The Hot Topic

by Christa D'Souza

  ‘We want women to study, have careers, be in boardrooms like men, but women still have to do all this during what is the most fertile period of their life. So if we are going to live longer, healthier lives after what is now our natural reproductive life, we are going to need changes. Forty-five may not be considered too old to have a baby nowadays, but medicine still refers to women as older mothers after the age of 35. That’s because our eggs accumulate mutations as we age, which tends to mean they will be less healthy, so we become increasingly less likely to conceive or bring a baby to term the closer we get to the menopause.

  ‘A woman came up to me at the end of my talk at Hay saying she loved being menopausal, being free of having periods or getting pregnant. At another talk, an older woman asked why people might not want to go through something so natural as the menopause. But there are plenty of things we do today that avert the natural: pacemakers, or keeping premature babies in incubators. We have seen that, when new reproductive technologies are available, people do seek them out. That is something that is only likely to increase in future. Education, getting a suitable job, being able to afford a house, schooling, all these things are happening later in life now. People are putting off having families for good reasons. And technological solutions will have to be sought if, more and more, we are going to want to have our families later in life.’

  It’s funny. One of the ironic upshots of the menopause is that I have suddenly become weirdly broody – broody in a way I never was before, during or after having kids.

  It’s no secret to anyone who knows me that I’ve always preferred dogs to children. Since I hit the menopause, though, I’ve begun looking at babies in the street in an entirely different way (and here is a little dirty secret, suddenly regretting I never even bothered to breastfeed the second one). In a way it makes a certain societal sense. I’m as established as I’m ever going to be in my career. I have a totally stable partner. I’ve got tons more patience. And even if I didn’t, I’ve got the help to pick up the slack. Wouldn’t it make sense to become a mother now, as opposed to then, when I had so much else on my plate?

  And then I play it forward a little. It’s one thing, a 70-year-old dad at the school gates in his Prada sneakers and his baseball cap. But a 70-year-old mum? That is something altogether different. Then again, why should 60 be an unnatural age to have a baby if we are going to live until we are 120? And, like Prasad says, who says natural is best anyway? The mother whose baby would have died if she hadn’t had a caesarean? The cancer patient undergoing radio- or chemotherapy? The couple who have just been told that the 10th bout of IVF has worked?

  Look, the idea of a mother and daughter-in-law two-fer-one special at the Portland doesn’t appeal in the least, but the idea of feeling the way I do now on the hormones, for the next quarter of a century or more, with no fear whatsoever of my cancer returning? Oh, yes please. I’d take that like a shot.

  ACCEPTANCE, ANDY WARHOL AND A POEM

  As I write this I am thinking about something my 13-year-old son told me over the weekend. ‘Mum?’ he went. ‘Do you realise you’ve got really long hairs growing out of your nose?’ The awful thing is, the little s*** is right. It appears I do.

  And like the rogue eyebrow hairs which, however much you pluck them, always corkscrew back, stronger, whiter and more professorial than ever, they haven’t always been there. It’s not so much that I’m morphing into my mother, I’m morphing into her father, (my grandfather), it sometimes feels. Then there’s my male-pattern baldness. Okay, an exaggeration, but when I look at pictures of my hair from a few years ago, I’m shocked by how thick and bouncy it was compared to what it is now. Those elastic pony-tail holders? Once upon a time I could only get them round twice. Now they’ll easily go round three times. The scary thing is, if I bite the bullet, surrender to the truth and get myself one of those short grown-up haircuts, I’ll probably never ever grow it long again. No more speed-plaiting strands of it when I’m bored or anxious, then; no more being able to put it up with a pencil and then taking out it for effect. Which, if I’m brutally honest with myself, may be no bad thing, no bad thing at all. There are very, very few women in their fifties who can get away with nearly waist-length hair. Moores, Julianne and Demi. That’s about it.

  Writing a conclusion is tricky. What are the take-home messages etc, etc… Someone asked me recently, if I had my druthers, would I have ‘done’ menopause differently? Well, maybe I would have stuck my head in the sand less and prepped more. Given up drink earlier. Bought the bigger-sized jeans. Gotten the grown-up haircut. Approached it like my friend and yoga teacher Nadia who, at 43, doesn’t feel nearly there yet, but who is determined not to get ‘caught short’ when it happens. I admire her prophylactic strategy. And her steadfast refusal to see menopause in a negative light.

  A lot of the work, Nadia believes, is about learning to accept herself now, as she is, no matter what. (As yet she is childless and without a long-term partner). ‘I need to be okay with the way things are as they are and continue to be okay, however it pans out to be for me,’ she says. ‘Who knows what will happen in the next five, ten years, but I don’t want to enter the last third of my life with any trace of bitterness or regret. There are two ways to age, one is to be brittle and unyielding, the other is to be fluid and flexible, I’d like to be the latter…’

  The kids or marriage thing? She’s not ruling that out (or in) either. ‘Plenty of middle-aged mothers I know are dissatisfied,’ she shrugs, ‘The point is, you’ve got to find joy and contentment with whatever life brings you.

  ‘I have a friend who is 49 and in a reasonably new relationship,’ she goes on. ‘Her partner offered to go down the IVF route, before it was really too late, because he knew she wanted a child. But when she sat down and really thought about it, after years of feeling resentful that she might never be a mother, she realised she was fine as she was. There’s a kind of elegance with that kind of acceptance, I think.’

  Nadia is very beautiful, with a killer, killer body – imagine a brunette Bo Derek – so I’m curious how she’ll deal on the looks front. (Her mother, who was also very beautiful, had a face-lift at 40). ‘Look, you can be sexy without that being your main currency. Once upon a time, yes, I did turn heads when I walked into a room; I don’t do that any more, but that’s okay. You have to relinquish that kind of power and replace it with something else. I’m sure that’s why so many women turn to yoga in middle age, filling themselves from the inside rather than the other way round. You can’t go into that next stage filled with regret and thinking, what did I do wrong? You have to enter it with a degree of grace.’

  Grace. If there is one word that seems important at this stage of my life it is this one. And when I think of the women (and men) I talked to while researching this little book, that’s the quality which always shines out. Shit happens. You deal. With as much humour and style and acceptance as you can muster.

  About seven years ago I had my passport stolen in Boston airport and had to get a new one in a hurry in order to be let back into the UK. I got the photo done in some booth in a mall on Cape Cod. My mother and I had had a row about something or other just before it was taken. And I remember thinking at the time, that has to be the worst picture that has ever been taken of me: how could I look so weathered and old and cross? I’ve had to renew my passport since, but keep the old clipped one in my top drawer. Passport photos are such life markers somehow. The other day I had a look inside and was shocked with… well, how marvellous I looked. Am I going to think that, ten years from now, of my current passport picture? I showed it to a friend of mine recently. ‘Who is that man?’ she said.

  There is a part of me which rather resents younger women, women in their thirties and early forties, who’ve reached the sweet spot of their lives and (like me at that age) couldn’t be less interested in the subject of menopause. I want to shake my fist and tell them, ‘It’ll come to you soon enough!’ But then there is another part of me that is
excited for them, excited for myself, for what is to come. Whether it is a function of menopause or not, I trust myself more, I like myself more, I’m not quite as fearful of what life might or might not toss out. So what if I inadvertently offend someone? So what if I don’t get invited to the party?

  ‘Sometimes people let the same problem make them miserable for years when they could just say, “So what”. That’s one of my favourite things to say. “So what”,’ as Andy Warhol once said.

  Look. There’s a fine balance between being liberated and giving up – and I’m still learning how to walk it (still learning to accept that word ‘balance’ actually); but, if there is any time in my life when the penny drops and I’m going to get it, now is that time.

  What the hell are we here for, what’s the point of us; once we die, is that it? The older you get the louder these questions become. Sometimes to stop them deafening me I like to remember the etymological definition of the word ‘ecstasy’. It comes from the ancient Greek and means, literally, to stand outside of the self (‘ek’ meaning outside of, and ‘statis’ – stature, standing). There we are. True bliss is to get over ourselves. To quote Bertrand Russell from The Conquest of Happiness, one of the greatest self-help books of all time: ‘One of the symptoms of an approaching nervous breakdown is the belief that one’s work is terribly important.’

  One’s work. One’s self. One’s reflection in the mirror while trying on bikinis. It all sort of boils down to the same thing. There’s a life out there beyond me, and I’m game to explore it.

  Is this a good conclusion? Maybe that’s the point: it isn’t a conclusion. Whatever the case, here is something from the Sufi poet Rumi, about s*** happening and accepting it with grace, which feels an appropriate way to sign off:

  The Guest House

  by Mewlana Jalaluddin Rumi

  This being human is a guest house.

  Every morning a new arrival.

  A joy, a depression, a meanness,

  some momentary awareness comes

  As an unexpected visitor.

  Welcome and entertain them all!

  Even if they’re a crowd of sorrows,

  who violently sweep your house

  empty of its furniture,

  still treat each guest honorably.

  He may be clearing you out

  for some new delight.

  The dark thought, the shame, the malice,

  meet them at the door laughing,

  and invite them in.

  Be grateful for whoever comes,

  because each has been sent

  as a guide from beyond.

  Some snaps from over the years…

  1964, with my mother and sister on Hampstead Heath

  1967, my sister and I on a hotel balcony on Orchard Street, Singapore

  The 1974 Badminton School photo. I’m in the middle of second row

  1975, in my first wonderbra, aged 15

  My first assignment for The Sunday Times (I wasn’t actually single at the time)

  Ramatuelle, South of France, 1991

  With my ex-husband, in Provincetown, Mass., 1994

  With my first-born, Flynn, in 1998 (he had just weed on me)

  At home in London, 2005

  Mykonos, 2005, with Django

  2004, in the garden at our cottage in Wiltshire

  In the spare room in Wiltshire, working

  On White Sheet Down in Wiltshire with Flynn and Django, 2007

  With Django in the kitchen, 2014

  With Nick, partner and father of my children, summer 2015

  With my mother and sister in Puglia, Italy, 2015

  Silicon Valley, 2015, with the Sisters of Perpetual Adoration – menopausal all

  Digging for tubers in Tanzania, February 2016

  AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

  D’Souza has written for publications such as the Guardian, the Daily Mail, the Times, the Daily Telegraph, Vanity Fair, and the Evening Standard, and is currently contributing editor of British Vogue. In her articles, she often probes body issues such as ageing, weight-control, diet, cosmetic surgery, and her own battle with cancer. She lives in London, with her partner and two sons.

  Copyright

  First published in 2016 by Short Books,

  Unit 316, ScreenWorks, 22 Highbury Grove,

  London, N5 2ER

  This ebook edition published in 2016

  Copyright © Christa D’Souza 2016

  The right of Christa D’Souza to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with Section 77 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

  This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights, and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

  ISBN: 978–1–78072–268–9

  Cover design by Two Associates

  Cover photograph: Jenny Lewis