Deborah Williams

Word Count 450

I don’t know when it started exactly, but I have a clear memory of standing in front of a class, talking about Frankenstein and beginning to sweat. The room was air-conditioned but my body was suffused with heat. Sweat trickled down my spine, tickled along the line of my bra, sluiced in my armpits. Could the students tell what was happening? Was my face flushed? Did they think I was about to keel over? In the academic version of “the show must go on,” I kept talking, even as my body puddled. 

This astonishing heat happened a few times before the penny dropped: I was having hot flashes. Me. I knew such things existed, but until that point, the knowledge was purely theoretical, as is the case with most profound physical changes: sure, I’d go through menopause, but in some far distant future, when I was, you know, old. How could that distant future have arrived when I was only in my (very late) forties? And why hadn’t I known that this process would start without warning and continue until—well, no one could tell me how long it would last. I was adrift on some current that would, eventually, deposit me on the far side of reproductive possibility, but there was no way to know how long that journey would take. 

When hot flashes struck, if I had time after class, I’d rush back to my apartment, towel off, change my shirt, then race to the next class. If time were tight, I’d wedge myself into a bathroom stall and swab at myself with a handful of paper towels. Neither option felt particularly elegant or powerful: bodies are profoundly humbling entities. 

Science says that the female body is almost 50% water. Even our bones are 20-25% water. So perhaps it makes sense that menopause is a rather watery process, from the sweating to the intense periods that some women experience. (“Flooding,” my midwife said briskly. “That’s what we call it. Keep some heavy-duty sanitary napkins with you. Tampons aren’t gonna cut it.”) 

It's as if our bodies are off-gassing youth, like mist evanescing off a lake. 

What my brain (73% water) hadn’t realized, before this process started, is that as you age, you live with all your past selves, the way a body of water is comprised of all the raindrops, all the glacial runoff, all the tributaries: we are ourselves and our ghosts.

But this watery process also holds an invitation: if water can transform, so can I. I’ll let the menopausal tides wash away the dross and from my perch on the high ground of “no longer young,” consider how I want to shape the years to come. 

Deborah is a writer and literature professor at NYU. Her work has appeared in various publications, including The Common, The Paris Review Daily, The New York Times, and The Rumpus. She is writing a novel about sex, art, and menopause, based on six tumultuous years that transformed Edith Wharton's life.