As I bob along to the rhythm of the UHaul, riding shotgun with my bestie, the green plains of southern Idaho zoom past. She begs me, “Hush… let’s just be quiet for a bit. “ I look out the windshield and revel at what my life is becoming right now. The beauty that has come into my heart since perimenopause feels like freedom wrapped in chocolate.
My name is Shannon Joy Mekeel and I’m a 51-year-old mother of three grown sons. I am also a soon to be divorcé. Women divorcing later in life seems to be trending lately. This is the bright pink side of the male loneliness epidemic that I plan to address in this essay.
I am originally from Colorado but I have lived in Florida for 20 years. I have been every kind of journalist and marketer, hustling to make ends meet, going to my kid’s soccer matches, and most importantly being the good girlfriend to my long-term boyfriend and later husband. But the truth is, as I’ve been smiling all this time, I’ve also had to bite my tongue way too often. I’ve been just putting up with everything for so long.
But the sharknado of perimenopause that has just swept its way through my life has cleaned away a lot of the bullshit that I have been dealing with. Here’s the thing, ladies: life is just too damn short to be miserable or even just okay. Life should be lived and fully celebrated and if you aren’t doing that when “the change” comes, watch out. Things are about to get transformative.
The recent death of someone dear to me at this time has made me painfully aware that in this life, there are no do-overs. This is life-school and if you don’t maximize your chances at enlightenment and authentic humanity at every turn, then you are not going to graduate. I’m shouting into the void,
“Here I am showing up. See me doing this hard stuff? I want to graduate this time. Life is just too hard to do this all over again.”
Now that I no longer menstruate, it’s convenient, sure. But that’s not the most important part. I’ve also morphed. I feel as if I am something altogether new. I’ve been a mermaid for a long time. Over the past 20 years I have felt like a mythical scaled femme fatale out in Florida. I describe myself and my friends as mermaids and as a writer I have defined a mermaid as a woman who has spent enough time on the shore to know the view, but knows in her heart that the magic—the real, transformative stuff—lives in the deep. She is someone who has been waiting for the tide to turn, not to wash her away, but to carry her into her own power."
I have clung to this identity of a sexy hybrid fish through three sons, two husbands, four books and two tattoos, but now that I’m headed back to the mountains, perhaps a new spirit guide persona is needed. I’m leaning into a caterpillar who becomes a butterfly but I’ll let you know if that’s true when I get to the mountains. A butterfly has the dutiful role of pollinating flowers during the day but retreats each the evening. It’s easy to love a butterfly. They are striking and colorful and fragile, and predictable. But, consider for a moment that there is another creature that has to do just as much work to fulfill its destiny and it gets far fewer accolades of transformation. She asks for far less in recognition. I could just as easily become this creature who rules the night. I’ll let you know once I get there.
More of me
Or I will die.
Time is short,
Hurry.
In many ways I feel reborn since becoming a fully articulated moth because I have eliminated so much of the stress that being “The Prostate Wife” has meant over the past three years. I have been cocooned for a long time, toiling with what would come next for me. A new job, house, a new book, all these things leading me closer to the end of this process. And now I’m ready to spread my wings and embrace the night.
At this point, I want don’t have a choice in the matter. Not really. This is earth school after-all and my assignment is to maximize all the goodness in me and embrace my future with unabashed bravery and all tenacity of a powerful winged creature. “Jump and you will learn how to fly as your wings unfold.” Ray Bradbury.
How does one do THAT? Welp, for me living as a fully articulated woman means going back home to the mountains where the earth smells like soil and pine trees. The mountains were my first tall dark and handsome and ohhhhh how I have missed them. Flutter, flutter. Home.
That’s the eventual goal but this cocoon stage is so very demanding of me right now. Colorado is the goal but first I have to say “no” more than I ever have before to conserve my precious, vital, feminine life force. It is very clear to me that if I’m going to curate this new life efficiently and successfully, I have to sluff off the title of wife and be free to flap. I have to let go of all the emotional baggage that this role requires and seek the light.
Filing for a divorce means that I don’t have to transfer my energy into him any longer. It’s mine now. No to him. He who will not listen to healthy advice, and he who constantly distracts from the beauty of the world, and fun, and deep philosophical conversations. The man who road rages incessantly. He who is not healthy in mind, body, and spirit. Moths have no time for fluff and futility and are drawn to the light as a marriage of understanding. Nature heals and I will not linger share my treasure.
I’ll fly away soon out of this cocoon and fight my way out strategically. I’ll bring all my restraint, health, confidence, and peace back home. Then finally, I must be brave enough to sit in the silence of soulful, quiet, dark spaces, of aloneness.
I’ve been a Mother for 28 years. As Moth me, I am called to honor my own being, because in all the cells of my being, I have a sudden awareness of my profound ancestral responsibility to help all people and the planet heal. That’s Crone all the way, baby!
I have a grave responsibility to be the best version of myself. Here’s why: at this point in the space and time in the continuum, my entire ancestry is looking down from the realm directing me and cheering me on. That’s profound shit. They have expectations which I must fulfill. I hear them but also feel them from my marrow nudging me forward. Via the good stuff, their DNA, which is affected by lived experience, I remember and now strive to honor their individual and collective fear and passion. Just two generations I can recall but all those before them too; Laveta, and Cora, Russ and Paul, these grandparents were all legends. Each of them, in their own ways professed that I was a very special little girl. They said I was set apart and destined for greatness. I could be anything, and they all knew it. I am them now, boiled down, refined, combined, and ready to activate to change the big, bad, hard, patriarchal world.
When I asked my 59 year old dear friend who’s driving across the country with me, right now, about all of these BIG FEELINGS, she paused. You see, she is currently in the midst of her own separation after being together for 23 years with her love, and at this very moment we are moving a lifetime of her precious possessions halfway across the country.
Anyway, back to the point of this thing. “I’m different now. What has happened to me?” I described the feelings I was having loosely, above, much less eloquently spoken than I have since written them now that I’ve chewed on them in the delicious way we writers do. I begged my Crone Idol for some wisdom, if even just a glimmer. Sitting in the UHaul, bumping down the interstate, with my mouth agape, “Is this awakening what it means to be a CRONE?”
AUTHORS NOTE: You don’t know my road warrior pal LauraLynn, not yet, but you will…. She’s a 40 year cancer survivor and has stared death in the eyes at least six times. She’s a healer of souls now. Yes, I can testify with great confidence that my best friend, mentor, and life-coach, Dr LauraLynn Jansen has invested the time, money, blood, sweat, and tears required to fully embrace, research, and understand what it means to be human.
After my quandary about the meaning of life for all of womankind, she replied to me, “I’ve felt like that since I was 21. “ Little known fact: LauraLynn was forced into reckoning her own mortality and early menopause due to the toxic (yet life-saving) soup of chemo and radiation she endured in 1986.
She answered with a nod of mutual deep understanding. “Since I was 21, I have been asking myself how can I live each moment in the most conscious way possible.”
Woooooowwwwww!!!!
Thank you, LauraLynn for guiding me into Cronedom so fucking gracefully. I’m grateful for ALL of it.
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