Where did I go?! · Women’s Seasonal Apothecary

Where did I go?!

I woke a few mornings ago dripping, absolutely dripping in sweat. My hair was damp. My pillow was damp.

I opened my weather app to see the temp.

It was 58 degrees.

This isn’t air conditioner or even fan-weather.

I knew what it was. I knew why I was waking at 4 in the morning like I had just run a marathon in 6,000 percent humidity in July in Florida.

It was the night sweats.

Hot flashes. Ovarian retirement.

It’s my time.

Despite having the medical knowledge I’m fortunate to have, I still Sat and sobbed at the edge of my bed. I felt ridiculous.

Like a teenager crying because the telephone never rang.

How was this even a thing? I’m 51 years old. Confident. Happy and content.

I sat sniffling, grateful my husband sleeps in another room so he didn’t see me looking like this. Like a sloppy drunk whose inner child was let loose with a box of matches and a death wish.

I definitely felt sorry for myself.

Wretch.

Who am I?

What is happening to me?

Where did I go?

Where did I go.

I’ve looked in the mirror a thousand times lately and wondered who I am. Who I’ve become. Who is this aging woman staring at me?

I’ve been labeled most of my life.

We all have been.

Daughter

Mother

Wife

Scheduler

Cook

Driver

Nurse

The one who holds it all together so no one else has to fall apart.

But now I don’t care.

A switch that got flipped inside my body that made me just not give a damn about making sure everyone is ok and safe and watched over.

I simply don’t care.

Which I have to admit is a far cry from where I lived even just two years ago.

I’ve heard these same questions echoed time and again. And heard the same lamentations.

Women who don’t recognize the person staring back. Don’t recognize the body that used to be firm and strong and now betrays them.

Women who can’t tolerate that which they have tolerated for YEARS.

Women who have everything they thought they wanted, a good marriage, grown children, meaningful work, a comfortable life, and yet find themselves wondering why they feel so untethered.

They almost always ask the question as though they’ve misplaced themselves somewhere along the way.

I don’t think that’s what’s happening.

I think we’ve misunderstood this season of a woman’s life.

We’ve been taught to see menopause as a medical event. A hormonal inconvenience. Something to survive until the hot flashes settle down. That eternal youth and beauty are the destination.

But what if that’s only part of the story?

What if this season isn’t simply about what our bodies are leaving behind?

What if it’s about who we’re becoming.

I love peonies. They arrive with all the subtlety of a brass band. They burst open almost overnight, spilling fragrance into the air as if the whole garden should stop what it’s doing to admire them. They are extravagant. Romantic. Impossible to ignore.

Orchids, in the other hand,

are different. They don’t announce themselves.

They bloom quietly, under conditions only they seem to understand. They don’t care whether anyone notices. They simply become what they were meant to become, in their own time.

I used to think becoming older meant fading like a peony after spring. Brown and used on the edges. Losing my petals and fragrance. The very things that made the Y chromosomes look my way.

But now, I’m beginning to see, it looks much more like becoming an orchid.

Women entering the years of Wisdom often begin making decisions that bewilder everyone around them.

They retire early.

They leave marriages.

They stop coloring their hair.

They go back to school.

They move to the woods.

They finally paint.

They say no.

From the outside, people ask, “Why would she do that?”

Perhaps because she’s blooming under circumstances only she understands.

In many earth-based traditions, a woman’s life wasn’t measured simply by her age. It was understood as a series of seasons.

Many modern Pagans and Goddess traditions speak of the Maiden, the Mother, and the Crone.

They aren’t boxes we are expected to fit into, but rather as archetypes, different expressions of feminine wisdom that emerge throughout a lifetime.

Some women become mothers. Some never do. Some revisit the spirit of the Maiden in their seventies. We move in and out of these archetypes more fluidly than any neat diagram can capture.

The Crone, though, has gotten a terrible reputation.

Say the word crone today and people picture a bent old witch with a crooked nose, muttering curses from the edge of the woods.

I don’t.

I picture a woman who no longer apologizes for taking up space.

A woman whose “yes” is wholehearted because she has finally learned the power of “no.”

A woman who has buried people she loved. Made mistakes she thought would break her.

Loved deeply.

Lost deeply.

Been wrong enough times to become humble and lived long enough to become wise.

She doesn’t know everything.

She simply knows what matters.

She no longer confuses being agreeable with being kind.

She no longer mistakes exhaustion for virtue.

She no longer believes her worth is measured by how much of herself she can give away.

She has become discerning.

There is a quietness about her, like an orchid blooming under circumstances only it understands.

Perhaps that is why this season feels so disorienting.

The world keeps asking us to remain peonies, bright, cheerful, accommodating, endlessly in bloom.

While something much older and much wiser, something or someone ancient, is quietly inviting us to become orchids.

The peony blooms because spring has arrived.

The orchid blooms because it knows its season.

The Orchid-Crone isn’t the woman who has all the answers. She’s the woman who has learned which questions are worth asking.

With that set of lenses, we realize isn’t really about menopause.

It’s about initiation.

Menopause is simply the doorway.

The Orchid-Crone is the woman who walks through it. And she doesn’t emerge because estrogen declined; she emerges because life has finally ripened her enough to stop living by everyone else’s expectations and start listening to her own inner knowing.

So perhaps the question was never ‘where did I go?’

But rather, ‘Who Am I Becoming.’

Understanding that allows us to stop mourning a version of ourselves that was never meant to remain unchanged.

Namaste.

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Where did I go?!