Power Surge

"I'm lying on the floor half the day," my friend is telling me. "The hot flashes are so strong I feel like I'm going to faint." Renee is one of many women I've spoken to whose perimenopausal symptoms are intense enough to alter her daily functioning. I feel an instant bond with her as we share stories of our difficult passage. Popular wisdom says that if your mother had an easy time of it, you probably will too. But Renee is one of several women I know who questions the popular wisdom - because her mom, like mine, reported few if any symptoms.

Are our mothers' menopause memories just a form of amnesia, an example of how people tend to remember the good and sweep the unpleasant under the rug? Or do they indicate a cultural change that reflects the navel gazing qualities of younger age groups compared to the outward-looking views of my parents' generation?

It could be some of each. Let's throw a third possibility into the mix: environmental contaminants, which have permanently invaded the bodies of each and every one of us. Chemicals from plastics, pesticides and other man-made toxins act as endocrine disruptors - which, say researchers, can mimic or block hormones and disrupt normal functions. According to the Natural Resources Defense Council, "This disruption can happen through altering normal hormone levels, halting or stimulating the production of hormones, or changing the way hormones travel through the body, thus affecting the functions that these hormones control." Debate continues on the human effects, but low birth rates, birth defects and failure of nesting behavior in the animal world can be traced to known extreme exposure to endocrine disruptors.

Since the female body is already in hormonal chaos around menopause, it's certainly possible that the build-up of environmental factors since our mothers' time could compound symptoms in the more hormonally-sensitive of younger generations.

Last, we can't forget that the world is changing faster than we are, demanding more from us than seems humanly possible. It's been pointed out that humans have not evolved to cope with the kind of chronic low-to-moderate stress that modern life imposes on us. Despair, depression and anxiety about world events and personal issues can take a toll on our immune systems.

Though most people carry on in public as though nothing is wrong, more and more of us are sharing stories about just how difficult it is to live in the world we've created. Technology brings evidence of our short-sightedness to our living rooms every minute of every day. Our parents were worried about their survival during the Great Depression. Many of us are doing that too, only now it's coupled with ongoing distress about carcinogens, rising oceans, failing pollination due to bee decline, soil depletion, killer viruses, genetically altered and hormonally treated food, and so on. Not to mention more immediate stressors such as joblessness, homelessness, lack of education and global economic crises (to name just a few).

So when a 50-something woman says she feels like lying down half the day, perhaps menopause isn't entirely to blame. I feel a fatigue and an anxiety that may or may not have affected my mother, who was perhaps too busy raising four children to notice, too busy willingly taking on a role that I rejected (motherhood). It was still the 70s, after all, and cultural consciousness about female sexuality (and equality) was young. There were lots of things we didn't talk about then, and the types of internal conversations many of us have now were probably too luxurious for the women of her day.

There is something to be said for roles, expectations and rituals, not that I'm advocating a return to any particular "good old days." But today's lack of such markers and civilities leaves us with little to hold onto, and few indications of progress. If we can no longer find meaning and purpose within our homes, our jobs, and our communities, the world begins to look like a pretty scary place. Circa, say, 2009.

Perhaps we women, with our extra sensitivities, are canaries in the coal mine, indicators of the health and balance of the planet. It's not such a far fetched idea; to bring the world into equilibrium many have called for the return of the feminine principle. I say, give Mother Earth a big estrogen patch and let's get the show on the road.

The Hundred Dollars

What's the difference between skeptics and cynics? Healthy skepticism is another way to say critical discernment, something necessary to get past, say, a timeshare salesman unscathed or beyond the "you have won" headline down to the not-so-fast fine print. But cynicism, it has been said, is a deep sickness of the soul. Many people have taken their skepticism too close to cynicism by making judgments from a fortress of denial, in which anything that doesn't make sense to a "rational" world view must be suspect. It's worth keeping in mind that because what we personally "know" constantly changes, and because the world does too, the truth is multifaceted and always shifting. It lies somewhere between total gullibility and absolute doubt.

All this is a long way of introducing the hundred dollars. Some years ago I was walking in a local park, bemoaning some fate or another, wondering whether all the talk of affirmations and positive thinking had much credence. I hadn't had much luck with them so far. "Okay," I said to the Universe, willing to take another gamble. "Show me if anyone is listening, if what I say matters. I'll take . . . hmmm . . . I'll take a hundred bucks."

I went home and forgot about it until the next day, when a birthday card from my mother arrived a week early. Inside was a check for $100. This didn't count, because she always sent $100 for my birthday, and I could have guessed it was coming.

A couple of days later, I received a letter from Fine Gardening magazine about an inquiry I'd made some time ago. They wanted to buy a single photograph I had submitted (rather unusual for slide submissions), and enclosed was a check for $125. My eyebrows arched in a possible concession. Did this count? I told myself that although I didn't know their payment would be in the hundred dollar range, I had been pretty confident that they would buy it. (Why? Most other photographs of mine weren't so lucky.)

The piece de resistance came later that week. As an admin at the law school, I occasionally helped one of the professors with personal tasks, like faxing and phone calling for non-work purposes. Unbeknownst to me, university policy stated that such work should be compensated separately, and from the professor's own pocket. Thus it was that Professor Burke handed me a check for $100 that Friday before I went home. "For all your extra help," he said, explaining the policy.

"Okay, okay," I said to the Universe after this third show of abundance. "I get it." It was hard to rationalize how all this had happened, and in such a short time. The birthday card may have been a given, but the other two were not. The third one wasn't even on the radar.

So do I fully believe in the Law of Attraction, and all that is good will come if you let it? Absolutely not. That's the gullible end of the spectrum. Unpleasant things happen to all of us despite our best affirmations and intentions. But the opposite end is no place to hang out either. It's the duality see-saw again. Energy expended in service of any extreme, be it ideas or behavior, is usually fueled by its unconscious opposite: methinks the skeptics protest too much. (What did Buddha say about The Middle Way?) Which is another way of saying that underneath every cynic is a wounded idealist.

As for the hundred dollars, wouldn't you know that I couldn't leave it alone. I went to the same park a few weeks later and raised my arms to the sky. "So," I bargained with the Universe. "I could use a few thousand bucks…."

Allow + Unfold = Grace

The first time I heard the word "acceptance" in a therapeutic setting, it annoyed me. Here I was, pouring my pain out to a new therapist ten years younger than me, and her main point at hour's end was that her strategy, if we were to keep seeing each other, would be to work on accepting my pain and "limitations." I remember thinking that while she was well intentioned, she clearly had no understanding of my troubles, my personality, and the amount of therapy I'd already done.

You know what's coming, don't you? Yes, indeed - she was right on the money. The reason the idea of acceptance, as it relates to life's difficulties, gets a knee jerk reaction is that people confuse it with resignation. "If my in laws want to belittle me, there's no way I'm going to accept that!" But this isn't what's meant by acceptance.

It's akin to surrender, another word that a lot of people don't like. "Why should I give up what I want?" goes the rationale. Surrender and acceptance are not about giving up. They are about owning where you are. If we're always chafing under the yoke of "what is," all our energy goes into resistance. And you know the old saying, "what you resist persists."

How can we humans, with our fundamentally limited awareness, truly know how things should be? We are famously short on long-term perspective and long on immediate gratification. It's understandable: being alternatively hot and cold, happy and sad, fulfilled and bored, sick and well – it never ends. You get used to one thing and it changes. Or, it doesn't change on your timeline, or there's something wrong with it once you get it.

Ranting and raving is what we usually do in response to this "wheel of life." That's our way of venting, of saying, "I'm in pain." Of acknowledging how helpless and victimized we feel in the face of social or universal forces. That's a first step, but if we want to get anywhere, the next step is acceptance, which steers us away from victimization and toward empowerment. This is the place where we can feel ourselves fitting into a better story than the tiny one we construct for ourselves. It's partaking willingly in a larger mystery, one in which we realize that letting life lead us in this strange dance is ultimately more rewarding than a lot of the choosing we have done up until now.