CHAPTER ONE

The Beginning of Our Travels Together

It very likely started when we hit forty and realized that gravity was not our friend.  The End of the World as We Knew it.  Yet, all in all for a few short years, we handled the changes in our bodies reasonably well.  We exercised, ate healthy foods, and congratulated ourselves on how gracefully we were aging.  And then, the hormonal shitstorm hit the fan.  The changes (emphasis on plural) were streaking at us faster than meteors in the Perseid shower.  Emotional, physical, mental.  You name it - nothing was left unscathed.   We were smack dab in the middle of The Big“M”.  Menopause.  The Change.

No one prepared us for THIS!  The magnitude, the intensity, and the sheer number of changes overwhelmed us.  So Theresa and I did what all good women friends do.  We shared our freakouts, panics, sorrows, and epiphanies with one another.  We bitched, whined, and complained, and yes celebrated, on a fairly regular basis.  And we wondered.  We wondered what exactly the Big M would result in.  What were we actually changing into?  Werebeasts?  Psycho crazy ladies?  Space aliens?

Then one day we were deep into a long distance discussion of these changes (and still finding some humor in them). I was lamenting that all through high school I’d wanted to be voluptuous and womanly, instead of a Twiggy-esque stick figure female, and now finally through the magic of perimenopause and age, I found myself at least looking like a goddess.  Unfortunately, that goddess was Venus of Willendorf. “Venus of Who?” asked Theresa. “I learned about her in an art history class,” I told her. “She’s this ancient stone goddess from Crete or somewhere.  She has a huge bulbous head atop a zaftig torso dominated by these ginormous pendulous breasts.”

After we finished laughing together, Theresa offered the possibility that we really are becoming goddesses.  Maybe The Big M is morphing us into Venuses of a sort.  True, we menopausal women are not the Venus of Willendorf; a symbol of fertility, the fecund female.  Nor are we Botticelli’s young Venus rising lustrous and innocent from the half shell.  No, our mature goddess is a real woman’s goddess, a goddess for the 21st century.  More than a figure of fertility, more than a benevolent goddess, more than youth and o