With Travail and Alone
By Amelia Hodsdon
Her skin is too tight. At night, she scratches at her arms and legs and shoulders, loosening it until she is comfortable and can fall into dewy dreams of petal-softness. In the morning, her skin is too tight again and there are bloody streaks on the sheets.
The woman sits up, scratches herself once more and rises into whoever she is today: the person she knows, who remembers what she likes and where her keys are; or the new one, who wants to obliterate herself either in sleep or in the cold of the sea, and who, if she finds them first, will throw her keys into the heart of the sun.
Inside the woman, something has been changing, a burgeoning that brews turmoil and leaves her searching for a place or a way of being that will soothe her. The something pulls and pushes, asking questions she can’t answer in words. Today, these feelings seem to come more often and from a deeper place and on her way into town, a stronger ache grasps her and she leans on a wall, sighing into her coat, hoping that nobody notices.
Her time comes in the post office, while she is waiting to return clothes that don’t fit, ones bought for a different body. The strip lights and the dry heat and the talk about scandals and stamp prices and other people’s holidays are suddenly too much, the feelings are taking over, and out she goes, out into the high street, and finds the quiet of the churchyard.
She sinks to her knees, heavier than she has ever been, down to the ground among the crumbling gravestones and the nodding daffodils. She knew this change would come one day, but not that it would be like this, at this time, all alone. She can hear the toddler group inside the church, their words drifting through the open window: “In, out, shake it all about… in, out, in, out.”
In, breathe in, out, breathe out.
Breathe in – everything she knows about herself, her precious self.
Breathe out – everything she has been told about how and who she should be, what she should be doing and how she should look and what she should be able to cope with and what she should be doing to stop whatever it is that is happening to her and should should should, out in a cry that startles the rooks out of the trees.
In, out: whatever this is, there’s no going back.
“Actually, menopausal women don’t literally give birth to themselves,” an unknown voice intrudes and this is the final push she needed: a great tearing, renting, all the way from the sky to the sewers beneath this town, a roaring and a rushing and then it is done.
In the warmth of the sun, the woman’s former self dries into a delicate, shrivelled husk. She stoops and touches it gently, watching as the folded form crumbles back into the earth. The woman says a couple of words and turns, and with each step away she lengthens her legs and stretches her arms in a half-remembered yoga move. She is shiny and new and old, made of sinews and wisdom and pain and persistence and love, and her next life has just begun.1
Amelia Hodsdon is an editor and writer living in Gloucestershire, west-south-west England. She studied linguistics & anthropology at university, then 25 years later did an MA in nature & travel writing. She is the writer-in-residence at the website WalkListenCreate, and has recently had pieces published in Echtrai and Seaside Gothic. She is interested in a lot of things.
This piece was inspired by a line from Ursula K Le Guin’s description of women’s experience of menopause – “She must bear herself, her third self, her old age, with travail and alone.” – in her 1989 non-fiction collection, Dancing at the Edge of the World.