Maternity and Menopause

Maternity and Menopause

I'm fairly certain that I'm going through menopause. If waking up sweating in the middle of the night is a sure symptom, then there is no question but that I'm experiencing a major physiological change.

What the “change” means for me is still an open question. I'm only in my mid-forties so facing up to the fact that I might be losing my last opportunity to reproduce is not something I'd expected to confront quite so soon.

I know that I'm perfectly content with the size of my family, and the thought of having a baby at this stage of my life is not one that excites me or brings maternal feelings to the fore. I always wanted a daughter for many reasons, but I have three wonderful sons, and I am not bewailing my lot.

But losing that capacity to have a baby is something else entirely. What if one of my children were killed or came down with a life-threatening disease? Wouldn't I want another child, especially if that child were able to offer a life-saving bone-marrow transplant? These are the paranoid fantasies that play out in my head lately, especially at 3:00 a.m. when I've already woken up in a cold sweat and can't get back to sleep.

But the thought of menopause also brings to mind other possibilities. Having spent nearly twenty years in the highly productive but very energy-draining activity of mothering, can I now begin to think about my abilities to create in a new light?

I find myself thinking of those Renaissance writers like Sidney, Shakespeare, and Cervantes, all of whom used the metaphor of parenting to describe the experience of writing. Cervantes, in one of the most memorable prologues to a novel, wrote in his preface to Don Quixote:

Idle reader: Without my swearing to it, you can believe that I would like this book, the child of my understanding to be the most beautiful, the most brilliant, and the most discreet that anyone could imagine. But I have not been able to contravene the natural order; in it, like begets like. And so what could my barren and poorly cultivated wits beget but the history of a child who is dry, withered, capricious, and filled with inconstant thoughts never imagined by anyone else, which is just what one would expect of a person begotten in a prison, where every discomfort has its place and everyone mournful sound makes its home.

Despite the fact that I am not writing this blog from a cell, I find Cervantes' words more and more resonant with my own experience. Just as I wanted my biological children to be the most beautiful, the most brilliant, and the most discreet, I have had to come to terms with the fact that they are not my imagined projections of genius, but their own idiosyncratic selves, creative and surprising in ways I never anticipated, but frustrating and even disappointing in rarely meeting my own narcissistic fantasies of what they might have been. Yet I still want to put the blindfold over my eyes and imagine that each of them will still conform to my parental fantasies of what their individual success might look like.

But now that my task of biological mothering is drawing to a close, I am taking on a new creative project, with the same heady and yet frightening sense of launching something I can't anticipate or entirely control.

The challenge so far has not been writer's block, but rather the question of how to discipline, contain and shape all the ideas that are raging in my brain, particularly in the wee hours of the morning when I find myself writing the next blog instead of getting sleep. Again I think of Sidney worrying that he is tying himself in knots trying to tell his Stella how much he loves her:

But words came halting forth, wanting Invention' stay;
Invention, Nature's child, fled stepdame Study's blows;
And others' feet still seemed but strangers in my way,
Thus, great with child to speak, and helpless in my throes,
Biting my truant pen, beating myself for spite:
'Fool,' said my Muse to me, 'look in thy heart, and write!'

Fearing to produce a "dried up, withered offspring," I nonetheless take Sidney's words to heart and hope that my fears will be belied by the creation of a lively and surprising discourse as I move from being the mother of sons to being mother of words.