Susan Burton
Appearances
This American Life
852: Pivot Point
I got my first period when I was 10, and then I continued to get it for the next 40 years. I didn't get it every month. There were exceptions, blackout dates, pregnancy, breastfeeding, anorexia. But for most of the 40 years, each month my period would come, and I'd open a calendar and mark the anticipated date of my next period with a TK, like a forthcoming fact in a piece I was reporting.
This American Life
852: Pivot Point
Sometimes I would get my period and not have tampons, and then I would go online and order enough tampons so that I would never run out again, and then suddenly I was about to turn 50, and I understood I would never get through all the tampons I had ordered. What was the first day of your last period? asked the nurse at the gynecologist's office.
This American Life
852: Pivot Point
Okay, I said, I mean, I think it was sometime last month, like August, but it's hard to tell. I'm at that age, you know, like I was kind of bleeding all summer. Not in an alarming way, just it was hard to tell. You are officially in menopause once you go one full year without a period. So I was not there yet. I was in perimenopause. During peri, my period had first come a lot, every 18 days.
This American Life
852: Pivot Point
Over time, that changed, 60 days between periods, then 90. I'd start thinking, this is it. And then I'd get my period again, and the clock would restart. Congratulations, a friend said to me one day when the counter reset to zero. She was kidding, but that was the feeling. Perry was a safe zone, and I wanted to stay there. What made Perry a safe zone was simply that it was not menopause.
This American Life
852: Pivot Point
It was still the before time. Perry may have been a safe zone, but it was not a safe harbor. During it, I'd had the common symptoms you hear about and other things you don't. Frozen shoulder, which was just what it sounded like. Migraines I managed by digging my fingernails into my forehead.
This American Life
852: Pivot Point
There were remedies for some of the symptoms, but what I tried or didn't is not what I want to get into here. My point is that I'd already been through a few rocky years. Years of accelerated aging. I felt startled by how quickly my face was changing. According to the internet, this was on me. There was a punitive quality to the phrase, sun damage.
This American Life
852: Pivot Point
But the promise was that once you were officially in menopause, you would feel better because things would slow down and your moods would level out. You would come into your own. You would give a shit less. In menopause, you would be sanguine. And yet I wasn't eager to get there. All along, I'd had so many fears about menopause.
This American Life
852: Pivot Point
A short list of those fears might start with my associations to the word. Dry, wiry, papery. I was scared of what would happen to desire, like how much of it I would feel. The messaging on this was positive. Women in menopause can still be sexy and still want sex. But the celebrities of menopause were hot and liberated. And you hardly heard from the regular women, who maybe did want less.
This American Life
852: Pivot Point
And that was the information I was looking for, how it felt to still be sexual, but to have the volume just turn down a bit. Because that was what I suspected was most true. I didn't know yet. I wasn't there. but I thought I might be closer than I'd ever been. That period I'd had in August, light, persistent. I had a feeling it would be the last one.
This American Life
852: Pivot Point
My bet was that once the hand on the clock circled through the year, that would be it. I would officially be in menopause. September, October, November, December. No period. Still in the before time. It was sort of like not wanting to move into a new decade, like wanting to linger in the last months of being 29, 39, 49, or 9.
This American Life
852: Pivot Point
Even as a child, I'd had a sadness about aging, not wanting to cross into the double digits of 10. Getting a period at 10 was early, very early, in 1984. I'd felt horror at that advancement. Now I recognized that this was happening again. As the year ticked on, now January, now February, I found there were things I missed about menstruating. There was a stillness in my body without it.
This American Life
852: Pivot Point
I missed the cycle, which began each month with a low, flat mood and then continued with the rising action of ovulation. That mid-month surge of energy, some of it erotic. I missed the elevation in mood. March. Earlier in my life, fearing pregnancy, I'd willed my period to come. But it wasn't like that now. I wasn't pulling down my underwear and hoping. April, May.
This American Life
852: Pivot Point
I was still in the before time, though I was increasingly accepting of the idea that I would soon be in menopause, testing it out in my head. Maybe this is partly because a whole new generation, millennials, had discovered perimenopause, and once again were shining up the scruffy territory we Gen Xers had claimed.
This American Life
852: Pivot Point
Advertisers had gotten there too, and now it seemed like everyone was talking about menopause, but most of them were not talking about it the right way. And this is probably always true. No one is ever talking about your own menopause, about exactly what it means to you. June, month 10. By now I was traveling without any supplies. There wasn't going to be an emergency.
This American Life
852: Pivot Point
There wasn't going to be another period stain. For years, I dealt with period stains, kneeling by the washing machine, spraying stain remover into a seam, or looking at the back of a skirt and wondering if it could be saved. But there's one stain I've never been able to get out, a stain on the pink upholstery of one of our dining room chairs. I sat there one early summer morning.
This American Life
852: Pivot Point
For me, a singularly important morning. A book I'd written had been published. I sat there in a nightgown, reading a glowing review. I could feel that I was getting my period, but it didn't matter. A dream of my life was coming true. I wanted to sit there in it. I didn't want to move. Now that stain is there, and I've tried to lift it, but it won't come out. And I don't mind that it's there.
This American Life
852: Pivot Point
It's a marker of a moment of bliss, and of an earlier self too, one whose body still did that. For so many years I tried to manage my period, make it invisible, get rid of evidence. Now this strange, possibly even repulsive, kind of preservation. But it's a stain that makes me remember the feeling of the world opening up before me. July came, and then it was August again, and it was official.
This American Life
852: Pivot Point
One full year. Is it too Pollyanna to say that I actually did feel the world opening up? There had been something trying about wanting to stay where I was. Once I crossed the threshold, there was no more resistance, and I was moving forward again. When I went for my physical, my doctor said, What was the date of your last menstrual period? August 2023, I said.
This American Life
852: Pivot Point
Menopause, she said, with an exclamation point. Like menopause, the musical. Like a curtain rising on a new stage.