Menopause tough for female executives - Women's Health - MSNBC.com

Menopause tough for female executives - Women's Health - MSNBC.com: "Menopause tough for female executives
Profuse sweating, mood swings, memory lapses interfere with work"

At last, someone is talking about this... I've had a suspicion for some time, now that one of the current reasons that women don't talk about menopause much in public, is due to our increasingly visible presence in public and professional life. If you're in a key position at the head of a corporation -- or any group -- and you're going through your Change, the impact that menopause has to your performance (whether real or perceived) can be considerable. The whole memory loss thing is not good. Nor is the sleeplessness thing. Nor is the hot flash thing. (I've been flashing intensely for the last three days, this being the first day I'm back at work... thank heavens!) All the obvious symptoms of (peri)menopause really do get in the way of your everyday professional life, if you're in a position of any kind of authority or leadership. And the prejudice associated with menopause (insanity, intense mood swings, becoming culturally useless because you can no longer produce offspring from your uterus) certainly don't help either.

But I differ with the tone and opinions of the article referenced above, in some significant ways. First off, I have information that says that heavier women are actually less likely to have hot flashes, than thin women. And I think that the professional motivation issue has more to do with our changing attitudes in life, than with sleeplessness. Oh, sure, getting less sleep can make you less than enthusiastic about your work. But for some of us going through the Change, our eyes are opened to how much petty bullshit takes place on daily basis -- especially amongst "the boys" who often seem more interested in proving who has the bigger hard-on, than actually solving significant issues. And our patience with that pettiness decreases, as our hot flashes increase. That endangers the supposed validity of the pettiness, and it makes us not only less enthusiastic, but subversively so.

Furthermore, the fact that your body does whatever it wishes, and you don't have a lot of control over it, can really affect your relationship to control and power. Maybe for men, whose libido (i.e., their bodies) tames down over time, the idea of controlling one's life is well within reach. But for women who are going through dramatic physical changes, and those changes are for the most part out of their control (we just have to deal with them on their terms), the idea of control becomes increasingly illusory, even laughable. And when the idea of control loses its allure -- not to mention its guarantees -- then funneling all your energy into your CAREER (which is what you've got to do, if you're serious about it) can seem just a tad futile. When your body is going through dramatic changes that are altering every piece of your emotional and physical life, a career can seem less and less vital to your sense of self. And the fruits of slaving away at someone else's idea of a good time, can turn bitter over time.

Being (peri)menopausal, for some of us, is antithetical to corporate advancement.

So, is that it, then? Does menopause at last provide proof that women are, in fact, NOT suited to the working world, and the ideal of equality in the workplace is just a 70's feminista pipe dream, after all? Or is this just another piece in the puzzle of human productivity... another thing to factor into our overall view of what place work has in our lives? Does menopause, perhaps, provide a roundabout explanation of why so many professionally mature women "dump out" of the 9-5 corporate world before they reach the pinnacle of their corporate ladder rise to the TOP? Maybe all the women who are quietly exiting the corporate scene are in fact (peri)menopausal, and their bodies are telling them, once and for all, that there are more important things in life than kow-towing to the grand poobah of the hour, and that -- similar to the unpredictability of their bodies -- there are no guarantees of how your life will unfold, so maybe all the hard work may turn out to be for naught, in the end... so why not just exit the rat race and craft a professional dream of your own making and definition?

Contrary to the tone of the article, I have to say that menopausal "enlightenment" about how unpredictable our bodies -- and life -- can be, does not have to be a liability for the lives of professional women who are going through it... rather, it's more of a liability for the companies which benefit from the contributions of these women. Provided that they give their bodies the space they need to "do their thing", (peri)menopause can offer tremendous insight and balancing to women who are willing to listen to their bodies. The Change becomes a liability for women if they don't go with it, they resist it, they try to medicate their way through it, and they keep trying to make themselves fit into a world that is no longer conducive to their comfort or their health. The menopausal process forces you to make choices about how to live your life -- will you take time off for yourself and give your body a chance to rest when it needs to, or will you force your body to behave the way it's been behaving for the last 25 years, regardless of the new and different signals it's sending you? The choices we make, as we go through our Change, are liabilities only to those who don't benefit from what we ultimately choose -- it's a liability to women who refuse to listen to their bodies won't and give them space to develop and grow at their pace... or it's a liability to the companies which refuse to recognize and honor the changes we're experiencing, and continue to demand exclusive rights to our energies and attention, even as our energies and attention mature and diversify.

Either way, menopausal women need to choose. And time will tell what the results are. But I suspect the outcome(s) will actually be good, with women coming into their power, even as they realize that -- when it comes to their bodies -- there's only so much power and control they can truly exercise. And men will learn from us. They always do. I suspect, after a few years, our male counterparts will start catching on, as women have, that work doesn't have to be the be-all to end-all in life, and maybe listening to your body is a good thing, when it's telling you it needs more sleep, or it isn't interested in cooperating with your constant drive for greater and greater accomplishment.

Maybe, just maybe, our bodies will turn out to be right... in spite of the fact that (for now) they seem terribly wrong.