Free Prime Time by Jane Fonda Page A

varied stretch of time leading up to menopause when women begin to experience the erratic cycling of hormones, and the estrogen and oxytocin levels in our brains begin to drop. These substances support our mood-elevating serotonin-releasing cells, the ones that make us feel good. According to the neuropsychiatrist Dr. Louann Brizendine, at the University of California, San Francisco, perimenopausal women are fourteen times more at risk of depression than younger and older women. Of course, many women sail through this hormonal transition with very little difficulty. But according to the National Survey of Midlife Development in the United States, life can take a downward turn for more than two-thirds of women between the ages of thirty-five and forty-nine. After that, once the hormones have stabilized with the completion of menopause (which happens, on average, at age fifty-one and a half years), life can take a surprisingly upward turn for a great many women.

    One of the last Christmases Tom and I had together. Troy is behind and Vanessa is on the right.
    Hormonal Shifts
    Another factor comes into play as we approach and enter menopause, one that can have a complex effect on our interpersonal relations: Our estrogen and oxytocin levels begin to drop below those of the more masculine, goal-oriented testosterone. Those feel-good hormones were what encouraged us to take care of others, smooth things over, and avoid conflict. Now we may find ourselves not caring so much about keeping the peace, and we may express our previously repressed anger more openly. Old Let-Me-Take-Care-of-It-for-You-Honey morphs into I’m-Going-to-Class-See-You-Later-and-the-Cleaning’s-Ready-to-Pick-Up. Contrary to what we may think, 65 percent of divorces after age fifty are initiated not by men wanting to leave their wives for younger women but by the wives themselves. They may start to ask themselves, “Have I lived my own life or the life others have wanted me to live, making decisions others wanted me to make rather than my own?”
    Had I known what was behind my depression and anxiety as I approached fifty, I might have sought help from a doctor who specialized in hormone therapies. This, I have since learned, is the optimal time for healthy women who are experiencing perimenopausal symptoms to consult their doctors about hormone therapy in low doses. (I will discuss hormone therapy at greater length in Chapter 14 .)
    Breakdown
    Even with pharmacological help, my marriage would have ended sooner or later. I was fifty-one when it happened and, always the late bloomer, still going through perimenopause. All the sadness and despair I had been experiencing over the previous several years crashed in on me. My lifelong, ever-ready carapace fell apart, and I had a nervous breakdown. I couldn’t eat or speak above a whisper or move quickly. I was in free fall. Everything I had relied on for self-definition—marriage, career—was stripped away, and I hadn’t a clue about who I was or what I was supposed to do with my life.
    People told me to stay busy, and this was, in fact, my usual way of dealing with times of uncertainty. “If I just keep moving,” I’d always thought, “no one, including me, will notice that I’m stuck … maybe.” But as Suzanne Braun Levine, who writes extensively about women’s issues, has said, “The cure for ‘stuck’ is ‘still.’ ” 2 I sensed that time wasn’t just an empty space asking me to fill it with something. Time just was, and its was-ness was asking me to simply be in it—fully.
    I sat alone most days in the company of my golden retriever, reading books such as Riane Eisler’s transformational The Chalice and the Blade, about Neolithic societies that practiced goddess worship and the rise of patriarchy that crushed it, and psychiatrist M. Scott Peck’s The Road Less Traveled, about what makes for a fulfilled human being. I knew I was raw and vulnerable, so I stayed close to the wall, and