I asked my husband the other day if he thinks I am bipolar. He said, "No, but you do seem to have highs and lows."
Understatement.
Yesterday I woke up perfectly fine, though perhaps a little tired as I didn't sleep well. I never sleep well but that is another post. By mid morning, I was holding a delicate balance between being cheerful and encouraging at the crisis ministry I direct, and secretly imagining that my hands were large enough to simply flick nearly everyone with whom I came into contact away from me like a bothersome fly and into the proverbial stratosphere.
It was that kind of day - all day.
Sadly, or perhaps comical depending on the mood or the moment, this is not unusual.
Mercurial might be a better description of the stage of life called menopause. At its most basic level the word or stage signifies the end of menses, a woman's fertile stage of life. There is so much beginning, however, that it is difficult to think of it all as an ending and perhaps this is why it is so volatile.
I know a woman who left her husband of more than 30 years after discovering through the many hormonal shifts in which clarity comes and goes that she had no longer knew him and perhaps never did. Their marriage, which began in an unspoken contract that cast her as a student to his personal brand of wisdom and later as a mother to his children, became a shell as these roles fell away and she began to discover a wisdom of her own. Now she writes poetry and travels the world.
I have taken an almost opposite route. I spent fourteen years single and mothering before marrying my husband right on the cusp of this passage. I eked out wisdom from myriad missteps and triumphs and now must try to discern what stays, what goes and what transforms in this beautiful and terrifying union while hormones rage and a new, yet unexplored crone wisdom creeps in.
I want to tell my kind husband to run, but I won't. I want to grow old with him as I dreamed in my younger days when I hoped for such a union.
