On entering your “hut at the edge of the woods” era
Every so often, a pattern or experience shows up among my coaching clients that is so pervasive that I feel like I just have to share it with you. It’s really one of the great pleasures of my job: I get to witness, firsthand, how, although everyone’s journeys are unique, and we’re hardly ever alone in our challenges.
This one goes out to all those readers who are peri/menopausal and raising kids right now.
So, picture this:
1) You’re in perimenopause or menopause. That means that you’re most likely 37 or older and starting to notice changes in your experience of your body and the world that range anywhere from premenstrual rage to hot flashes to – as I so *joyfully* (not joyfully) experienced last summer, long-term bouts of vertigo.
2) As such, your estrogen levels are beginning to drop. Estrogen is, to put it bluntly, the “give a fuck” hormone. It’s responsible for your urge to caregive, and when it drops, many women experience things like not caring what other people think and wanting a little distance from the people they’ve devoted their 20s and 30s to looking after. Shifting progesterone levels also play a role here, the result of which is quite literally an impulse to flee the scene, as it were – to crave solitude more.
3) Friends and I have joked that this is our “move to the hut at the edge of the woods” era, and I think there’s probably some truth to that. Our foremothers were likely finished raising their kids, for the most part, by the time they reached this age. The little historical reading I’ve done notes that many midwives and other wise women didn’t fully step into that role until they had reached the end of their most intense childbearing and childrearing years (geez, no wonder I found attending births while raising young kids so impossible!). Cue: the move to the edge of the woods or the edge of town; the locus of many a historical wise woman’s dwelling.
4) The thing is, a great many of us modern mothers are still in heavy parenting mode as we enter perimenopause and menopause.
5) Heavy parenting demands + less estrogen = an impossible-feeling push and pull of a part of you that, quite literally, physiologically, wants to be done with all of this caregiving – and then the associated guilt, resentment and even rage of being needed more than ever.
6) Now, add in the fact that most of us perimenopausal and menopausal mothers are also parenting kids who’ve been through a pandemic. A quick Google search of “post-pandemic children’s mental health” yields hundreds of research studies and personal stories, and myself and so many of the other mothers I encounter know this in our bones: our kids aren’t okay. They’re experiencing anxiety, depression, school avoidance and other really, really significant challenges. Their lives might be unfolding differently than we thought they would. Without wanting to sound cliché, we are truly parenting in an unprecedented situation. We’re clearing the path as we walk it; making the rules as we go.
7) As a recap: we are feeling – both physiologically and psychologically – the urge to stop caregiving (like our ancestors would have at our age) but we’re still neck-deep in parenting a generation of kids in crisis. And so it follows that a lot of us are in crisis too. And that we’re making ourselves wrong for how much we don’t want to be wanted so much right now.
(me too, y’all)
My friends, if I had a solution to all of this I’d be a bazillionaire – but it did occur to me that it might be helpful to connect these dots for you, in case you’re feeling disorientation or confusion or guilt or resentment about being in this real pickle of a situation in your life right now.
Another conversation I’ve had with other mama friends recently is that, as our children get older, we lose social media or public writing as a venue for venting about our experiences – and connecting with others who might be going through the same thing. I know, social media is such a double-edged sword, and there’s a part of me that can’t even believe I just wrote that last sentence, but it’s true: I’ve spent the last 10 years writing about motherhood online and feeling the camaraderie of everyone else who was going through similar highs and lows. Now that my kids are in their pre-teen and teen years, I need to be more mindful of their privacy, and I don’t feel freely able to share the experiences I’m having of parenting them. I’ve met a lot of other mothers who are noticing the same: it’s as if, overnight, a large source of our supply of support – and the associated normalization that comes with it – disappears.
And so, here it is for the kids in the back: you’re not alone. Far from it. There are a good few of us who are looking up “hut at the edge of the woods” blueprints and wishing there was an instruction manual for these challenging years.
The post On entering your “hut at the edge of the woods” era appeared first on Jessie Harrold.
