Following this prize-winning essay, Sheila discusses the author’s way of putting description, metaphor making, example, comparison and contrast and cause and effect to good use in developing a humorous essay that clearly defines the experience of menopause and the mental and emotional states it encompasses.

Heat
by Riley Ellen Martin

The open window brings the night air in our bedroom in winter to around forty breezy degrees, and an oscillating fan keeps it moving. Propped on one elbow I look over at my husband. Buried but for the top of his head, his hands crossed peacefully on his chest, he has begun to snore lightly. I’m still experimenting. One leg out of the covers and maybe one arm. No, too chilly, all parts back under. Too warm. One foot goes out, and one hand. This is good. As I begin to drift off, the first of the night’s heat waves crashes over me. Damn! I throw back the comforter exposing by entire body to the frosty air, dozing as the heat passes. My body temperature returns to normal, then plummets into the shivering phase. Teeth chattering I cover up to my icy ears and wiggle over to my husband’s back to share his warmth. I’m sleeping when the second wave hits. Breaking contact with the envied snore-man beside me, I throw one leg out and land it atop the comforter, which is freezing, moving the leg to a colder spot every few seconds, and turn the pillow to the cold side. Reaching for my glass of ice water, and dipping my fingers, I sprits my face. This time I lie awake until my temperature normalizes, slowly slip the limbs back under the covers, and pray for mercy.

Since giving birth the first time, I’ve noticed a definite correlation between labor and life. Most things, and these are words I live by, are like a contraction. It builds to a peak, and just when I’m sure I can’t stand it another second, it begins to subside. My theory holds true for hot flashes. The trick is to breathe in between.

My daytime world has divided itself into two categories: things that are, and things that are not good fans. Last Christmas my daughter gave me a small table-top, battery powered fan, and two purse-size models. The way my similarly afflicted sisters dove on them at the warm, crowded Christmas Eve family gathering, I thought I’d have to stop for new batteries on the way home. The purse-size is too noisy for out in public, and that’s why God invented greeting cards and those annoying advertisements that fall out of magazines. The Spanish folding fan in my office and the Japanese rice paper one by my seat on the sofa were also gifts. Menus can be good fans, but they might not arrive at the table in time. Napkins, cloth or paper, are not good fans. Sometimes, I push up my sleeves and rest my bare forearms casually on the cool table, but this only works if there’s no tablecloth. In a pinch, I wrap my hands around a glass of ice water and/or touch the glass elegantly to my forehead, fighting the urge to pour it over my head. Fanning with just hands is not only ineffective, it makes me look and feel hysterical.

My hot flashes begin with a subtle tingle, and if I’m not too distracted to notice it, I can sometimes keep the heat down. Once at the dentist, the assistant and I were chatting while she pinned the paper bib around my neck. “Could you hand me that magazine, Cindy?” I asked calmly, pointing to a nearby stack. “Ok, just a second. Which one?” Melting, I answered, “ANY one, and hurry, I don’t want to READ it!” “Oh, I get it!” she said when I started fanning, and she reached for the little air blower she uses to dry clients’ teeth and aimed it at the back of my neck. Ahhhh. There are lots of magazines at the hair salon, too, and a cool setting on the hair dryer.

 I’ve heard many sadder stories than menopause. But in the beginning, I was profoundly sad and angry that this was happening without my consent. Like a broken compass, this symbol and reminder of my womanhood, as I’d known it so far, was failing me. But, after a good cry, it’s not a bad trade. No cramps, no tampons, no birth control, no pregnancy scares. Someone compared menopause to adolescence, which makes sense to a point. Changing hormone levels cause the ruckus in each case, but having experienced both, I know there’s a critical difference. Adolescents are either unaware of where they’re headed, or they are aware and overjoyed at the prospect. They believe absolutely in their immortality. I sometimes miss the immortality.

Menopause is one of those times, like pregnancy and labor, when some sense of control is important, and illusive. Nearly every day at 6pm, like Pavlov’s dog, I think of Chardonnay. I don’t think the dog drank, but he sure knew when it was time for a treat. Ah, this sweet division between the workday and the evening! Within five minutes, wine will bring on a hot flash, and it’s darn well worth it. At least this I can predict and perhaps start cooling off early. Cocktail hour I can control!

We Boomers do have a lot of intelligent, articulate, and vocal company on this menopause ship, so it’s not a lonely voyage. I worry a little about the backlash, though. We’re familiar with all the usual reasons our voices get muffled in the world—she’s young, she’s old, she’s blonde, she’s a bitch, she has PMS, etc. Women! Women drivers! But, we’ve had to figure out how to explain, or at least survive all of those, plus intuition and tears, so I guess we can handle hot flashes, too.

I think it’s about inner forces affecting outward changes affecting inner ones. Some of these processes are accomplished with whispers and nudges. Like how small the print is getting, the noise my knees make coming downstairs in the morning, and that Sunday nap that isn’t just a luxury anymore. Like those “What the hell did I come in here for?” moments. Like realizing how vulnerable my parents have become, and what that means to me.

But a hot flash is a club over the head. I get it. I’m not a young woman. Even if I lose weight, I’ll still look silly in a belly shirt. No one cares if I’m good breeding stock anymore. I need to not mind so much the effort it takes to stem the southward migration of body parts. I’m supposed to figure out what I’m made of—sugar and spice, and what? What I was going for, and whether or not I got it. And find the grace to take what I started with, what I’ve earned, and what I’ve learned, and to parlay that into a rest-of-my-life that means something. Heat softens, mellows, makes malleable. I’m like a cake batter that, heated, takes a sweet solid form. I’m like a beautiful piece of raw metal put to the fire and bent to a graceful arch. I’m like a fine, scented candle that melts to an amorphous wax blob, and …never mind.

Ok. I’m working on it. This contraction may be peaking.

I’m lying awake buried to my ears in the comforter, gathering courage to abandon the bed. This is the ONLY good time for a hot flash!

****

A Good Definition Essay is Made of Many Rhetorical Styles
by Sheila Bender

From Riley Ellen Martin’s opening description of the essay’s speaker in bed with her sleep disrupted by the alternating hot and cold temperatures of her body to the essay’s ending with the speaker’s search for a metaphor to keep things positive, I smile at the goodhearted humor with which the essay confronts menopause. The author’s images lead her to the insight that she will have to keep working at being able to reframe aging. At the essay’s end, I picture the speaker waiting for the next hot flash to propel her out of bed and to her desk where she might continue working on her philosophy of midlife.

Maybe, she seems to say, the physical conditions of menopause will provide metaphors for what she needs to understand and accept at this stage in her life.

“Heat” is a definition essay that succeeds by incorporating several patterns of thinking to inform readers. It is instructive to look inside the essay for how Riley uses the particular patterns of thinking in creating an entertaining, extended definition:

Evocation makes the speaker’s feelings tangible on the page: All five senses are employed. Cold air is coming into the room and being circulated by a fan. Arms and hands and legs and feet are being adjusted inside and outside the covers for temperature correctness. The body is when hot exposed to frosty air. Then a cold body is warming against a mate’s back. Then the speaker is using her body to locate cooler spots on the linen. Props are employed as well to let us know how the body is taking heat and cold in through the senses–comforter, sheets, pillow, ice water.

Metaphor helps the speaker understand how she deals with her experience: After an evocative description of living with hot flashes at night, the speaker offers us a comparison to dealing with the contractions of labor–things will peak and be over. The speaker realizes she has experience dealing with modulations and can draw on it.

Division and classification allows the speaker to amuse us with her obsession: We learn about how the speaker deals with things during the day–by converting objects everywhere to fans. We have lists of objects meant to be fans (battery operated table top and purse sized fans, Spanish and rice paper fans), objects converted to fans that fail for various reasons (menus and napkins), behaviors that utilize non-fans for successful and unsuccessful cooling effects (cold tabletops and glasses of water, and objects not-meant-to-be-a-fan-that-turn-into-good-fans (newspapers, magazines, hair dryers set on cool).

Comparison and contrast helps the speaker place this experience in life’s continuum: Menopause and adolescence may both include changing hormone levels, but the outlook they indicate to women is quite different–a growing sense of power versus one of decline–an expansive feeling that one is immortal versus the understanding that one is not.

Distinguishing attributes of the way the speaker copes and thinks allows us to understand her situation: Thoughts of Chardonnay intensify even as drinking it will certainly cause a hot flash–but how delicious to have a hot flash that comes predictably from something you are doing rather than randomly and without warning. Menopausal thinking is survival thinking and compensating is part of survivor success. Another attribute of the speaker’s way of thinking is concern that women in menopause have reason to worry about the male world finding one more reason to “muffle” female voices. Moreover, she points out, attributes of menopausal women are part of a larger bag of changes: eyesight decline, joint problems, need for naps, memory problems and worries about aged parents.

Cause and effect helps the speaker move forward into considering her next life stage: In addition to restless, sleepless nights and funny public behavior, menopause can lead to a woman realizing that it is time to use her previous life experience to create something meaningful with the rest of her life, something that may be more beautiful, more shapely than that earlier experience.

Coming full circle to the opening of her essay, Riley ends with her speaker awake under the comforter, but with more on her mind now than keeping warm or waiting for the next hot flash. The understood presence of the sleeping husband, not awakened as the speaker works on gathering the courage to leave bed, emphasizes that menopause is a private journey that every woman, although often with the support of others, makes on her own.

I congratulate Riley on a fine job of using multiple patterns of thinking to allow her readers to garner a fuller understanding of the impact of menopause on a woman’s life.