Each Month

Each month with menstruation, perhaps we can't accuse women of getting mean or snappish—instead we have to understand women are just losing their confidence in life.  It's as if the egg, in its monthly departure, is announcing to women that they should give up hope.  They're losing their life's gift, and so, rightly, women are grief-stricken.  For a few days they believe they are not quite women: they have nothing to give.   

            When my wife Bettina was having her period I was required to compliment her continually.  If I didn't do this she became despondent.  The egg, at these moments, was seemingly all she embodied, and now it was leaving; there were no babies to make.  And if her husband was not telling her she was attractive to him, then really, truly, there was no hope: she has no man focused on her, and no egg. 

            Bettina and I were still fairly young, in our early-thirties, with two small children, when her demands began appearing each month.  Of course, I had my focuses and distractions, primarily in my work as a struggling teacher—yet I was not inattentive, not unfaithful.  I did not drink or rage.  I was largely present for her and our two children, both of whom we eagerly chose to have, and whom we welcomed into the world.  And when the second one had arrived we told ourselves that was the end of kids for us.  Our two children, healthy and handsome, were on their way in life, with us in attendance.   Perhaps, with the two growing children, and no more to arrive, Bettina had begun to feel left out, I don't know.  But the demands for validation began to creep in each month.  I was pretty good with this: I complimented her on her body, her clothes, her cooking.  These were not just fronts I put up, either.  They were sincere. 

            Yet when we got a little older, in our early-forties, instead of turning insecure for a few days each month, Bettina began to harbor great disappointment in me because the compliments were not coming as often as they used to, and she now became convinced that I had never loved her in all the time I had known her.  This lack of confidence in me, however, was a big secret that needed to be kept from me.  To do otherwise, to be more direct, would perhaps be too unwomanly.  She didn't complain, didn't seek to leave, so I was unaware of her feelings.  I thought we were happy.  It was very typical, this male unknowing, this ignorance that resided in me for several years.  And my later discovery of my ignorance was as painful to me as her eventual leaving me, at age forty-eight.  Still, I must say she covered it pretty damn well, guerrilla fighter that she was. 

            For finally, at menopause, life felt truly over for Bettina.  Horrifically, this was what a woman's continually aging body had been pointing at for decades; it was what she'd been striving to hold at bay with beauty regimens, gym routines, and pleading with her man to compliment her.  Now, with the eggs no longer in play, it had arrived: the end.  

            I witnessed it in Bettina: her warmth and connection to me evaporated.  She was wholly empty of eggs; she was sure that this emptiness was living in me too.  In my own barrenness with tributes I certainly, in her eyes, could never give her what she needed.  She decided there was a profound lack in me.  She became distant, confused, angry.  There was no point, she felt, in continuing with me. 

            In my struggling to discover and then keep ahead of my ignorance, I had hoped that a few years further on, once she was done with menopause, perhaps she would be a woman again, an older woman, sailing into middle age, reconciled to herself, solid, grounded, able to accept this new life of hers.  At least that's what I thought.  I would just have to weather the storm.  I loved her still, and we had two wonderful children who still needed us. 

            Yet Bettina slowly lost interest in me, in sex, in my thoughts, in our life together.  And though I should focus on her, her focus on what was important to me was gone.  What I am, what I sought in my teaching and my students, was now all ridiculous, imaginary.  This sense in her, I foolishly believed it was only her settling into mature womanhood, where men's dreams, or men's work, suddenly appear a bit stupid.  I was not aware how dire the situation was, and she really couldn't tolerate me.  Instead I believed that as a woman gives up on one thing—having babies—she accepts another, she accepts life, doing it more ably than most men who it seems can't quite find a new view as well as women do, and so, when old age comes, men are more helpless, or bereft. 

            I was wrong.  Women can go stone cold.  The hope for connection, which seems to define women much more than men, vanishes.  In fact, for men, the wish to maintain a connection, to be settled in marriage, to accept their spouse now and into the future, seems to increase as men get older—just in time for men to find their women leaving it behind, going cold, learning to find resentment for so much of what has gone before, tallying up life's toll and finding every-one to blame.  

            Strangely, at age forty-eight, knowing there were no eggs in her, I had needed to become more active toward Bettina, as she became less so toward me.  I had to fight the tide, rise up against it all.  I needed to prove myself to her by opting to buy a new house, bigger than our last one, and earning and spending more money, and taking vacations to exotic locations.  The eager, stalwart young woman I knew 20 years ago was absent; now, as if from the pages of a clichéd popular magazine, there was a "strong and independent" middle-aged woman demanding what had been denied her, what should always be hers: a man's continual deep love-focus, as well as increased adventure, increased spending.  All perhaps to compensate for her missing eggs. 

            And though she didn't really like sex anymore, I needed to make love to her more often, or at least show my desire, so as to be rebuffed.  It was as if the missing eggs were still shouting out: Don't forget about us!  She and I had to go through the ghost dance of sex, but it had turned into "romance," into a kind of virtual baby-making, without the pleasure or the irrationality or the pregnancy.  Though the time for babies had ended, I felt she had became the baby.  The demanding baby.  How strenuously I had to hover over her, assuring her.  For middle-aged women, it seems there is more need for proof, to replace the babies, the ones that were born or the ones that never appeared.  Proof also for the love she is sure has drained from me, now that her eggs are gone.  After all, how could anyone love an eggless woman?  She became the baby, to nurture, a delicate baby that could expire at any time. 

            And the money.  Money had to be more apparent now that the eggs were finished.  The shopping took over.  The young woman who once didn't need to shop, now couldn't go through a week without spending money on things we didn't need—for in the back of her mind there were perhaps still ghost babies to provide for, ghost babies to rise up out of her.  Resources needed to be stockpiled, grocery store bags filled, and phantom mouths filled.  Our children were now in college, yet they seemed to be back home, in their cribs, as the house got stuffed with food, with new furniture, with redecoration.  Finally, pets needed to be procured—first one, and then another.  Again, a kind of deluge of babies, of living creatures, small, helpless, but covered in fur this time. 

            My wife felt herself empty and needing to be filled.  I said I loved her and would was committed to her always, and that we were involved in our life together: resolved, content, conciliatory.  She begged to differ.  I was not worthy, she decided.  Her body, she knew, had more inside it.  I had needed to respect that.  She left me. 

            Are women now, I wonder, more like hyper-women, never giving up on life, on babies, on being provided for, focused on?  Is this because these women marched off to college, or had babies late?  Now must they overcompensate, make up for that lost time, the lost babies?  Where is her youth, her beauty, her missing babies, her connections, and all the promises she made to the demanding world?  To give up on these promises would show her to be a failure, and worse—old. 

            Her missing eggs can never be accepted.  Once, in earlier eras, at forty-five, a woman began to fade away, as we all did, though a woman had her children all lined up, who themselves were usually grown and married.  These children never faded; these children would live past her, and she had nourished them, and they were in her orbit still, having their own children.  Now, middle-aged, it was time to step back, after all the pressure of courtship, and child rearing.  Time to settle, find contentment, weariness, to perhaps do this better than men who weren't as close to their children, who saw their own fading strength and had less recourse. 

            But now, to fade away is not allowed by anyone, especially women.  We must only be able to do more, be more, give me, receive more.   My wife found she could not bathe the world in the glow of her love, her children, her eggs; all she knew was that she had less, and her husband was giving her less too.  Over and over it dawned on her: she could not populate the world with children or with her husband's deep need of her.  All the gaping mouths and grasping hands were fading.  No one had told her about this, that the end came, that she was not always the center of things.  And in fact, she became convinced, in her horror, in her confusion, that her doing this, her caring for others had been a trick used against her.  She hadn't chosen anything, instead it had all been strapped to her, like a too-heavy backpack.  Her response?  To leave me and so, in her mind, to start over, on her own terms.  And to act as if the past 25 years had not even happened.  So brave and ludicrous, so life-denying—her wish to deny herself nothing. 

            Now she hopes to find a new life, and perhaps a new man who will give her what she had with me long ago or perhaps never—not until, like an intrepid explorer, she discovered her own burgeoning life, and learned to live all of life right, this time.  No one ever dies these days, as our bodies empty.  No one must give up, for each life is a long-distance run and our panting lungs have been with us ever since we can remember as we perform for life, hope to wring out of life ever more product and validation.  

            These poor women—maybe they don't come out on the other side of life anymore, after menopause.  Now, these days, these limitless women never disappear, nor do the eggs.  All

of life remains poised before the magical day, the day that dawns each month—and finally forever—when we are empty but do not accept it, when we push on regardless, moving past all the people who fail, who give up, who renege on the egg, on the huge capacity in each and every one of us. 

            Never give up on the egg, that's what she says.  Never accept less from anyone, especially a man like me, who has never learned what she knows each month: there must always be another egg, another chance, another life to live.