Human sacrifice in modern times

Yes, in this case the "human sacrifice" I'm referring to is symbolic. But it's a sacrifice all the same.

In her book, Slaying the Mermaid: Women and the Culture of Sacrifice, Stephanie Golden outlines the famous fairy tale of how a mermaid fell in love with a human. She gives up her voice and her immortality for legs and the chance for life with him.

In all of the mythology of fairy tales, there isn't a male version. As the author explores, in depth, sacrifice is a female trait.

Unwitting, not unwilling

In the "siren song" myth, she has all the power. It's a myth.

It's not framed that way, of course. Women are praised for giving things up for love.

It is considered both a part of their nature and a willing expression of their devotion.

What kind of mother are you to not do your utmost for your baby?

What kind of wife are you to not let your career get put on hold for pregnancy or your husband's prospects?

What kind of daughter are you to not do anything asked of you by your aging parents?

What kind of employee are you to not agree to take on that extra work the boss needs right away?

The deceptive ease of saying "no"

The classic response is to claim that women could just say "No" to these things. No one is making them do this!

It's not a literal gunpoint situation. But in a way their life is at stake. Of course they can say "No." And buck a lifetime of social programming that says if we do, we'll be considered a selfish, uncaring, woman not worthy of love.

In the many many times I have posed this question, I have never had a woman respond with "Just say No!" Because women know it's not that simple. It is men who say such things, because they have their own social programming; the one that says, A man does whatever he wants to do.

Of course, that gets them into trouble, too. It's just not the same trouble.

When I say, "Women are expected to sacrifice," it has a starkness that prompts denial in the listener, be they man or woman. But if I phrase it as, "A mother should do everything for her baby," it's approving nods all around.

Because if we want to do it, it's not a sacrifice! Which is the very trap women fall into with their eyes wide open. Love is a very powerful emotion, and in Western culture, one that women are allowed to feel, freely and openly.

But how they can express it turns out to be full of fences.

Sacrifice and stress

At its most extreme, as in the patriarchal Quiverfull movement, women are allowed some autonomy in the domestic sphere only. She can run a home-based business, but only under the permission and "headship" of her husband, father, or other male guardian. She is responsible for child raising, but with male children being encouraged to reinforce her subservient position when still quite young. It is a highly stressful situation of low control and high responsibility.

With such a stark example, it's easy to dismiss lesser forms of coercion. Especially since 21st century fathers are far more likely to share household chores and childcare, with increasing marital satisfaction as a result.

Over all, the evidence shows that the shifts within marriages — men taking on more housework and women earning more outside the home — have had a positive effect, contributing to lower divorce rates and happier unions.

But for women who are dealing with menopause now, that probably wasn't the case. Our teen years roughly coincided with the rise of second-wave feminism. The controversial fact that "women were people" clashed, sometimes roughly, with the kinds of prevailing attitudes that were so shocking when depicted on Mad Men. When I was a child, women were not allowed their own credit cards, to keep their job if they were pregnant, get a no-fault divorce, or call sexual harassment what it was.

I had to flee 1,200 miles to settle in a place that encouraged more egalitarian marriage structures. I had to make that a priority and be willing to uproot myself to find better soil for my ambitions. I was also a computer professional from the time there were computers in common office use, and so I avoided more traditional views of women in more established professions. And it still wasn't easy.

Prior to women's liberation, a woman was supposed to willingly put herself last every day in order to take care of her husband and family. Love is what drove them to do so. And it is genuine love.

I'm just not sure about the "willing" part. Because the women who signed up for this in their teens and very early adulthood didn't realize what was truly being asked of them.

The short straw

Not every woman reaches her mid-years with a sense of being cheated, just as 25% of women seem to sail through their menopause with no symptoms. Yet that leaves a very large number of women who confide the un-discussed dilemma of any woman who devoted her entire self to her family:

Now that the kids are growing up, they don't have time for me any more. And now that the kids aren't around, my husband acts like I don't have any purpose in the family, and he resents giving me any money that isn't for groceries. I don't have any job skills, I never had any time to get into a hobby, and now I just keep house for room and board?

I really liked my job, and I wanted to see what I could do. But my husband had to move to help his career, and it paid more, and so I worked part-time, and mommy tracks, and didn't keep up with my schooling. I'm twenty years out of date and he seems to resent that I'm not making nearly as much as he is. All that cleaning and cooking and child care is in the past and now it just doesn't matter?

My girls want to get married and have babies with me taking care of them while they work, and I see the whole thing starting all over again. How can I tell my daughters that they will just come home to another work shift if they don't marry with better expectations than I did? How can I tell my family that it's time for me to have my own life? I don't even know what that is.

Even acknowledging such feelings cuts sharply against the grain of how much love a woman can genuinely feel for her family. With the best intentions in the world, she devoted herself to them, creating the happy, independent, lives they now enjoy.

So it hurts very deeply to discover they don't seem to understand what she did for them. They can be alternately clueless and defensive. Didn't she want to do it?

What she wanted was to love and care for her family. But if the only way to do that is to become everyone's servant, without any outlets for her own ambitions and interests... how many women sign up for that, knowingly?

When the deal is put out there this truthfully... not many.

Women are retreating from marriage as they go into the workplace. That's partly because, for a woman, being both employed and married is tough in Asia. Women there are the primary caregivers for husbands, children and, often, for ageing parents; and even when in full-time employment, they are expected to continue to play this role. This is true elsewhere in the world, but the burden that Asian women carry is particularly heavy. Japanese women, who typically work 40 hours a week in the office, then do, on average, another 30 hours of housework. Their husbands, on average, do three hours. And Asian women who give up work to look after children find it hard to return when the offspring are grown. Not surprisingly, Asian women have an unusually pessimistic view of marriage. According to a survey carried out this year, many fewer Japanese women felt positive about their marriage than did Japanese men, or American women or men.

Unless one was there, in the late 20th century, it might be difficult to understand how women were denigrated for showing an interest in feminism and equal rights. My own circumstances pushed me out to the cutting edge.

Women without clear talents in open professions, women who had trouble finding any liberated men to date, women whose relatives and hometowns and religions were extremely negative about stepping outside of their domestic role; such women felt that if they wanted a good marriage and a happy family, they had to do so in a "traditional way."

They thought they were choosing the old order, where they were supposed to be revered for devoting themselves to family and motherhood, only to discover that by the time they hit mid-life, new expectations were in operation. These women are supposed to act as though their lives are their own responsibility now.

A whole generation of women got ground up in a giant culture shift. That wasn't supposed to be the deal.

Menopause: the ignored epidemic

There's a good reason menopause both sucks and blows.

Women are set up for a rocky transition because modern life bombards us with unrelenting stress, added toxins, and a low-nutrient, processed food, diet. This keeps most of us in a hormonally fragile state from adolescence to perimenopause anyway.

This is the part that sucks.

Then, when menopause hits, we often have trouble because this was a delicate balance at its best, and now several major production plants have collapsed. So we go to the doctor, and get offered anti-depressants. Because they are so afraid of giving women hormones. Even if there might be thyroid and adrenal issues happening along with the known estrogen and progesterone deficits.

This is the part that blows.

No way to escape

Perhaps there is a more neglected patient on the face of the earth than the middle-aged woman. I'm not belittling the challenges faced by those without health insurance, adequate income, or even a shortage of health professionals where they live.

But if we polled the people in physician waiting rooms across the country, the one question I would ask is: "Are your health concerns taken seriously?"

we thought it would be a safe spot

In one 1992 study, the reactions of women to menopause broke down like so:

• 25% of women experience no noticeable changes except the cessation of menstruation
• 50% of women experience some menopausal symptoms, varying from mild to moderate
• 25% of women have more severe symptoms

It seems to me that this is an extraordinary piece of information.

Aren't we told, over and over again, that this is a "natural" thing for our bodies to do and so we are just carrying on about nothing? Why, then, do three-fourths of the women dealing with this "natural" transition have symptoms that are, at best, annoying, and at worst, leaving them unable to lead a normal life?

When I began grappling with insomnia, mood swings, and exhaustion, both my primary physician and my OB/GYN (male) took the patronizing "heh heh, this is what happens when we get older" route. They said it would probably pass shortly. I should get more sleep, try to reduce stress, and make sure I "ate right."

So I tried. I took to the web to form a more detailed plan, based on a consensus I gleaned from big, mainstream kind of sites. Sure enough, these sources expanded on what my doctors had told me. Saved! I had been plucked from my stormy ocean, put on a boat, and delivered to Conventional Wisdom Island.

Here's what the natives on the island were told to do:

• cut back on meat and fat and substitute whole grains
• drink a lot of soy milk
• increase their exercise, especially cardio
• begin stress-reducing routines like meditation and yoga
• become vegetarian
• go to bed earlier

And I was ready to get back in the boat and paddle out to sea again.

I've been there -- vegetarianism had made me fat and sick. Soy milk is not healthy. Yes, it's a source of estrogens, but the wrong kind that can lead to estrogen dominance in the absence of progesterone. All the cardio in my past had aggravated an old hip injury, I couldn't do it any more.

I'd been in a meditation class for two years already, and I was quite good at it. I went to bed early, it was waking up at midnight and not getting back to sleep until five in the morning that was the problem.

Fear of effective treatment

For a year, I tried to wait it out. This was a transition and it was supposed to end.

I took herbs to help regulate my hormones. I tried over the counter, vegetable, forms of estrogen, but they tore up my stomach like a Roto-Tiller. I felt my coping skills, formerly hovering in the high 80's, had plunged into the single digits. I'm normally a cheerful and cooperative person, but now my frustration would boil over in an instant and I'd want to destroy things. With an axe. While screaming.

I started using apps and other electronic devices for both home and work because my memory would short out on me. The last straw came when I forgot some backups at work. I'd been an IT professional for decades and this was as natural as breathing. There was no harm done, but I felt horrible and panicked. I made an emergency appointment at my OB/GYN.

I'll never forget the way the woman PA kept rolling her chair back and back as I launched into my litany of misery. At one point I do believe flames shot from my eyes.

She declared me a "five alarm menopause emergency." And offered me Prozac.

I was starting to get that axey-screamy feeling again. In short, clipped, words, I said that she'd just explained I had an endocrine problem. I wanted an endocrine solution.

And then, because I had demanded it, because I shot flames from my eyes, I got a prescription for an expensive combination of hormones extracted from PREgnant MARe urINe.

It was the end... of the beginning.

So it all started when...

When I was a teen, struggling with what turned out to be a challenging adolescence, I figured that by the time I got to menopause, science would have figured it all out.

I was terribly, utterly, ludicrously wrong.

To explain my feelings, visually, in an artistic metaphor

I began menstruating in the 1970's and I got terrible cramps, and was told that would "go away when I had my first baby." There I was, mid-teens, not sure I even wanted children, and even if I did the solution to my problem was about ten responsible years away?

It was my first inkling that the world of adult authority is not based on The Scientific Method. In fact, many decades later, I've decided it more closely resembles a bunch of well-meaning, but inebriated, people with a dartboard.

Nonetheless, I managed, until some mid-life medical decisions plunged me into hell. And the world of medicine, which was instrumental in getting me into this state, turned out to be no help at all when it came to getting me out.

It took the World Wide Web. well-honed research skills, my innate tenacity, and a desperate willingness to try almost anything. The miserable part was quite the incentive all by itself. But there was also the fact that the timing was downright evil.

I was just getting a lot of obligations out of the way, I had some wonderful projects I wanted to work on, I had built up a base of skills and understanding. And I can barely get out of bed? I can barely get through the day? There are times when I have trouble thinking? And I can't sleep?

I became driven to not only regain my health, but to surpass my previous state. Now I have to live a long life because this half belongs to me.

I was able to put a lot of pieces together. I'm still in the process. There's a red barn, with most of its roof, and you can tell it's in a field. There's a crow, but it's hard to tell what it's sitting upon.

I know we're supposed to do the edges of the puzzle, first. But, sometimes, things don't work that way.