When the Bleeding Stops

Abstract

As a woman in her early forties, dancer and choreographer Lovísa Ósk Gunnarsdóttir has become fascinated by menopause and middle aged women. "I am late.Now I am forty-one years old and I am at crossroads. The reason for me being late could be that I am pregnant, but it also could mean that my menopause has kicked in early. A couple of years ago, my partner and I were thinking about having another child. I went to see my gynaecologist to see if everything was ok. My period had been a bit off and my doctor started to ask me when the women in my family hit menopause. I realised I had no idea. When I asked him if he thought I had started menopause his response was very vague, like he was avoiding the question. He used the words “lets not even talk about it”, even though he wanted to check the status of my hormones, “just to be sure“.Coming home I was a bit shaken and shocked to realise that I knew hardly anything about menopause. I started to think about all the women around me that had probably reached menopause. I had never had a real conversation about it with anyone, not even my mother or my sister. There wasn’t any kind of dialogue going on in society that I knew of and now even my doctor didn’t seem to want to discuss it.I went online to try and find some information, but what I found left me feeling panic and shame. Menopause seemed to be some kind of a shameful disease and the symptoms nightmarish if you were unlucky. Most of the remedies included the intake of hormones, which according to some research increase the risk of cancer and heart disease. The more I read the more I got the feeling that being menopausal meant that your purpose in life was done. And the only thing left to do was to crawl into a corner, curl up, fade and die.I procrastinated for as long as I could before calling my doctor to get the results. If I didn’t know, I didn’t have to tell anyone. I felt like my identity was on the line. My friends, family and the society would think less of me - would see me differently. Time passed and when my menstruation was back to normal I decided that I was going to prepare myself. Prepare myself for becoming middle aged. I felt the urge to address this excruciating silence somehow and understand where this shame I felt was coming from and how come Western society in particular is not having a conversation about something that happens to half of the population. We have all heard of the mid-life crisis that men go through, but how come there is this lack of knowledge about menopause?"