MenoLog#2: “My mother didn’t tell me because no one modeled her to tell.” - AJ
I had never once heard my mother complain of physical or emotional pain even when raising, all alone, six kids (including the man-baby she had for a husband). I only have scarce memories of what transitioning to menopause and post-menopause may have looked like for her especially now that I know what most likely happens.
I remember that around her 40s and all along her 60s, my mother was always bathed in sweat. Drenched. Red cheekbones, wet hair, damped neck, clammy chest and back, dewy groin, and dripping wet under her breasts. Always overheated and engaged in deep breathing not as a technique to manage stress but more as a natural reaction to what may have possibly been exhaustion which had to be her normal as she never stopped working at home and her 8 hours plus full-time job.
Through the years, my mother was diagnosed with a long list of ailments including high blood pressure, diabetes, thyroid disease (which now we know contributed to her excessive sweating that was never addressed by any doctor who saw her), and early onset dementia.
And about all of it, silence even in the face of concerning health issues that kept piling up throughout the years. Like her abnormal monthly bleeding not been critical enough to address it with a doctor as heavy periods had always been her normal even when they shouldn’t be at 50. But that, like everything else affecting her health, she was never told.
One day, due to what appeared to be an “unforeseen” event to everyone, she ended up in the hospital. The bleeding was so bad that it looked like a flowing river down her legs. And as frightening as it was to watch, the worst part was to witness a lack of urgency from my mother herself, family members, and the medical staff that tended to her. In the hospital, they took their time before finally deciding to rush her to an emergency surgery for a total hysterectomy. After the surgery, no explanation about what had happened, the reasons for it to happen, or what she would experience moving forward with no uterus. No treatment or follow-up. She just received aftercare instructions, and no one ever talked about it back home.
Throughout my life I watched my mother not only keep silent on everything pertaining to her wellbeing but also watched her model it. There was never a conversation about how she felt. Not once did she voice the aches and pains in hand with a life of non-stop physical work and emotional and mental drainage. I learned that being quiet was a staple of a generation of women like her, but the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree, and repeating what she modeled came as natural as breathing for me and my sisters.
In the last years of her six decades of life, it never occurred to me to ask how she navigated menopause without understanding its physiological impact. But by the time I could have asked, she was already lost in her dementia. I know it must have bothered her a million times more than what bothers me because at least my generation gets a chance to understand every single reason behind lasting years of debilitating symptoms and so many conditions triggered by the event. I get a chance that my mother and generations before her never got. And for that, I need to do better in voicing my very own aches and pains.
At the end of the day, my mother didn’t tell me about hers because no one modeled her to tell. Besides, she would have not known what to tell when she was never made aware of hormonal imbalances triggering a physiological chain reaction that transforms our health forever. For her, the normalization that pain comes along with getting old and about that, never a conversation.
If I could only have my mother without dementia see me go through my menopausal moment, I would for sure have a story to relate to and an opportunity to listen to a story she never got to tell. I know that then and only then would she have talked about her lonely menopausal journey, and she would have made it her mission to make herself present in mine.
