have a Christmas potluck. Don’t spend all day cooking as if you were creating a second Thanksgiving. Go for a walk, have a snowball fight,  play with the kids instead. Read a book aloud as a family or sing carols together.

Your friends and family will not miss any of the usual Christmas trappings and if they do? They’ll soon find that they enjoy being in the company of a relaxed, pleasant, unstressed you much more than all gifts, cookies, and decorations in which you can bury yourself.

There’s a saying most of us have heard. “This moment is a gift, that’s why they call it the present.” Sure, it’s a little corny, but it really is true. Happy holidays.

Lately, I’ve been getting as much mail from men whose mates, moms, and menopausal female pals are looking like a puzzle they just can’t figure out. So for them, I’m offering a few small tips for dealing with us while we are going through the Change.

#1 Choose Your Words Carefully
While you are tippytoeing on those eggshells, here are a few phrases that will get you on your way with the least amount of breakage:

“I love you.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Have you lost weight?”

I’m forever grateful to Shellie Rushing Tomlinson of All Things Southern for sharing these gems. Check out her video on Hot Flashes and Mood Swings in the August 3 blog post of this year “Gotta Love Those Southern Menopause Goddesses” to further understand why you can’t say these three phrases too much.

My own hubby, Dewitt, often sounds like a well-trained parrot as he trots these out over and over. Do I mind his constant repetition? No I don’t. It doesn’t matter how or why he is saying it, just that he is. It’s a way for him to express to me that he knows I’m having a menopause moment. Or year. Or two.

#2 Don’t help. Listen.
We know that it is a man’s nature to want to help in situations where damsels are indeed in distress. However, I can assure you that unless you can magically change our very DNA or make it rain female hormones on command, there is nearly nothing you can do to help. Except listen. Without speaking. And maybe handing us a cool damp cloth for our fiery forehead when we start to sweat like pigs.

#3 Surprise us with housework

I came home today from lunch out with two of the Venuses. I looked at the kitchen sink where I’d left the stack of dirty dishes only to find them washed and air-drying in the drainer.

This is guaranteed to get us right in the heart. And sometimes even in other sensitive places, where our libido has hung a sign reading “On Vacation, Indefinitely.” Yep, porn for women is men doing chores without asking what needs to be done (that is a key part – if we have to tell you what to do, the surprise factor is pretty much lost. As are points.)

The other night, Dewitt jumped up and dried dishes that I was washing, after throwing in the laundry. I gotta tell you, he never looked sexier to me. Hmmmmmmm, housework as aphrodisiac.

#4 Preemptive mood strikes

Along with the aforementioned three mission critical phrases, offering chocolate, neck rubs, wine, and the TV remote are effective mood enhancers that can smooth out some of the emotional swings before they happen. And if they do occur? It’s less likely that you’ll be caught in the crossfire.

These are enough to get you started. Heck, if you only implemented the advice in these four simple tips, you’d be well on your way to being the ideal menopause goddess mate, friend, or companion. We’d love you for it.

Photo for this blog posting is the cover of a fabulous, fun book called Porn for Women. Photographed by Susan Anderson, From the Cambridge Women’s Pornography Cooperative, published by Chronicle Books of San Francisco.

My husband once remarked that it was a wonder that more couples don’t get divorced during the  Big M transition. And certainly it’s true that if we who are undergoing this forced journey don’t understand much of what’s occurring, our mates and loved ones are left completely befuddled.

The combination of physical changes and emotional changes can put a strain on the most loving relationship. Loss of libido, depression and apathy, irritation with everything your loved ones say and do, fatigue, hypersensitivity to noise, temperature, and touch are just a few of the manifestations of this hormonal rollercoaster ride.

Christiane Northrup, author of The Wisdom of Menopause, starts her book of 500+ pages with this sentence “It is no secret that relationship crises are a common side effect of menopause.”

Okay, well it may not have been an intentionally kept secret, but I sure never heard anything about this. (Or any other of the myriad manifestations of the hormonal sh*tstorm we call the Big M.) And I’m a registered nurse for pity’s sake.

Dr. Northrup goes on to elucidate that whatever is wrong or dysfunctional in your relationships will be greatly exacerbated by menopause. I think that is true.

However, in all my talks and sharings with menopause goddesses and their loved ones, I’m finding that a huge amount of upheaval can exist in the most functional relationships.
The Venuses spent a significant part of every meeting focusing on our primary relationships. Suddenly sexual desire disappears. We may not have leisure time interests in common with our spouses. The kids are no longer a focus.  How then do we connect with one another?

And now our intimates want to spend more time with us (the men are changing, too, don’t forget.) We are just beginning to explore our creativity and may want to spend more time alone or with girlfriends  How do we reconcile these needs with our desire to be connected with our loved one?

It has been all too easy to assume that every freakout or episode of bitchiness is hormonal – “oh she’s just going through menopause”  rather than a legitimate reaction to circumstances.

Additionally, deeper difficulties may be brewing or problems long ignored have just come to the surface.

However, it is just as deluded to assume that this sea change isn’t hormonal. Especially if the change is fairly dramatic, seemingly without warning.

Theresa and I found that we went from zero to sixty on the irritation meter in seconds during the worst of our transition. Talking with the other Venuses showed us that we were not alone.

It became clear to us that we needed to ascertain when our anger was a legitimate problem, a true trampling of our boundaries versus a hormonal side effect. Let me tell you truthfully, it can really be hard to discern the difference.

Looking backward, I can offer this advice. Proceed with caution and take it slow. We found that irritation might flare up in a circumstance that we could certainly rationalize as being justifiable anger. But we often decided not to act or say anything right away. We mused. We waited. We paused.

If we were still pissed off in a few hours, we reevaluated and decided on a plan of action for confronting and discussing the problem. If our irritation had literally vanished, we knew that hormones might have played a part. And we let it go.  No harm, no foul.  Especially no harm. To us or anyone else.

(A little history sidenote here – none of the Venuses is a shrinking violet, unused to sharing her feelings, including anger. If you have always contained your anger and irritation, this may not be the best plan for you. You may need to let some anger out. After all, some Change is good!)

And some good news.  The worst of the emotional and hormonal upheaval seems to last around two years, give or take a year. So be patient. Get to know your irritation levels; when they require intervention and when they don’t. Warn your loved ones when you feel especially out of control so they won’t take it personally. Best of all, they can support you. They love you.  They want to help.  Let them.

My friend, M (you’ll remember her as the Menopausal Squirrel), felt pretty good about her health care practitioners. She liked and trusted her gynecologist right up until she began her menopause journey with a plethora of symptoms including hot flashes, mood swings, and insomnia. That’s when things got ugly.

On an office visit, she asked  about remedies and symptom relief. Her gynecologist recommended HRT. M. wasn’t too keen on that idea given the press since the WHI study. “What else can  I do? ” she asked. “Antidepressants” was the answer.  “No other options?” she queried. “There’s nothing else we can do,” she was told.

She walked out of the office and never went back.

Now I’ll be the first to admit that it can’t be pleasant to have a hot, bitchy woman demanding relief and answers in your office when you don’t really know what will help. And I truly understand as a health care practitioner how much you want to offer a definitive answer to such questions. Especially when your local drug rep has just offered you a sheaf of paperwork detailing why this might be a great new use for an old favorite drug.

Still, I gotta think that “I don’t know” might be a better start than “How about an antidepressant?” A fabulous followup might be “I’ll try to find out what other options might be helpful.”

A simple medical professional review session is in order here for all healthcare professionals involved in the care of menopausal women. And all menopausal goddesses are invited to read along to learn how to frame some of their questions in discussions about symptom relief or management.
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Review Statement # 1:   There is no silver bullet.
This is a phrase often used in health care circles to mean that there is no single drug, therapy, or regimen that will eradicate, alleviate, or cure any given syndrome or set of symptoms.

(It is well known that health professionals speak their own language – not sure where the silver bullet metaphor came from unless it was referring to the single thing that can kill a werewolf. While we may feel like we change as much as these lupine creatures during menopause, there really is no silver bullet for us.)

Review Statement # 2    All treatments have adverse or side effects.
Duh! And antidepressants have some whoppers!

Review Statement # 3    All Patients Are Individual
You wouldn’t think that this would even need saying. I heard it over and over again in nursing school. Still…………..

Review Statement # 4    Choose the least interventional option first for any symptom or disease state.
Okay, fans, moisture wicking clothing, natural progesterone cream, and go up from there. Need I say more?  To suggest that HRT or antidepressants are the first or second or only answers goes contrary to this very basic rule. Never try to shoot a fly with an elephant gun.  At least not until it goes rogue.

Review Statement # 5    Conduct a Risk-Benefit Analysis before prescribing treatment.
Take into account severity of symptoms, prognosis, and medical history versus possible benefits minus adverse effects or danger of future medical problems. In other words, examine the risks and potential benefits for each individual patient together with that patient. The operative word being Together.

Are antidepressants bad?  Or wrong? Heck, no. If one is suffering from depression that interferes significantly with daily living, these drugs can literally be lifesavers. This type of clinical depression is an indication that the benefits might outweigh the not inconsiderable risks. Should they be a first line for hot flash relief? Absolutely and unequivocally NO. The risk-benefit teeter totter will be weighted the other way.

Review Statement # 6    Involve the Patient In His/Her Own Healthcare
Duh again. Yes, it’s inconvenient. Yes, it will likely take longer. And the outcome will likely be far more satisfying for all concerned.

To be fair, I can’t tell you how many physicians over the years have told me that their patients don’t want to be that involved in care decisions; they just want to be told what to do. It’s possible we consumers have been at fault by not communicating our desire for involvement or by being too compliant or passive.

We need to prove them wrong and take an active role in symptom relief and control. Empower yourself, ask questions, seek information and move ahead as a full fledged participant in your own Menopause journey.

What did M do when she left her MD’s office? She shopped around., albeit hot flashing, grumbling, and sleep deprived.

She found an integrative wellness clinic that offered wellness counseling including dietary solutions and bioidentical hormones. Options were offered only after extensive testing for her hormone status, including thyroid as well as cortisol, estrogen and progesterone levels. She’s feeling 100% better. Especially since she is now in partnership with her healthcare provider/s.

Want to learn more about your own options? Check out Women In Balance, a non-profit organization dedicated to educating women about their health and wellness options.

“I LIKE it but I just don’t know if it’s my PASSION.”  Finding a life’s passion was a theme for some of our early (and recent) discussions at the Venus meetings. Our dissections of this topic have had an urgency to them. After all, we are now officially in the second half of our lives and we don’t want to waste a single second. We spent a lot of time in the first half working and building career and family life.  Now we want to “find our passion.”

I’ve been musing more about this lately.  And it seems to me, we don’t need to find our passion, necessarily.  Passion sounds huge, momentous, important and weighty.  We had questions galore about the passion quest: Where do we look for it? How do we know when we’ve found it? How much of a commitment do we make to it.

A passion should by definition be GRAND.  Or should it?

What if we just had a lot of little passions, small pastimes we enjoyed and delighted in like gardening, biking, and wine-tasting (in Beej’s case) or photography, hula, and golf in mine. More like passionettes. That would sure take the pressure off – finding the ONE special thing that we not only are in LOVE with (read passionate about) but are willing to abandon ourselves to and actually become good at doing or performing. How about we just fall in like (and out if that’s how it works.)

If we were to allow ourselves full access to our delight in our small “likes” rather than that one great LOVE or passion, might we then be able to relax into pure joy and contentment? And in so doing, discover that our real passion is LIFE?

I’m not sure, but I feel so much more comfortable and “full” when I look at my passionettes in this way.  I’ll likely never be a good golfer, but I really like it. I don’t want to golf every day or obsess about my score.  I just want to get outside, breathe fresh air, hit some pretty shots and maybe break 100 now and again.

I love hula – it’s my spiritual practice as well as a dance. And a crossroads has opened before me – do I want to go further and become a teacher? And the answer would likely be yes if it was my ONE PASSION. If I’m honest with myself, I’d have to say it is not. I can go to church and worship without needing to become a minister.

This past week, I’ve been indulging in my photography passionette.  Jack Davis (of the Photoshop WOW books) taught a class here on Moloka`i, Hawai`i with my handsome hubby Dewitt Jones. I’ve been reveling in taking photos with no real goal or endpoint in mind -  just pure pleasure

In fact, now that I’m no longer looking at photography as something “serious” or my passion, I’m experiencing way more fun and freedom. And my favorite camera?  My iPhone – because with all the cool apps, I can shoot, collage, and push the creative envelope to my heart’s content, no holds barred. (Check out my Digital Diva and Digital Diva / Digital Dude iPhone art sites.)

So I’ve given up looking to find my PASSION.  When I have family, good friends, and my small but vibrant passionettes, nothing is missing.  Nothing at all.

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.

One of my girlfriends is newly in the throes of perimenopause.  And she has just experienced her first full-on Menopause Moment.  Yep, one of those mental lapses that previously would have been simply unthinkable and would cause a woman to doubt her very sanity. I think that we can safely assure her that it won’t be her last.

Just a little background on my friend to put this all in context. A (for Anonymous which is how she wants to be known just now) is a CEO, multitasking go-getter who still finds time to play and hang out with friends in between running her business and her bicoastal life. I think of her as one of the most balanced and together people I know. Which is why her story of her Menopause Moment is all the more hilarious and revelatory.

Menopause doesn’t discriminate and it takes no prisoners.  It afflicts every woman in her own unique way while providing universal Menopause experiences; those Menopause Moments that remind us we are in the second half of our lives.

Okay, enough background info – back to the story.  Our heroine has just finished closing up her East Coast house for the winter and is embarking on a circuitous journey to her West Coast home via New York, Miami, Kansas, Atlanta, and Seattle. She’s all packed and is on a last minute business call as she climbs into the taxi for the airport.

A couple of minutes of driving and her phone loses service.  She’s puzzled.  Usually she has such great service with her network all the way from home to airport.  She starts to dial again, when she realizes that the phone in her hand is not her cell phone.  It is the cordless HOME phone and she has just taken it with her.  After a few minutes consternation, she begins to laugh out loud and calls to tell me all about it, proclaiming, “I know understand how women put the mail in the freezer.”

So hey, no harm, no foul.  She’s sending the phone back to a neighbor to put back in her house.  The best thing about all this?  She knew that it’s NORMAL and she LAUGHED at it.  Because, girlfriends, that is all we can do in the face of such disorienting change.  Like the calypso poet / singer Jimmy Buffett says “Breathe in. Breathe out.  Move on.”  Words to live by now and for the next 50.

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

When I was dragging my weary bod around like a lead weight during perimenopause, I figured it was just part of the Change.  But when my hair began thinning, my hands and feet were cold even though I was so hot generally I felt like a living furnace, and my weight was going up, my nurse mind went “Aha!”.  I need my thyroid tested.  Although these symptoms are nonspecific and indeed can be from low estrogen and progesterone, I knew they could also herald hypothyroidism.

So off to my MD I went.  She ordered T3 and T4 levels as well as the more specific blood test TSH which stands for thyroid stimulating hormone.  Basically, this is the hormone that tells your thyroid gland – hey, more thyroid hormone is needed, kick it into gear and produce some.  So if you are low on thyroid hormones this TSH level should be high.

Mine wasn’t.  It was normal. My blood tests were all normal.  I didn’t think much more about it, although the symptoms continued.  My previous MD left her practice and I found a holistic practitioner who is an MD, homeopath, herbalist and runs a complementary medicine clinic.

Complementary medicine is just what is sounds like.   All the tools of Western medicine are used and complemented by other disciplines such as nutritional healing, homeopathy, herbs, massage, acupuncture, and more.  (Also called integrative medicine or holistic medicine.)

This new practitioner performed a complete physical exam and pronounced me hypothyroid as I had every clinical symptom and sign.  The blood tests?  Just not sensitive enough.

Many physicians now believe that hypothyroidism should be diagnosed on the basis of symptoms rather than blood work.  If still unsure that low thyroid hormone is the culprit, they simply place the patient on a very low dose of supplemental thyroid hormone.  If there is improvement, the diagnosis is clear.

I started my Naturethroid and within two days was sleeping through the night, my hands and feet warmed up, I had energy again, and I was calm.  It took longer for the weight gain and hair loss to stabilize, but they did.

And as time has gone on, my dosage of thyroid hormone has been decreased gradually until I take very little.  My own hormone factory has kicked in again.  I have energy and am at my ideal weight.

I’m not sure why, but with the onset of Menopause, it seems that many of us also lose thyroid hormone.  Maybe all our hormones are more intricately linked to one another than we know; maybe it is part of the overall Change.  Whatever the reason, it’s worth checking out.  We may not have to feel so tired, heavy, low energy, and mentally foggy.

To find a practitioner near you, I suggest you check out the American Holistic Medical Association.  Their website is http://www.holisticmedicine.org/ You may also Googling complementary and integrative medicine in your area.