Change

A love story

Dear Lovers,

I promised paid subscribers the occasional gift for no particular reason. Here is the first one.

Poetry is my first writing love. Essays are my second. Both forms are demanding and working hard at them to capture precisely what I mean to say is the greatest gratification.

The essay below was published in a collection of Living While Feminist – Our Bodies, Our Truths.

This is piece is very dear to me. I took long crafting it and I was, and still am, happy with how it reflects the kind of writing I am most comfortable with: fragmented and non-linear, intimate, deep, humorous, and without pat answers. It is long. It is to be read with a cup of tea or a glass of wine in hand.

Thank you for trusting me enough to subscribe to Love Letter’s Extra Large version. I hope you’ll enjoy this, and share with me your own stories in response to it.

Love,

K.

Change – a love story

‘I think of it as the uglification,’ I tell two women I have known for half an hour.  

I haven’t told anyone else about the word that comes to me daily now as I get dragged backwards through this alarming transformation called menopause which, until now, has been a concept out on the far edge of some distant tomorrow. 

When I thought about menopause at all, I realise now that I imbued it with some sort of silvery magic, in which a woman’s full head of hair turns an even, steely grey, and she becomes serene and sage-like. I used to think of menopause as ‘the sagification’. I rather liked that joke about a hot flush being a power surge.  

I associated menopause with power.