Darcey Steinke - Flash Count Diary: Menopause and the Vindication of Natural Life

2:11 a.m.: I wake, heart thwacking, as heat flows up from my stomach, courses behind my face, and radiates out through the top of my head. I watch a lamp with a pink shade drift out of my neighbors window and hover over my darkened backyard.

An hour later I wake again, this time within the aura before the flash. No matter my mood, each aura brings a surreal dj vu feeling, the thorn in the flesh that Saint Paul talked about: everything is stilled, everything is wrong. Its as if a shard of a different and darker reality has been thrust into my current one.

Auras are less universal than heat, though many in the diverse group of women I interviewed reported having them. About a minute before the flash comes I get the worst feeling, one woman told me. Another described the eerie quiet just before the feeling of thick unease: I get very calm, then a sensation comes that scares the heck out of me. Another experiences a free fall: I feel like Im going down in an elevator, my stomach drops, flash of nausea, a weird weak feeling, then the heat.

I throw off my covers and feel, in the first pocket of spooky quiet, that flames are burning from my inner organs up into my muscles toward the skin. Id run away, but how does one flee ones own body? Each hair is a thin electric coil heating up my head.

I know whats going to happen and I know that its going to be bizarre. I leap up and go into the kitchen, run myself a glass of cold water, gulp it down. I jerk a bag of corn out of the freezer and press it against my chest and stare out the window. The leaves in the yard blow one way and then the other. I go back to bed, but the heat coming off my husbands body is dangerous. I go into my daughters empty room and lie in her bed surrounded by posters for DIY bands and photos of her high school girlfriends. Her thick comforter triggers another flash. First comes the stillness, the sinister feeling one woman described. I feel outside continuous conventional reality, trapped inside the flesh-and-blood corporeality of my body. Saint Paul, who may have had epilepsy, called his auras an intimation of heaven. Not the clich fluffy-cloud angelic sphere but a feeling of the next life in all its raw, brutal grandeur. I yank up the window. Heat sweeps through me like a tiny weather front. I know my parcel of the earth is spinning closer to the sun and the air is heating up. Even a few degrees rise, when my windows are open, can trigger a flash.

Much like my sense of smell was magnified when I was pregnant, my body is now sensitive to the smallest calibrations of heat. When food is placed in front of me at a restaurant, most recently a plate of scrambled eggs, first my belly and then my face burn. Entering a room, I wont at first know its sealed, but as I talk to a student in my office or teach in my classroom, the sense of entrapment grows. Ill glance at the window, the door, panicking as one after another, body, room, building, is locked down tight. As the fire bowls along my nerves, I long to escape my body, to shoot up through my own skin, the ceiling, and bust into the atmosphere itself.

When I wake next, there is smoky light at the window and the heat in my limbs is already subsiding. I shift. My husband asks whats wrong. Its happening again, I say, jolting up, running the tap in the kitchen, drinking down the cold water. I go back to the couch, and though the windows are open, they face a brick wall. I feel trapped in the narrow room, squeezed.

My Flash Count Diary, a mottled black-and-white composition book, lies on the coffee table. Nine flashes today, not counting this current run. First, over coffee this morning, I felt my heart compress and then heat launch out horizontally into my arms and down into my hands. Later, while teaching, talking about how blankness as an interior state for a fictional character has to be created, just like anger or desire, I felt a sudden pang of misery followed by a smoldering sensation in my back. After class, out for a drink with a friend, listening to her talk about her husbands hallucinations, I felt heat radiate from my stomach up into my chest, neck, rolling up like steam behind my face. Once home, I flashed while washing dishes and changing the kitty litter. And finally, just before bed, I had the sensation that my nightgown was affixed to my body with hot glue.

Back in my bedroom, I am trying again to sleep. Its almost daylight as I make a pallet out of blankets on the floor next to our bed. I want to be near my husband. I lie, one leg out of the blanket, calf pressed against the cold wood. I must always be a little cooler than is comfortable in order not to flash.

I have found flashes to be desperate, uncomfortable, sometimes even sublime, but never funny. On TV and in film, if they are shown at all, hot flashes are comedic bits akin to a man slipping on a banana peel. As a child, I remember watching Edith Bunker on All in the Family redden, fan herself, get discombobulated, and dash into the kitchen as the laugh track roared. Menopause is often filtered through male bafflement and repugnance. In Mrs. Doubtfire, Robin Williams catches his fake breasts on fire and, using two pan lids, eventually puts out the flames. He stands disheveled, his chest smoking. My first day as a woman, he says, and I am already having hot flashes.

Kitty Forman on That 70s Show is menopausal, complaining about the heat and snapping at her family. Her husband, Red, refers to the horrible thing that has taken over your mother. When Red looks up menopause in the encyclopedia, he is repelled. Good god, I didnt think theyd have pictures.

Jokes about menopause abound.

Q: What is scarier? A puppy or a rational woman in menopause?

A: A puppy, because a rational woman in menopause does not exist.

Q: What is ten times worse than a woman in menopause?

A: Two women in menopause.

Q: Why do women stop bleeding in menopause?

A: They need the blood for their varicose veins.

Women, too, make fun of flashes. On Etsy you can buy buttons that read BEWARE OF TEMPERATURE TANTRUMS and OUT OF ESTROGEN: APPROACH AT YOUR OWN RISK.