The Gate of Elderhood

A personal letter on menopause and what it means to step into elderhood in a culture that stopped valuing its wise women.

Dear Vi,

Have you ever thought about life as a series of gates? It’s been on my mind for a while, the older I get. Here’s what I’ve come up with.

The first gate is the one we walk through when we become adults. We bear children, raise our families, do all the things modern life asks of us, which is to say, everything.

And then we approach menopause. We’re still young enough to be raising the last of our children, some of us even helping raise our grandchildren. But somewhere deep inside we’re starting to become aware of what comes next, even while we’re still deep in the doing. We’re getting ready for the next gate, which happens after menopause.

I’m calling this the gate of elderhood.

We all know that this is a very powerful place for women, and we all know this is why the patriarchy is so afraid of us. So afraid that centuries ago they actually tore that gate down and covered its remains in smoke and mirrors until we had no value at all left in Western society.

Maybe this sounds simplistic, but I believe the loss of our female sages is why the world is in so much trouble today.

Have you heard of the Grandmother Hypothesis? It suggests that the reason human women – unlike almost every other mammalian species – live decades past menopause is because they help raise their grandchildren, thus giving those children a better chance at survival. Whether the hypothesis is true or not, we do know that in indigenous and non-western societies, the wisdom and experience of the matriarch kept the village vital and healthy. It was the postmenopausal grandmothers – the matriarchs, the crones and wise women – who preserved the traditions and guided the community through hard times. Who guided and gave advice. Who recognized, acknowledged, encouraged, and demanded things be set to rights when needed.

I have experienced the acknowledgement and encouragement of an elder, and let me tell you, it was no small thing to receive. In my thirties and forties, I studied and taught Middle Eastern dance, specifically Egyptian folkloric styles, including the stage form popularly known as raqs sharqi. I’m not Egyptian – the dances of this country aren’t part of my culture, and I took that very seriously. Considering myself a dance ethnologist, I sought out and studied with mentors and attended carefully chosen conferences with the goal of learning, performing, and teaching the dance accurately and with respect to its cultural origins. The last thing I wanted was to be seen as borrowing from the surface for my own purposes.

It’s hard to know if you’re doing it right. I craved feedback from an elder who actually held the knowledge I sought.

At one conference, I got my chance. The teacher everyone called Aunt Rocky, a generation ahead of me, was sitting in a chair between sessions. I knelt on the floor beside her and we had a conversation. She’d been noticing me, in the workshop. The questions I was asking. The way I moved my body. The way I felt the music. The expressions on my face. Before I got up, she put her hand on my head and said, You’re doing good work. I’m proud of you.

I have carried that moment with me for over twenty years. It’s a small thing to describe, but it was not a small thing to receive.

How many young people could benefit from something like that? To be seen and acknowledge and praised and encouraged by an elder? Someone whose opinion mattered to them?

I’d actually like to rephrase that last bit, because this is the heart of everything I am trying to say here: someone whose opinion mattered to them because it mattered to all of society.

What We Lost When We Lost the Grandmothers

I look at the world now and I feel something close to despair. Where has humanity taken itself? When I entered my 60s, I felt like I’d entered an invisible demographic. A dismissed demographic. An irrelevant demographic. It fills me with anger.

It fills me with determination to bring the wise women back into society. It’s time to give them a chair to sit on, to ask for their advice, to listen to what they say, and treat those words as valuable.

The gate of elderhood.

The one I’m standing in front of right now. The one I can feel myself getting ready to step through.

I want to be careful here, because there’s hubris in insinuating that I am a wise woman, in insinuating that I know the way when I don’t. I don’t! I don’t know anything at all, really, except how much our society needs its grandmothers, crones, and wise women back.

What would walking through this gate mean? Is it a direction I’m meant to grow? I don’t know. But I’m not ignoring it. I’m going to investigate it and see what comes up.

I also know that somewhere not too far down the road is the fourth and final gate. The stage of life where we need the hands of the younger generation to hold us, instead of the other way around. How many good years do I have left before my body starts to fail?

What Comes Next

We all want to make our mark on the world. What do I want mine to look like, now that I can feel the shape of the time I have left?

As a book coach, I make my mark on the world by helping you make yours. And now that I’ve turned 65, I can feel a shift happening inside myself around how I want to do this work going forward.