Free Harley and Me by Bernadette Murphy Page A

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    I ponder these things. I am forty-nine, married nearly twenty-five years. How many years do I have left? How do I wish to spend them?
    Some of this dissatisfaction women experience at midlife has to do with biology. It’s no secret that relationship crises are usually attributed to the crazy-making effect of hormonal shifts that occur at this time in life. These hormone-driven changes affect the brain, giving women sharper eyes for inequity and injustice, and voices that insist on speaking up about what they see.
    â€œAs the vision-obscuring veil created by the hormones of reproduction begins to lift, a woman’s youthful fire and spirit are often rekindled, together with long-sublimated desires and creative drives. Midlife fuels those drives with a volcanic energy that demands an outlet,” writes Northrup.
    The brain chemicals that turned women into wonderful nurturers and doting caregivers during the childbearing years drop off in midlife, leaving us with the same basic hormonal makeup we had at about age eleven.
    In other words, when those hormones start to wane, watch out, because “the bitch is back.” That’s according to writer and humorist Sandra Tsing Loh, who tells of her own struggle with hormonal changes in The Atlantic . “If, in an eighty-year life span, a female is fertile for about twenty-five years (let’s call it ages fifteen to forty), it is not menopause that triggers the mind-altering and hormone-altering variation; the hormonal ‘disturbance’ is actually fertility . Fertility is The Change,” she writes.
    â€œIt is during fertility that a female loses herself, and enters that cloud overly rich in estrogen. And of course, simply chronologicallyspeaking, over the whole span of her life, the self-abnegation that fertility induces is not the norm.”
    I spent my young adult life striving for what’s been called the American dream. A nice house, a responsible spouse, the 2.3 children who do well in school and have possibilities of eclipsing their parents’ lives. Those nurturing hormones helped in that pursuit, but they also excised the flinty dopamine, thrill-seeking drive right out of me, replacing it with a thick, soft blanket of estrogen. By my late thirties, I had morphed into the head room parent for my kids’ grade school, a woman who cooked homemade play-dough and wore Winnie-the-Pooh jumpers paired with sensible shoes. I was Estrogen Woman with a large E emblazoned on my chest. Any kind of risk-taking impulses went underground. I fed that sensation-seeking part of me by attending graduate school, writing books, learning to play the cello, discovering subtle ways to experience risk. Which makes complete sense: To be a good mother, those other drives needed to take a backseat.
    The awakening I’m now experiencing is abrupt and disconcerting. No wonder it looks to others like a midlife crisis. But I’m not acting out . In a very real way, I’m coming out as who I really am.
    In Loh’s 2014 book, The Madwoman in the Volvo: My Year of Raging Hormones , she becomes embroiled in an unexpected affair with her longtime manager. Together they leave their respective marriages, both of which included young children. They start a new life together and live, thus far, happily ever after. I love the romance of that plot. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if some handsome stranger would show up right about now? I know it’s not that simple. I helped build this dying marriage. Who’s to say I wouldn’t do the same thing yet again?
    But I know one other thing for sure: I’d love for a man to look at me in that way. As if I matter. As if what I have to say is important. As if I’m attractive.
    In my early twenties, when I married, I saw myself as unattractive and, frankly, damaged goods. The late teens and early twenties is atime when female self-esteem is at its nadir. I had been neither cute nor popular in high school.