About Me

Why would a perfectly nice, respectable fortysomething woman (me) start a blog about seasoned sex? Because she’s not getting any? Because she’s getting some and it sucks? Because if she doesn’t get some soon her partner will be getting gone? Or was just because when she hit menopause, the floor dropped out, the ceiling blew off, and she found herself floating in limbo, devoid of all desire and dreams?

Yes, menopause was the beginning of my sex problems and the end of my sex life. If you’ve ever gone through a long period of not getting any, you know just how depressing and lonely life can become. Good sex, at least for me, goes with connecting, feeling good in your body, intimacy, romance and fun. All you have to do is look at what happens to a marriage when you take sex out of the equation. I got one word for you: divorce.

In case you have your doubts about what I’m saying, let me spell this out it:

Menopause = Hormone Free
Hormone Free = Sexless
Sexless = Loveless

Therefore, Menopause = Loveless.

At least that’s how it was for me and I have a feeling my experience isn’t unique.

Now, I’d like to say the disappearance of my sex life and my marriage along with it would have been enough motivation to propel me to search for help years ago. But that would be too logical and too entirely unlike me. Remember at the time, I was in menopause and off my rocker.

No, it took something far more awful, horrible and shocking to get me to do anything. I saw my ass and it was fat. I’d been watching a home movie one evening, scrutinizing this flabby middle-aged woman as she slumped across a room with her back to the camera. I was about to say to my friend, “who’s the fat ass?” when I realized in a flash of heart-exploding panic that the fat ass was me. My friend tried to reassure me that the camera adds weight. “It doesn’t need to,” I screamed, as I ran to hide in the closet, under my clothes that didn’t fit anymore.

Sometimes it takes a cold hard look to really get that you aren’t the 20-year old college dorm queen you used to be—all giggly, firm and fabulous. In an instant, I saw myself the way everyone else does: a sloppily aging woman skidding into fatigued obsolescence. I felt like I’d been dismissed from the gene pool, left to watch from a frayed deck chair while all the other lithesome reproductive beings copulated with Darwinian intensity. They mattered. They belonged. They weren’t in menopause.

Of course, it took me a long time to connect sex, menopause and hormones. Blame it on denial. Menopause has been vilified, glorified, “medicalized,” analyzed, and even made into a musical. But in the end, it’s mostly denied—what I call the pink elephant in a woman’s life. You know it’s there, but there’s no way you’re looking. I don’t know about you, but I was raised with the reigning expectation that aging, menopause, and even death were all optional. It was just a matter of time before we found cool new pills, injections, and surgeries to make it all go away.

Talk about being delusional. A rear end (and beer belly) expanding to mythic proportions was just the beginning of my menopause. And still, I was, “whaddya mean, I’ve got a problem? I blamed stress. I blamed my job. I blamed my neighbor’s smelly cat, all that Guinness, the way my ex-husband drove, and that freaky long weekend in Vegas.

Eventually, after ruling out one thing after another, I came to the blindingly obvious conclusion that menopause is one choice we do not get. Oh, sure, there are the exterior renovations—the boob jobs, the Botox, the facelifts, the tummy tucks. But you still feel blah inside, like an old bean bag that’s lost half its stuffing. You add new stuffing, and you think you look the same as you did in your twenties, but everyone can see you’re just fooling yourself.

Why go through all that pretending? It’s not menopause that makes you nuts, it’s trying to cover up the fact that you have gone into menopause that makes you crazy. When it finally registered on me that I could not fake it anymore, the answer appeared.

Oddly it took the form of science. Specifically, Dr. Chris Heward, a research endocrinologist (someone who specializes in the study hormones) and President of Kronos Science Laboratory. Chris and I talked for two years, covering everything from what happens to a woman’s body during menopause, to the role hormones play in maintaining health and sexuality. Eventually we wrote the book, Ride the Pink Elephant, which guides you through the science of hormones and shows you how they can transform a life—in this case, mine.

If you want to know how hormones can help you, check out Ride the Pink Elephant. If you want to know what it takes to have a seasoned sex life, sign up for my blog. Here’s my bottom line: I know from first hand experience that menopause can snap you out of the most tenacious youth fantasy faster than you can say, “I’m a little homicidal this year.” But I also know there is a whole new world after menopause. Happier, healthier, seasoned and oh so sexy!

The Pink Wrangler.