Send In The Crones
November 21, 2002

It's official: I'm a crone.

I don't mean the gnarled figure you usually see flying around on a broomstick at Halloween. I refer to the last of the three phases of the female principle in the ancient/pagan life cycle: the maiden (innocence), the madonna (fertility) and the crone (wisdom).

At least I think the crone stands for wisdom. The wisdom we accumulate on the journey through life is supposed to be the carrot dangled on the stick to help get us over the traumatic loss of fertility. In my case, no reward was necessary; I couldn't wait to get here.

I'm in menopause at last and I couldn't be more thrilled about it. No more apparatus to haul around when traveling, and no more messy surprises. No more expensive prescripton pills. No more birth control of any kind. I began my cycle when I was 10 years old, and 40 years is a heck of a long time to be stranded in the fertility phase.

I don't want to be a Pollyanna about this: growing older is no barrel of laughs and it's definitely not for the squeamish. When Katharine Hepburn was once asked why she didn't watch her old movies on TV, she replied, "There is very little pleasure in watching oneself rot."

True enough. Even those of us who never looked as glamorous as Hepburn can't help noticing the difference. The face I see in the mirror doesn't seem to change all that much from day to day. But it's often a shock to look at photos of myself from 20 or even 10 years ago and see in them the presence of that indefineable something—youth—that's not so much in evidence any more. I don't remember ever feeling any younger then than I do right this minute. I guess we're always too busy with life to stop and revel in the fact of being young. We take youth for granted, never believing it won't last forever. Aging is something that only happens to, well, old people.

But eventually youth gives way to the next phase. Let's be delicate and call it maturity. And it's not such a bad thing, for all those reasons I listed above. What amazes me are women who will try anything, animal, vegetable or mineral, to keep a stranglehold on their youth—or at least the illusion of it.

Face lifts have been making cosmetic surgeons rich for decades. Personally, I can't fugure out why anyone would endure such painful and expensive abuse to get rid of a few bags and wrinkles. Why spend good money to have my skin slit, racked and stitched like the victim of some medieval torturer? Especially when the results can be so dubious – anyone remember Robert Redford at this year's Oscars? I couldn't be bothered to iron my hair back in the '60s, and I have even less desire to iron my face. If I want to permanent-press my skin, I'll go lie down under a steamroller. It would be cheaper.
Then, there's Botox, the means by which women in their 30s—their 30s!!!—receive anti-wrinkle injections into the face that partially disable the facial muscles where pesky wrinkles collect. It's like something out of an S&M fantasy or a bad Ken Russell movie. Imagine an episode of Ab Fab, with Eddie and Patsy staggering around with needles sticking out of their foreheads, hunting for another bottle of champers. There are even Botox parties, like the Tupperware parties of old, where women congregate in private homes to sip wine, nibble finger food, and disable their facial muscles.

Other women turn inward. Hoping to outsmart nature with drugs, they try hormone replacement therapy to stave off the side effects of menopause like hot flashes and night sweats. Me, I'm a cold-blooded reptile constantly freezing; I'm looking forward to hot flashes in hopes they will elevate my internal thermometer at least to room temperature. HRTs have recently been denounced in medical journals for a staggering list of potentially dangerous side-effects, but there's always been a price to pay for fooling Mother Nature. My friend Marcia recalls an encounter she once had with a group of ladies in their 60s who were all taking hormones and who were STILL having their periods! That's my vision of Hell.

Friends who have preceded me into cronism tell me there is one concrete benefit to aging: crankiness. There's no law that says you have to grow old gracefully, and what fun would that be? Literature is full of elderly aunts who lurk on the fringe of the action making acerbic wisecracks; after a cerain age, you no longer have time to waste in idle chitchat. No longer obliged to be cute, we're finally allowed to say what we think.

Of course, no sooner had I embraced imminent cronism than the other shoe dropped: after a six-month hiatus, I've stared having periods again. My doctor promises me I'm no longer fertile, it's just Mother Nature having the last laugh, one final capricious display of menopausal fx. As a crone, however, I can give myself some good, cranky advice: stop whining and get on with life. There's no time to waste.