Rethink Menopause with Omisade Burney-Scott of the Black Girl’s Guide to Surviving Menopause
Show Snapshot:
Rethink menopause with Omisade Burney-Scott, the creator of the Black Girl’s Guide to Surviving Menopause, a multimedia project seeking to curate and share the stories and realities of Black women and nonbinary people navigating menopause.
We explore aging, intimacy, body change, pleasure, love, spirituality, and the liminality of menopause. And we cover the ongoing fight for bodily autonomy, the importance of listening beyond our echo chambers, how to ground ourselves during the swirl of change, and why transformation is not linear.
In This Episode We Cover:
1. How getting fired became the creative catalyst that sparked The Black Girl’s Guide to Surviving Menopause.
2. Centering the stories of Black women and gender-expansive people experiencing menopause is key to amplifying all voices and all stories.
3. Why menopause is a mental, emotional, cultural, and spiritual experience.
4. How intersectional identities in race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, sexual expression, social-economic status, regionalism, and the stress of white supremacy, misogyny, and the patriarchy impact the experience of menopause.
5. The liminality of menopause.
6. How to ground yourself in the swirl of change.
7. The ongoing fight for bodily autonomy.
8. Reclaiming our menstruation stories and unlearning the messages that something is “wrong” with our bodies.
9. The intergenerational journey of menopause.
10. Add to Cart. How the “Say More” Menopause Conversation Cards—Omi’s collab with menopause essentials company Kindra—can enrich your menopause experience.
Quotable:
So many things that have happened in my 55 years of life that really inform how I not only see myself, but how I really want to see or bear witness to other people and the fullness of who they are, with no illusions of perfection, but absolutely invested in the very potent, beautiful, powerful way that we can all show up.
We’ve been very intentional about the fact that our work to normalize menopause, midlife, and aging through culture and narrative shift work, is through centering the stories of Black women but also Black women-identified and gender-expansive people. I did not want to be complicit in the further marginalization of people who are experiencing menopause and midlife because they don’t identify the same way that I do.
More Resources:
Follow Omisade:
Omisade’s podcast:
Black Girl’s Guide to Surviving Menopause
Omisade and Kindra Say More Menopause Conversation Cards
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More Links:
Transcript:
Katie Fogarty [0:30]:
Welcome to A Certain Age, a show for women who are unafraid to age out loud. Menopause is having a moment; businesses and brands are rushing to create products to serve the need of this market; celebrities including Naomi Watts, Gwyneth Paltrow, Stacy London are investing in or leading menopause companies. What it means to be a woman in menopause is shifting, becoming more nuanced, becoming more expansive.
My guest today is a woman who is at the front of this narrative shift, making menopause more like the women who go through it; sexy, smart, soulful, stylish, socially aware. Omisade Burney-Scott is the creator of the Black Girl’s Guide to Surviving Menopause, a multimedia project seeking to curate and share the stories and realities of Black women and femmes over 50. A southern, seventh generation, native North Carolinian feminist, mother, and healer with decades of experience in nonprofit leadership, philanthropy, and social justice, she joins me today to talk about aging, intimacy, body change, pleasure, love, spirituality, and of course, menopause. Welcome, Omi.
Omisade Burney-Scott [1:38]:
Thank you so much for having me, I’m glad to be here.
Katie [1:41]:
I’m super excited, I’ve been following you and your show for ages on social media. I know that you are a partner with Kindra which is a sponsor of this show, they have wonderful menopause products. You have collaborated on something called Say More menopause cards and when I saw that cross my social media screen I said, I have to reach out, this is finally the moment I want to connect. We’re definitely going to dive into Say More, but I would love to actually start by asking you when and why you launched Black Girl’s Guide to Surviving Menopause?
Omi [2:16]:
Sure, this is a great question. I actually took a sabbatical from social justice work in 2019. I started working in nonprofit area, social justice, back in 1995 and that’s looked like both doing advocacy work around racial justice, gender justice, economic justice and then I was a program officer for a small family foundation at one point, and then my practice has shifted to consultancy work. I found myself really burned out at the end of 2018. Our parents had been ancestors for quite some time, but we lost our first sibling in 2018 which really had a deep impact on myself and my other siblings. There was this really intense natural catastrophe in our state of North Carolina, there was a hurricane named Florence and it came and the eye of the storm sat on my hometown in eastern North Carolina and created what was called a 500-year flood, which displaced my eldest sister, she was unhoused by that event. And then I was released from my job, which is a nice way of saying I was fired.
Katie [3:41]:
[laughs] Euphemism alert, right.
Omi [3:45]:
Right, right, right. But honestly, I am grateful for all of those precipitating events because what I felt like the universe was really trying to say to me was, “Omi, slow down. Take a moment, take care of your heart, take care of your body, be with the folk who you love, be with your boys, be with your siblings, be with your friends. Just sit down for a second, just take care of yourself.” So, I launched into a creative sabbatical and the behest and encouragement of a close circle of friends and my eldest son, Che. And while I was doing this creative sabbatical– I love storytelling, I’m a storyteller, I’m a creative... I wanted to have conversations with Black women my age and Black women who were older, just to touch base on life. I’m very blessed to live in this amazing creative community of Durham, North Carolina and I reached out to a couple of people who now partner with me and work with me on the Black Girl’s Guide around this idea. And it came up, “Well, maybe you should document these conversations. These feel like they’re going to be rich, rich, rich conversations that could probably be beneficial to other people.” I said, that’s a great idea.
So, my current podcast producer, Mariah said, we should do a podcast and we should call it the Black Girl’s Guide to Surviving Menopause and I thought that was funny. [Katie laughs] I said, “Oh that’s a hoot.” And then I said, “Actually, that’s exactly what it is.” And we went from there, we are in Season 4 of the podcast and quite honestly Katie, I was really coming to the conversation and this creative place from my own identity, myself as a Black, cis-hetero, Southern woman and I realized that that was still very limiting in terms of the voices and the narratives and the stories that I really wanted to be able to share. So, we’ve been very intentional about the fact that our work to normalize menopause, midlife, and aging through culture and narrative shift work, is through centering the stories of Black women, of course, but also Black women-identified and gender-expansive people. I did not want to be complicit in the further marginalization of people who are experiencing menopause and midlife because they don’t identify the same way that I do.
Katie [6:18]:
Absolutely. I think you’ve done such a good job of that.
Omi [6:21]:
Thank you.
Katie [6:22]:
When I look at the list of guests that you’ve had and the topics that you’ve focused on, you’ve realized that vision. And this leads me to– I have a two-part question for you, and I want to... You’ve had a number of conversations, you’re in Season 4 of this incredible offering, what surfaced in your conversations about the experience of Black women or nonbinary individuals that makes their menopause situation unique and distinct? And then the second part to my question is, what have you seen that is universal?
Omi [6:56]:
I think that everybody’s menopause experience is unique, whether you are white, Black, Latinx, Indigenous, Chinese, whether you’re 25, 45, or 50. We all have very, very unique experiences. I think that sometimes when we’re talking about women’s health or health equity, we really want to lump everybody in the same basket right, because what we’re trying to do is make sure that both have access to quality care and if they’re not having access to quality care that we’re trying to figure out how to make that happen, and we’re also trying to advocate for folk to be protected around their bodily autonomy.
But truth be told, none of us are the same. Physiologically, we might have uteruses, fallopian tubes, and ovaries, but that’s kind of the limitation of our sameness across the board. So, when you’re thinking about how a person shows up in their intersectional identity around race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, sexual expression, social-economic status, regionalisms... When we don’t pay attention to that, it’s kind of... I don’t want to use the word “lazy” because that’s not the word that I want to be amplified in this conversation, there’s a lack of curiosity that’s on a spectrum, a lack of curiosity because people don’t have opportunities or haven’t had opportunities to be in a thoughtful place, or to be in any kind of authentic relationship with folk who are not similar to them. And then sometimes there’s kind of a woeful, willful ignorance where it’s like, “Oh we’re all the same.” It’s like, actually, you could not possibly think that. And there’s all of nuance in between those two points of entry into how are we all not the same? How are we all the same?
And I think that the experiences for Black women, and I am not the embodiment of all Black women, I can speak for my experience and what I am very clear is that Black women are not a monolith, but certainly we do have some shared experiences in this country as it relates to race, as it relates to gender, as it relates to being hypersexualized, as it relates to our personhood often being invisiblized. And so, what I wanted to be able to do is to do what I figure, very much through a social justice lens, is a reclamation of a space and a voice and a narrative from an equitable standpoint, right. So, if I center these voices, all voices will be amplified. If I center these stories, all stories will be amplified. And that’s the equity lens rather than the equality lens.
So, what I’ve been hearing from Black women, women-identified, and gender-expansive people is like, menopause is more than gender, menopause is more than age. It is also more than a physiological experience, it is a mental experience, emotional experience, cultural experience, and some would say a spiritual experience. I definitely feel it’s a spiritual experience. So, when people ask–
Katie [10:06]:
And tell– I’m sorry, go ahead. Keep going about that, I wanted to ask you next about the spiritual experience component of that.
Omi [10:14]:
Sure. So, when people ask me, how is your experience different from a white woman, or how your experience might be different from a white friend I was like, well we have different experiences in this country. And so, while we may have shared experiences because I identify as a cis-hetero person, and they may identify as a cis-hetero person, our lived experiences are going to be different because systemic oppression, white supremacy, patriarchy, and misogyny, impact us differently. So, that’s why physiologically, I might have different experiences, because of the stress that I might experience because of the systemic oppression that a white woman might not experience or because of the stress that I don’t know... Last night I interviewed a transmasculine non-binary person who experienced menopause in their late twenties because they were engaged in gender-affirming surgeries to be more of who they are, and their care team kind of forgot to mention that they would go through menopause as a result of these surgeries. And they’re about to turn 31 and I’m 55. So, there are ways in which our experiences are the same and there are ways that they are very divergent.
The spiritual aspect for me is that I think about our entire life’s journey as being a series of transformations, a series of rites of passages, series of experiences that give you more information about who you are this lifetime, how you’re showing up, the nature of your relationships, the kind of integrity and character you want to walk within the world. And as you go through these different iterations of yourself, you’re given more opportunities to be more authentically yourself which I think is, for me, a part of my spiritual practice and understanding. And I think of menopause as being one of those rites of passages that I have experienced this lifetime.
Also, I think about menopause as being a liminality. When we talk about liminal spaces, we also talk about liminality as it relates to death and dying, but I think liminality is much bigger than that. And I think we often experience liminal experiences that we don’t even know, because you’re kind of in the midst of it and you’re being transformed from one way of showing up, either in the world, in your relationships, in your own body, to a new way, and it could be really disconcerting, it could be challenging, it could be confusing. And I think that so much of what we’re seeing happening in this menopause landscape is people rallying to make sure that folk have support while they’re navigating this liminal experience.
Katie [13:07]:
Absolutely. You did a whole podcast on this, where you say that transformation is not linear, it happens in cycles, it’s literally a swirl of change. I love that you identify that sometimes you don’t even recognize that change is happening because it’s swirling all around you.
We are going to be heading into a commercial break but when we come back, I want to explore some grounding ideas that have either worked for you or that you’ve surfaced through your conversations that you can offer to listeners who might be in this swirl of change. We’ll be back after this quick break.
[Ad break]
Katie [14:38]:
Okay, Omi when we headed into the break, we talked about the notion that transformation is not linear, that it happens in cycles. Sometimes, you use words like unsettling and overwhelming, or maybe that’s my word because I felt overwhelmed. How do we navigate through phases of change in a way that is grounding? What has worked for you? You shared that you had to be told by the people closest to you, “Sit down and take care of yourself,” during a moment when you were in ultimate transition. What worked for you during that time and what have you surfaced through your conversations on the podcast that you can offer to listeners?
Omi [15:16]:
I think that what has... I love this question, by the way. I think that what has worked for me is being in really tight, beautiful community with a group of very close friends who are always holding space for each other. As we gather new experiences, we process those experiences with each other, and we hold onto them. So, I think that my group of friends are wildly and deeply introspective people so when we find a friend who might be entering into a transformative experience that one of us has already navigated. For example, I think about how I was one of the first people in our friendship group to lose a parent when my mom passed away 24 years ago, I was 31. And so, what has happened as a result of that is that when I have had other friends know that their parents, their mother or their father or both, are at the end of their life, they will reach out and say, “Omi, I know that you had to navigate this, I don’t know what to do. I need help.” And that’s how I ended up in this kind of odd, death doula role as well in my community, not only of close friends but has expanded out to people I actually don’t know and don’t have relationships with who are just trying to figure out how to navigate this natural process in the same way that folk are trying to navigate when they access a birth doula.
Katie [16:53]:
That’s such an amazing offering to have because you’re not only bringing the experience of having done it, you’re bringing 24 years of perspective. So, it’s not just, “Oh hey, I’ve gone through this too.” But “I’ve gone through this too, I’ve seen what works,” and you have this I don’t know, this wealth of knowledge that only perspective can give us, that you can offer to people who are struggling through it.
Which is why I love that you also shared that your conversations around menopause were meant to focus on not just women like ourselves who are maybe right in the process, but to connect with women who are older, who have gone through it because they have what we are not going to have yet, which is just this distance from the experience, where you can talk about it in a different way. Have you been surprised by anything that you’ve had in conversation with somebody who is maybe significantly older than you in chronological years?
Omi [17:48]:
Yeah, I think the first person that I interviewed for the podcast in Season 1, a person who was a dear family friend named Delores Eaton. When I interviewed her, she was 89 and she passed away last year at 91, so she was the same exact age as my mother, and she was my eldest son’s teacher. She was retired and when we decided we were going to go into the season, I asked her if she would do me the honor of being the first person we talked to.
Interestingly enough, what I found ironic was that no one had a conversation with her about menopause. And that’s actually a pretty persistent reflection, both with folk who are my peers and with folk who are older is, “No actually, nobody talked to me about menopause.” There’s a conversation in varying degrees about menstruation, about the onset of your cycle, about menarche, but not about menopause. And so, when I talked to – and we call her lovingly, Mama Dee – when I talked to Mama Dee about her experience with menopause, she was able to reflect very honestly and candidly about her personal experience with menopause, and she was also able to be reflective of, “My mother never talked to me about this stuff. My aunts didn’t talk to me about this.” What she learned about menopause was by going through it and being introspective or reflective of what her experience was after she had been done with that.
I think part of my way of making sense of my own lived experience is that I get very curious; I’m a tinkerer, a lay-anthropologist, and lay-historian. I always want to know more context around what I’m experiencing, and I think that absolutely has to do with my training and work around social justice. I always know that there’s more context and subtext around what I’ve experienced.
So, it was really interesting to me when she said, “No, my mother never talked to me about that.” And what she said to her about her period was like, “You’re a young woman now Delores, you can get pregnant.” So, they were really focused on making sure that she did not have an unwanted pregnancy because they wanted to make sure that she went to college and was able to do all the things she wanted to do in life, as a woman who was born during the Great Depression, became a teenager during World War II and was being raised and going to college in the Jim Crow South, in Alabama. So, all of that is context for why they didn’t talk to her about her body, you know.
Katie [20:37]:
You know, it’s so interesting what you said too, they were focused on making sure that this feminine milestone that she went through wasn’t going to derail or change what was possible for her in her life. They wanted to make sure she wasn’t having a baby too young, which I can understand as a mother of a 22-year-old girl, or young woman, rather. But it’s interesting because when you think about the fact that menopause can happen as early as 35 and typically happens around 51, 52 when we still have decades in front of us and we still have so much that’s possible, yet we don’t even recognize that we need to be having these conversations, necessarily, so that we can continue to thrive in this way.
I had lunch with a friend recently who was sharing that she has a 15-year-old daughter and she’s 45 and she realized that her daughter was going to be going through 30 years of having her period and she was going to be going through 30 years of not having it. They almost had the equal expanse of time in front of them, yet we choose to focus on this middle part, and not this ending part. Why do you think that is?
Omi [21:48]:
I think that when you live in a culture that has a... very dynamic relationship with women’s bodies. [both laugh] I’m trying to be–
Katie [22:02]:
Talk about euphemism alert! Let’s just call it what it is, I mean, people want to tell us what to do and it’s not okay.
Omi [22:08]:
All the time.
Katie [22:10]:
Not okay, not okay.
Omi [22:12]:
You know, there’s so many ways in which we experience patriarchy, both internalized and explicitly externalized and so, we fight it all the time. We’re fighting it from the moment that you take your first breath to the moment that you take your last breath, to be able to move in the world with uninterrupted bodily autonomy and agency. So, part of the way that bodily autonomy is disrupted is by silence. If you are not able to talk about your body, if you are not affirmed about your identity, if you are told that there’s something wrong with your body, if you are told that the way that you show up is less than human, you’ve got to unpack and unlearn all those things. So, I feel like we’re in this constant flux of learning and unlearning, reclaiming, disrupting in all the ways.
I’ve been reimagining my menopause origin story to really think about the breadth of my experience with menstruation. I started my period 43 years ago, so my origin story started October 31, 1979, in Mr. Barnes’ math class, that’s when I began my menopause journey. Because menopause is the ending, it’s not a spontaneous event that is detached from your full menstruation journey, it’s a part of your menstruation journey. So, if you think about your origin story, then you actually kind of kick it back. People say, "When did you start thinking about menopause?” When I heard the full breadth of what menopause was that included perimenopause, menopause, and post-menopause, I was already somebody’s mother, I had already been married, I was pregnant with my last baby. So, I wish that the conversation that I felt like was so robust for me in the 1970s around my period and sex education and contraception – because we were living in Maryland at the time and they had a really decent sex education program at our public school, which no longer exists in so many school systems – that they had also included menopause.
If you begin something, you can also safely assume that there’s going to be an ending at some point. The same way that we begin our lives, we know that we will end our lives. So, the same way we begin menstruation, we will end menstruation. And that’s why so much of the work that we do at Black Girl’s Guide is intergenerational. We are not spontaneously all becoming menopausal people, you’ve been on a journey you didn’t even know you were on.
Katie [24:52]:
I love that. Omi, by the way, my experience with having my period started in math class as well so we have that in common. [Omi laughs] I was in math class, it was like during the spring, I was in a Catholic school, we had to wear these pale, yellow skirts and Marion Bell tapped me out in the hallway after math class and said, “Come into the bathroom.” And I was like, “Why?” And I got in there and I had bled through the back of my skirt and didn’t know. And she was so kind, I will never forget this. She said, “Go into that bathroom stall, take your skirt off and hand it to me.”
Omi [25:25]:
And she washed your skirt for you?
Katie [25:27]:
She washed it in the sink for me and then she said, “Put it on, turn it around and wear it...”
Omi [25:32]
Flip it, yes!
Katie [25:32]:
...flip it, and then go to the school nurse and get a tampon.” And I was like, what’s happening? I mean, it was so... Anyhow, so she was so kind and so supportive.
Omi [25:42]:
How sweet! Oh shout...what’s her name again?
Katie [25:44]:
Marion Bell, Marion Bell.
Omi [25:45]:
Marion Bell, I hope you’re listening to this episode.
Katie [25:48]:
I’m going to make her listen to it because we’re still in touch.
Omi [25:49]:
You should! And my person was Sandy Jones, my best friend who is still one of my best friends. I wrote her a note and I said, “Something is happening.” [Katie laughs] And she wrote me a note back and said, “Happening where?” And I said, “In my panties.” And she was like, “What?” And I said, “I think my period started,” and she was like, “Whaaat?!”
Katie [26:09]:
First of all, I love that you wrote her a note. Today you’d be texting her...
Omi [26:12]:
Right, right, right, right, right. [Katie laughs] This is definitely pre-cell phone days. She literally got up and went up to the front of the class and whispered in Mr. Barnes’ ear, "I think her period has started, we need to go to the nurse.” And he looked at us, he was horrified, [Katie laughs] I think for vast and sundry reasons, but also, we really got on his nerves because we talked all the time and he was like, "Okay fine, get out.” And then we went to the nurse, and she announced to the nurse that I had started my period and she asked Sandy, “Did you start your period as well?” She said, no. Then she said, “Then you can go outside and sit in the hall.”
And the school nurse was also very kind to me, she said, “How do you feel?” I said, “I’m a little crampy and I have a little bit of a headache.” She said, “Okay do you want to call your mom?” And I said I would love to call my mom. My mom was a registered nurse and I called her, and I said, “Mommy, I think my period just started and she started crying.”
Katie [27:11]:
Aww.
Omi [27:12]:
[both laugh] It was so sweet, she was like, I can't wait until you get home! And I was like, oh my god, this is so overwhelming. And when I got home, she just loved up on me and she called my aunties and my aunties sent me a period package. It was from Macy’s, no May’s in New York, my aunt lived in Brooklyn, and she sent me this package and it had seven-day-a-week panties with the days of the week on them.
Katie [27:39]:
Oh my god, yes!
Omi [27:40]:
You remember those?
Katie [27:41]:
Yes! [ laughs]
Omi [27:43]:
And also, a bunch of sanitary napkins, both with the zip and the belt, lightweight girdle, a full girdle, three slips and a very sweet note. It was my Aunt Emma and my Aunt Anna, which were my dad’s sisters, and they were like, you are a young lady now and we love you and we’re proud of you and I was just like, “Oh my god.” It was overwhelmingly sweet. And I have 16 first cousins who are women and they did that for all of the girls in our family.
Katie [28:15]:
I love this story. Now I’m wracking my brain... Most of my nieces... actually, a couple are coming up so I’m putting the seven-day underwear idea in the back of my head to whip out. Because that underwear... I love that. Such a fun memory.
This is such a great segue, I want to talk about Say More because Say More is about having these conversations and celebrations. It’s the project that you’re doing with Kindra, the Say More menopause cards and I spent some time on the website reading about it and you call it an invitation, which I adore. What are you inviting us to? And what do women experience using this card and accepting this invitation?
Omi [28:57]:
Yeah, I think that’s a really good question. Part of what I’ve experienced, and I think you have probably experienced this too with your platform is that people really do want to talk about it, people who listen to the podcast of participate in our intergenerational events often say, "I want to talk about it, I don’t know where to begin, I don’t know how to start the conversation.” Or, if we start the conversation, I know there’s probably so much more that we could talk about.
So, when I was in communication with the folk at Kindra back in the fall – so we’ve been working on this since last fall – we were talking about how we could create a tool that would facilitate deeper dialogue, introspection, a deeper thought process around what menopause is and what midlife is. So, it’s about menopause, but it’s also about midlife. And we want this deck to be accessible to people who are experiencing menopause, also to the people who are in their lives.
Here’s a fun fact, I recently hosted an event here in North Carolina with a small group of people to introduce the deck to my local community. And one of the people who came to the event, her name is Brittany, took the deck home, and the next day, she had a conversation with her grandmother, her grandfather, her aunt, her uncle, and her husband all using the deck. And the way that the deck is broken down, it’s broken down into the four elements: Earth, Air, Fire, and Water. You shuffle one of those elements and then you draw cards. And the card that came up was around sexual pleasure and that’s when Brittany learned that her grandparents are having fantastic sex, [Katie laughs] frequently. Frequently!
Katie [30:51]:
Yay! [still laughing]
Omi [30:53]:
And she texted me and she said, “Omi, I just found out that my grandparents are getting’ it in [Katie laughs] because of this Say More deck” and I cracked up and I said, “Wait, what?” She said, “I took the deck to my grandparents’ house, and I was talking to my grandmother and my auntie and then my granddad chimed in and said, “Oh yes, we’re having the best sex of our lives right now.” And then her uncle started chiming in and said, "What are y’all talking about?” And then her husband came into the conversation.
So again, there’s a very gendered assumption that we’re only talking to women. It’s a very gendered assumption that we’re only talking to a certain population of folk who will get this or want to get this. But I promise you, every time I have a conversation with folk, from the photographer who worked with us to do the lifestyle shoot, to the folk who are on my team, to the people who I’ve sent the deck to, and then this event, it’s like, "Oh no, these are questions for everybody.” They actually are. And the fact that there are explicit questions about menopause and aging makes it that much richer.
My training, when I first came into the nonprofit social justice work, was around popular education. There’s an amazing educator, writer, activist, and advocate named Paulo Freire, who wrote a book called The Pedagogy of the Oppressed and one of the things that he talks about in The Pedagogy of the Oppressed is how story is central and key to any advocacy, activism, or transformation, or change. And we learn a dialogical tool called popular education where, you and I are doing this right now; you’re the expert of your story, I’m the expert of my story, we’re exchanging stories, and somewhere in this exchange, somewhere in this dialogue, there is an opportunity for us to figure out together how we can transform the nature in which people experience menopause.
So, we pack that all into the development of this deck. So, we looked at how will this deck be used as a dialogical tool? How will we use what we understand to be true around popular education as a tool inside this deck? And so, I pulled a couple of cards for us because I knew we were going to be talking.
Katie [33:16]:
Yes, let’s do it! I want to hear one.
Omi [33:18]:
So, I pulled from the Earth element. This is a good one. So, this is the Earth element, and the sub-category for this card is Identity. So, the question is, “How has your body changed over time? Think about how you feel about your body today. Has it impacted how you relate to the world around you?” And then there’s an invitation also on this card. “How do you celebrate or honor how your body has transformed? What were the greatest challenges and how did that spark growth?”
Katie [33:55]:
We need a whole other podcast. [both laugh] Because I have so many good ideas, should I give you a couple of quick answers?
Omi [34:04]:
Sure, go for it.
Katie [34:05]:
I would say that my body has definitely changed. I’m 52, I’ve had three children, I’m not the body, or the shape, or the skin that I was at different times. Sometimes when I look in the mirror, I’m surprised. I feel like my mental image of myself maybe is different in practice. But I think largely I was raised by a mom who didn’t center beauty or appearance and it doesn’t bother me. I mean, there are days where I’m like, it could look different, and I wish it did. But for the most part, I feel grateful, and I feel like I’m at 52, I’m healthier and fitter and happier than I ever was. I was a smoker when I was young, I didn’t take care of myself in that way. I was lazy.... I guess we’re not going to say lazy, but I had a lack of curiosity around exercise, [laughs] let’s put it that way. And as I’ve gotten older, I recognize that I need to care for myself, and I do yoga and I try to eat healthy and try to stay away from cigarettes. I do drink wine, but I guess I’m just grateful. I lost young friends to cancer when I was in high school, and I appreciate that my body still works and is here for me.
Omi [35:26]:
Mhm, mhm. That’s really good.
Katie [35:29]:
That’s a lot, I just dumped a lot on you. [laughs]
Omi [35:31]:
No, it’s really good. And that’s how it is. So, this deck also is a somatic experience. Somatics is how our body processes our lived experiences and some of those lived experiences sometimes come with trauma or come with a lot of emotional heaviness or weight, and sometimes they also just elicit a bodily response, a somatic response because of the emotion and the joy that you also experience. This is absolutely what people should anticipate. This is a great conversation that makes you want to do what? Say more. You want to dig in, you want to really unpack these places.
I also am a lover of yoga and one of the things that I have incorporated into my yoga practice is standing in front of the mirror in the morning before I put on my gear to go downstairs and get on my mat and I do a little bit of an inventory where I’m like, "How do you feel about your body today Omi? Is there are body part or body parts that you feel like you want to show some extra love to today or that you actually feel good about today?” And there are some days, I’m going, to be honest, where I’m like, "I don’t like anything about my body, I’m just going to go down and get on this mat and get it over with, [Katie laughs] I’m not feeling it.”
But honestly, more often than not, I have so much gratitude for this body and this journey that I’ve been on in particular over these last couple of years, I think about how powerfully my body has carried me through the pandemic. I’m grateful for the way that my body has shown me how strong I am and how resilient I am, and how I know how to take care of myself. I do have body memory where I know what I need to be healthy, I know what I need to drink, I know what I need to eat, I know how I need to move, I know how I need to rest. Am I always consistent? No. Am I always good at it? No. But there’s a knowing that is undeniable, and I bear witness to that knowing, so how my body has changed over time is that I trust my knowing, where I didn’t always trust the knowing, especially when it was new to me. I’ve been pregnant three times, I had a pregnancy loss at 40, but I’ve had two boys and I also think about my relationship to my body and its ability to have carried two spectacularly beautiful people.
Katie [38:01]:
I love that, I love the word “trust” and to trust the knowing that we’ve acquired over the years. We are nearing the end of our time, but I do have two questions I want to ask you before we move into our speed round. So, I am going to suggest that everyone who is listening to this, go buy this deck, I’m doing “Add to Cart” myself afterward because even just this one sort of jumping-off point, this one prompt that you’ve shared, I can see how exciting and fun it would be to be doing this with a group of friends, people in your family, the men in your life, just people.
Omi [38:34]:
Everybody.
Katie [38:35]:
Everyone in your life. So, I’m going to encourage everyone to “Add to Cart” and then share it. Tag Omi on Instagram, tag me, I would love to hear what your experience with Say More is.
But Omi, what I want to ask you is, could you have created the Black Girl’s Guide to Menopause, could you have created Say More when you were younger? Perimenopause begins in our mid-to-late thirties, but did it take getting to midlife for you to launch these projects?
Omi [39:04]:
Oh yeah. I definitely think that there is something about the journey of getting here that allowed this to manifest in the way that it did. There’s been an accumulation of experiences, both amazing, beautiful, and also really hard that has informed the way that I understand story and narrative and personhood, that wasn’t available to me in my thirties.
You know, I’m 55 and at this stage, I have moved in the world in a way where I’m sitting in my home that now is literally 20 years old, I bought it 20 years ago, this month. And my eldest son is 30, my youngest son will be starting high school, both my parents are ancestors, I have a sibling who is an ancestor, I’ve been married, I’ve been divorced, I’ve been hired, I’ve been fired, I’ve filed bankruptcy. There are just so many things that have happened in my 55 years of life that really informs how I not only see myself, but how I really want to see or bear witness to other people and the fullness of who they are, with no illusions of perfection, but absolutely invested in the very potent, beautiful, powerful way that we can all show up.
And so, I think that the Black Girl’s Guide to Surviving Menopause, was born in the moment that it was supposed to be. And it was born in a moment when I was not tethered to other work, it was born in a moment where I was in a very vulnerable, open-hearted, tender-hearted place, that allowed me to be more conscientious of my own voice, and that made me also keen, I had a very keen ear to other people’s tenderness. I wanted to make the space safe for folk to be tender with me, in the same way that I needed to be tender with other folk. I feel like I was engaging in some really rich, spiritual reciprocity with the folk who’ve offered their stories to the space that we hold.
And I think that the work that I’ve done with Kindra... You know, I’m actually reached out to quite often to partner. Sometimes those partnerships feel like the universe is ear hustling and knows that we have similar thoughts and want to do really deep, rich, substantiative work around this menopause, midlife thing. And sometimes it feels kind of crummy. [Katie laughs softly] I’m just going to be honest, it feels like folk are wanting to monetize or commodify who I am and also tokenize me and I don’t like that and I don’t engage in that. I just simply say, “No.”
Katie [42:02]:
Well, you said yes to something so beautiful with Kindra. My last question before we move in our speed around Omi is, I know that you close your podcast by saying, “We will see you on the dark side of the moon,” [Omi laughs], and as we move nearer to my own close, I want to hear why you share that with your listeners.
Omi [42:20]:
Right. So, in a lot of earth-based traditions or goddess-based traditions, the menopausal cycles of our lives are associated with moon phases. So, when we are in menarche, we are considered a kind of new moon, you’re at the beginning of a phase, of a cycle, of a journey. When we are fully in our menstrual cycle, whether you decide to become a parent or to have children, or carry children or not, you’re in kind of the full moon phase of your life. And then when you are no longer menstruating and no longer have a womb space or a uterus that could carry children if you wanted them or not, you’re on the dark side of the moon, you’re in the Crone phase. What I like to say that we’ve done with the Black Girl’s Guide, is that we are cartographers and we have excavated the dark side of the moon and we engage in glamping on the dark side of the moon.
Katie [43:24]:
We’re here for glamping! [laughs]
Omi [43:26]:
Listen, Katie, we are not here for any of this alien versus predator situation on the dark side of the moon, [Katie laughs] absolutely not, we‘ve got all kinds of cozy places for people to sit and yummy food, if you want Kombucha we’ve got Kombucha, if you want wine, we’ve got wine. [Omi laughs]
Katie [43:44]:
I love this! I love this imagery. I’m going to glamp on the dark side of the moon with you any time.
Omi [43:51]:
Absolutely! Please do.
Katie [43:53]:
Oh my gosh. And everyone needs to tune in and glamp with Omi on her podcast. But we’re going to do a quick speed round. I do this at the end because I could talk to every single one of my guests for hours and it’s so hard to wrap things up, but I do close with a speed round, it’s just one- or two-word answers so we can have a quick energy boost as we head out into the end of the show. So, it’s a one- or two-word answer, let’s do it.
Omi [44:17]:
Okay.
Katie [44:17]:
Creating the Black Girl’s Guide to Surviving Menopause was _____.
Omi [44:22]:
Liberating.
Katie [44:23]:
Menopause has taught me _____.
Omi [44:26]:
So much about life.
Katie [44:27]:
A menopause body care practice that makes me feel like me _____.
Omi [44:32]:
Rest.
Katie [44:33]:
When I journal, I feel _____.
Omi [44:37]:
Curious.
Katie [44:38]:
Other voices of midlife or menopause to have on our radar: _____.
Omi [44:43]:
Young, queer people.
Katie [44:46]:
A Say More prompt I return to again and again: _____.
Omi [44:50]:
How has my body changed?
Katie [44:52]:
If a listener picked one card out of this deck, which would you want it to be?
Omi [44:58]:
Something from the Air deck because it’s about your thinking.
Katie [45:05]:
Okay, perfect, we need to be thinking. Finally, your one-word answer to complete this sentence: As I age, I feel _____.
Omi [45:14]:
Beautiful.
Katie [45:15]:
Love it. Beautiful, beautiful, beautiful. This has been a beautiful conversation. I have so enjoyed getting to know you. I feel like I do because your social media shares just wonderful insight and it’s sort of a vibrancy that pulled me to it so it’s been such a treat to spend time with you, I would say “in real life” but I guess we’re behind mics in different rooms.
Omi [45:40]:
[laughs] It’s real, it’s just a version of it. But I appreciate it.
Katie [45:45]:
Right, a version of reality. Before we say goodbye though, how can our listeners find you and your podcast, and the Say More menopause conversation cards?
Omi [45:54]:
Absolutely. You can learn more about the Black Girl’s Guide to Surviving Menopause, our podcast, our zine, and our intergenerational conversations through our website, www.blackgirlsguidetosurvivingmenopause.com. You can listen to the podcast wherever you listen to your podcasts, so Spotify, Apple, all the things. And you can learn more about the Say More deck by going to either our website or going to ourkindra.com and you can learn more about our partnership there too.
Katie [46:24]:
Fantastic. Every single thing that you mentioned can go into the show notes. Listeners can find those over on acertainagepod.com. Thank you so much Omi, this has been a pleasure.
Omi [46:33]:
Thank you.
Katie [46:35]:
This wraps A Certain Age, a show for women who are aging without apology. Join me next Monday when I sit down with Australian author Tabitha Carvan, to dive into her irresistible memoir, This Is Not A Book About Benedict Cumberbatch. It’s hilarious, heartfelt, it crackles with wit and shares the liberating power of reclaiming our passions as we age, whatever or whoever they may be.
Before we say goodbye, I want to thank everyone who has taken the time to write a review of the show on Apple Podcasts, I see and appreciate you. If you have not yet done so, make today the day. It’s so easy to do, just find A Certain Age on your podcast app, scroll down to the bottom, and tap on the stars to rate or leave a written review, both matter.
Special thanks to Michael Mancini who composed and produced our theme music. See you next time and until then: age boldly, beauties.