Women & Second Adolescence: A Second Chance at Growing Up Strong

Excerpted from
Inventing the Rest of Our Lives: Women in Second Adulthood
By Suzanne Levine

As we enter our fifties, many women who, like me, postponed having children, find themselves going through menopause around the same time their children are going through adolescence. In my case, my daughter began to menstruate just as I was beginning to miss periods; and my son was well on his way to becoming a master at talking back by the time I hit my Outward Bound no! epiphany. The physiological hits of menopause left me relatively unscathed, but I met up with the who-am-I-and-where-am-I-going demons of Second Adulthood just as my son was encountering his own adolescent version of those same demons. Juxtaposing the two life passages has helped me see that both are launching pads into the future. My teenagers and I are grappling with the same two disorienting questions: What is happening to my body? and Who am I?

What's Happening to Me?

Raging hormones. We have hot flashes, teenagers have acne. We stop menstruating, they begin. We sleep less, they sleep more. We lose libido, theirs goes bonkers. They grow hair, ours thins. Both age groups are prone to extreme mood swings and strange behavior. When I complained to the father of five grown children about my son's unpredictable ways, he smiled knowingly and explained that I would have to accept that a teenager simply becomes a "werewolf' for a while-an unrecognizable creature of the night. The description struck me. It wasn't so long ago that a woman going through the change of life was also considered a werewolf of sorts, an unbalanced harpy in a constant state of PMS, who literally changed color and grew fur without warning.

The major difference is that the teenage werewolf is accepted as a stage of life, while the menopausal werewolf is considered an affliction in need of treatment. In my mother's generation, doctors prescribed tranquilizers to tame the beast. Husbands and media wits told jokes about her. Then, beginning in the 1980s, doctors had a new treatment-hormone replacement therapy (HRT). In addition to subduing many physiological symptoms, it allayed anxiety and promoted a sense of well-being and energy for some women. Since then, some fifteen million women a year have begun hormone therapy; in 1999 alone, ninety million prescriptions were written.

Recent alarming findings have forced us to make some tough choices. In 2002, the National Institutes of Health halted a major clinical trial of an HRT drug because of an increase in the incidence of breast cancer among its participants. But many women have been reluctant to give up the boost HRT gives. A woman gynecologist I consulted is among them. "Postmenopausal women have more power today than ever before," she began. "Why do anything that will reduce that power and energy unless there is a strong medical reason for that particular patient? I know what estrogen is doing for me. I wouldn't be working at such a high level and enjoying it so much if I went off estrogen. Sure it's a risk, but I ski and that is a risk too."

The debate goes on. We will have to await new studies of Second Adulthood women to determine what role, if any, replacing the estrogen that launched us into puberty can play in our relaunch. In addition hormone research on adolescents may turn up other relevant findings. For example, reduced levels of the mood-enhancing hormone serotonin in teenagers have been cited as sources of both depression and impulsiveness. Though menopausal women, who are known to suffer bouts of depression, have yet to be studied in the same way, the documented fluctuations in that hormone may explain something about the out-of-character behavior we are experiencing, too.

Overall, looking at our werewolf behavior as a ream of the scary movie adolescence is acknowledged to be enables us to see our rebellious behavior for what it is-a physical, psychological, and emotional shake-up that announces our Second Adulthood, a transition into a promising new stage of understanding and accomplishment.

Who Am I?

In adolescence it is called an identity crisis, and solving it is considered the main psychological work of that stage. In Second Adulthood, the way one thinks about oneself is just as crucial. As we evaluate our experience so far and contemplate the possibilities ahead-as we wrestle with The Question-we meet our sense of self with an intensity that we may not have experienced for thirty or forty years. Changes that take place in that crucible, and the way we recalibrate our lives in response to them, result in a personality shake-up. Every woman I spoke with was struggling to get to know herself anew. The stirrings of introspection that accompany the other emotional, neurological, and hormonal shifts of second adolescence become more insistent as we move ahead.

For the average woman, focusing on her self has been a furtive business at best. The education process for women of our age has been in pleasing, caring for, and empathizing with others. Even when she was wielding power or earning money, a women often felt she had to first factor in the needs of those around her. Urged to take one day a month to pamper herself, or take to heart the airline safety instruction to put her oxygen mask on before attending to her children, she has been reluctant to accept such counterintuitive advice. The first cover of Ms. magazine in 1972 was a drawing of a blue Shiva-like woman with eight arms, each holding a tool of her trade-a mop, a baby bottle, a typewriter. It resonated with thousands of women who were going crazy trying to do it all. I see that figure as an energy field that is being depleted-a generic woman with thousands of tiny arrows all pointing outward, from her brain, her hands, her heart, her genitals-a sort of St. Sebastian in reverse. With so much energy exiting the system throughout our first adulthood, it has been hard to hold onto enough to turn the focus inward.

Yet that is precisely what we want and need to do in our Second Adulthood. One of the most profound psychological shifts that takes place as we move into that new stage is a reversal of the caretaking system: we begin to hear one another say "I'm going to take better care of myself." By that we mean more than getting an occasional massage-though pampering is on the agenda. We mean listening more closely to the needs and passions we have shunted aside because we were too busy. At the same time we are tuning out some of those demands that kept us so busy. "It is such a relief," says Amy, who is only weeks away from retirement, "to hear myself saying, 'That's not my problem; let someone else take care of it.' I am looking forward to taking care of myself.

Alexis, a recently retired gym teacher, is just beginning to readjust. "It used to be like everything I did was other-directed-teaching for others, mothering for others, being a wife. Now with retiring I feel like I'm so self-oriented; I guess I still feel a sense of apology about focusing on myself; it's very difficult to make that leap."

Despite the centrifugal forces that have beset us, each of us has always been aware-however dimly-of an inner life. We've sheltered it from outside demands by a second skin that protects a closed system of conversations inside one's head, intimacies exchanged only with friends, or thoughts jotted down in secret journals. But the protective membrane has, over the years, become hardened to leather. As we spend more quality time with our buried self, we also begin to experience the satisfaction that comes from within.