Four readers on aging, fertility and identity
I asked how you’re thinking about the loss of fertility as you reckon with perimenopause and beyond. Here's what you said.
Music icon Patti Smith thanks everything — her toothbrush before she brushes her teeth, her socks for keeping her feet warm, the vegetables she eats for having grown to nourish her.
That’s what she said on Julia Louis-Dreyfus’ Wiser Than Me podcast, on which Louis-Dreyfus interviews women about the wisdom they have gleaned over their years.
“As I get older, I do it more,” Smith shared about her gratitude habit.
This line really stuck in my head coming out of Thanksgiving and thinking about this week’s topic.
As I mentioned a few weeks ago, for much of my adult life, it felt like infertility was a core part of my identity. It took up a lot of my time — and money — and shaped my relationships. Even today, as a mother of two, done growing my family, I still feel a twinge of sadness when I see a pregnancy announcement. Lately I’ve been thinking about what it means to enter a phase of life defined by the absence of fertility.
To still carry a little pain and also let that season of life go feels remarkable: For so long, I constantly thought about my own fertility, and now I feel grateful to have the privilege of aging into a time when my fertility is seeing itself out. I like to think that as I get older, I get better at holding multiple truths at the same time, too — and letting myself find ways to be grateful for the lessons gleaned from them, even the painful bits.
A few weeks ago, I asked you all how you’re thinking about the loss of fertility as you reckon with perimenopause and beyond. Many of you responded and shared so deeply and so intimately. It’s not just about the ability to have children — it’s about how society values us.
I’m really honored to share the reflections of four readers on aging, fertility and their identity today. Interviews have been edited for length and clarity.
Anne, 47, New York City
Entering perimenopause without children
My 30s had been really, really, really difficult and I kind of felt like I got some rest in my early 40s where I was like, “All right — I have this great career, I have a lovely family, I have a great life, things aren’t over.”
And then I turned 46 and I wasn’t sleeping well, I was gaining weight, I felt super anxious.
I’m not married now. I haven’t lost hope on finding someone really lovely. But there are these societal markers as you get more senior in your career that are also really important, they signal a certain level of maturity and wisdom that you may have but if you don’t have them — if you don’t have photos of your kids in your office or a ring on your finger — that signals that you aren’t as accomplished. It has affected my ability to be recognized for certain levels of work, of wisdom, of thought leadership in a way that you don’t realize til after the fact.
Once I realized I was having some pretty significant perimenopausal symptoms, it was just a reminder that I had spent so much time, especially in my 30s, wanting to find the right partner and have a family.
Grief is too strong of a word, but oftentimes as women it feels like the way you are defined — regardless of whether or not you actively wanted children or couldn’t have children or things just didn’t work out — by whether we have succeeded in becoming mothers.
Perimenopause felt like an unexpected slap in the face. Nobody was saying this to me, but I was still thinking, “Hmm maybe I can engineer my way out of this. Maybe I can eat more healthy or if I do this or I do that” and then you realize, no — your body is just going to do what your body is going to do.
We also play a part in this. Women dye their hair and do all of these things. We’re all part of this betterment machine, I guess. So it affects the fertility question because the fertility question also has this underlying theme of signaling that you’re healthy, that you can literally give life — and if you’re not that, then what’s wrong with you?
Christina, 43, Vancouver, British Columbia
Pregnant with her second child via IVF while in perimenopause
Pregnancy is not easy ever. I have health stuff, it’s been hard. And it’s really hard right now — I’m in the third trimester. I’m huge. I’m waddling. I’m old. I have a lot of gray hair. I don’t look like a young mom. I am going to be so glad when this pregnancy is over and I’m also going to be so sad to never have another baby. This feeling of this baby inside of me moving and wiggling and responding when her sister cries — it’s amazing.
The sort of disappearing that happens during perimenopause also means I am so much less self-conscious. I care so much less about how I look or how people perceive me. Knowing that people’s perceptions of me and my body are informed by my age and what I’m able to do with my body is something I think about a lot. I’m reluctant for the day when someone asks my daughter, “Is she your mom or your grandma?” That might be the day I start dying my hair.
But my transition into perimenopause — I also feel ready for it because I’ve been dealing with my own hormones and fertility for a long time now. It doesn’t feel like this unknown thing. I feel like if I can figure out how to navigate infertility and hormones, then hitting menopause is just a part of the spectrum of figuring it all out.
Elisabeth, 59, Lansing, Michigan
Faced career setbacks after menopause
If I wasn’t raising a child I would have made different career decisions, but I also thought I was doing pretty good. I was a CEO of a nonprofit in early childhood education, and when I was in my mid-50s and my daughter was done with college I was ready to make that leap into the next best thing. I thought I would be quite a catch.
I was doing a bunch of networking, making connections with people and asking them to connect me with other people. I really wanted to get a job in a big consulting firm. I wanted to spend the last decade or two of my life bringing in tons of money. I met with a whole bunch of people, friends of board members, people who were very eager to be helpful and to talk to me. But nothing ever landed me an interview.
When I went through menopause five years ago, during all of this, I didn’t think much of it other than the loss of my period. But then all this work stuff was happening and confusing me. It just didn’t make sense to me that I couldn’t get a job equivalent or better to what I had done before, which has never happened to me ever in my life before. I started to wonder if there was something wrong with me, wrong with my brain.
My partner has just been able to write his own ticket. He could just go from one field to another, make connections, and people are always seeking him out to do things. How come those same people aren’t seeking me out for the exact same thing? I didn’t think 59 was old. But in the eyes of a lot of people, I’ve already peaked.
Nobody wants to hire a bossy, smart, late-middle-aged woman. Nobody wants that. But if I were a man, I would be seen as having the right type of intelligence and experience and skills and personality. If I were a man, we wouldn’t be having this conversation — I would be working.
Lesli, 38, Seattle
Adopted after infertility treatments
My parenthood journey was different — and my body and my experiences are really different than a lot of my kids’ friends’ parents because of it too. I have twins, but they didn’t enter through pregnancy.
Heading into facing perimenopause and menopause, I’m kind of looking at this map of uncertainty, because I know that not having a full-term pregnancy and not carrying a pregnancy to term and going through childbirth will impact my experience. I can’t use my own mom as a model. She and I have had some conversations loosely around all of this, but I also know that we both know that there’s little chance that our stories will look similar, simply because her identity is different than mine.
There’s been a lot of reprocessing what my identity is, finding acceptance of my reproductive identity. It’s about making peace with the contradictions — maybe not peace, but acceptance. I will experience menopause, as will most of my friends. And it will be different, because my story is different. There will be similarities, and there will also be differences.
I think that the work I have done around my own infertility and becoming a parent through adoption is helping me navigate the phase of perimenopause and menopause, because I’m familiar with some of this discomfort, some of this uncertainty, some of the trauma, the feeling of being alone and isolated. There is also empowerment because I’ve already done impossible things.
For a long time, it was like, “Well maybe I will accidentally get pregnant. Maybe this will happen.” Navigating this next phase of life is really about saying, “No, that chapter is firmly closed.”
There’s just more hope for what I get to do.
Quick question (again)
As I mentioned last week, I’m working on an upcoming edition of the newsletter focused on how our cultures inform our understanding of menopause — how we learn about this process is both specific and universal.
Did your immigrant mom have a tradition she shared with you? Did an auntie pull you aside mid-hot flash and laugh about what’s in store? Did your grandmother whisper to you at a family gathering about a food you should or should not eat at this time?
What about your cultural background has most informed how you understand what menopause is, medically, and what it means to age and change and continue to grow into yourself? Please write me!
I almost forgot
Yes, we’re going to talk about Heather Gay on Las Culturistas right now.
I love reality TV and especially Bravo and especially the Real Housewives and most especially “Real Housewives of Salt Lake City,” a show that is both the ultimate version of the Real Housewives and also completely rewrote the model for what Real Housewives can even be. I could talk about this all day.
But for now, I will tell you that I can’t stop thinking about the conversation Heather — center snowflake of my heart — had with Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang about the way that watching Housewives before she was cast on the franchise was transformative. For her, it shed a new light on what women over 40 could do with their lives.
In this moment when the Housewives have transcended camp and are mainstream enough to have spawned an entire cultural and economic commentary ecosystem, this conversation feels so significant: It’s one about women, age, options — and money.
There’s often still an air of “Housewives — they’re not like us” that surrounds these shows and fuels their popularity. But despite the volume of plastic surgery, thrown drinks, and deployment of sprinter vans, this franchise notably put actual real, live adult women on air and showed their ability to build brands and make money for doing that.
Exploitative? Maybe. Consumerist? Certainly.
Maybe it’s feminist. Maybe it’s post-feminist. Maybe it’s post-post-feminist. Maybe it’s none of these things — but credit where credit is due, which for now is to Heather Gay, for naming it.