One of the things that brings me back to my grief a little bit recently has been going through perimenopause.
Because I say to myself,
What did my mother feel like during this?
When did she finally get into menopause,
Right?
All these questions about it.
And I remember vaguely that my mother had a moment in perimenopause where she was bleeding very heavily and she went to the doctors.
And I remember I was worried for her.
And often I think,
I don't want to have that.
I don't remember what that was about.
I never asked her.
I was a teenager involved in my own stuff and I never asked her.
And of course I can ask her now.
I can be with her and work with her and channel with her.
But just the ability of not having the ability to go and talk to her in person,
To see her face and to ask her her experience of all those things,
Right?
So I'm grieving in the middle of this and in perimenopause.
And I'm just,
I spoke earlier about grieving with my children getting older and I'm also going through perimenopause,
Which is a whole nother life stage.
It's a transition,
A transmutation.
It's a whole new part of life and hormones are fluctuating and my sleep is fluctuating and my sensitivity to certain things and opening my mouth.
It's like there's so many things going on and my body is changing.
And isn't it true that when you're in so much change,
You just want to be with your mom.
So all of this grief is coming up because my mom would never have not been there during this.
Never.
So I'm going through this grief of my own body,
Right?
Shifting and changing.
And it's beautiful and I have no problem with it,
But it is changing and there's shedding happening.
And at the same time,
I'm grieving this version of myself before my parents died.
And I'm grieving these timeframes when I was young and when I started driving and I'm grieving my 25 year old self and gosh,
There's so much.
And to be in all of this while my body is reminding me daily that I'm changing,
You're changing.
It's not going to be the same,
Right?
I have a few gray hairs.
My cycle is totally off and I might,
You know,
Yeah,
I might call it shape-shifting.
I'm shape-shifting into the next version of me.
There's so much going on.
It's a constant fluctuation and a constant going with the flow of what comes up and a constant reminder to be conscious with life,
To be conscious of the changes that are all around us.
And that is life,
Right?
Change is life.
So it's really interesting to be going through perimenopause.
And I know a lot of people go through perimenopause in their teens,
Getting older and then all those reflections to my parents and myself when I was younger.
It's really beautiful to be bending time in that way,
To be able to bring the parts of the arc together.
And if you think about bending time into a circle as a portal to transformation,
I could go on and all that spiritual talk,
But I feel so vulnerable and I feel so not seen and seen at the same time.
And I feel like I'm pulling together the scaffolding and pulling off the scaffolding and trying to collage it back together in a way that I don't even know what it's supposed to look like in the end.
I am just like in this,
You know,
This grief and menopause.
It's like molting of the feathers.
It's like the shedding of the skin.
You don't know quite what's underneath yet.
You don't know quite what's coming out,
Right?
When you molt and you shed,
What's coming out underneath.
It really does.
It goes back to trust,
I guess,
Right?
Trust.
Presence.
