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Choosing the Garden

I thought I might have chosen the wrong place.

The cafe was loud and full, the coffee machine competing with the scrape of chairs, conversations crossing over one another, and every second person through the door someone I knew.

Lisa Fitzpatrick seemed gentle. Kind. Almost shy.

I wondered if I should have chosen somewhere more private for a conversation about sex, heartbreak and menopause.

I had brought questions, of course. Strong ones, I thought. Questions designed to move beyond the provocative title of her new book, Sexy Menopause, and into the substance beneath it.

But as Lisa began to speak, the conversation found its own shape.

My curiosities surfaced naturally, one after another, without needing to be introduced. Lisa was funny and articulate, able to move between the clinical and the deeply personal without making either feel diminished by the other.

The gentleness remained, but something else began to reveal itself beside it.

Lisa has worked as a physiotherapist for 33 years. In her clinical practice, she performs around 30 to 40 pelvic examinations each week. She speaks with women about pain, prolapse, libido, shame, relationships and bodies that no longer behave in ways they recognise.

She has also lived through her own upheaval.

Her relationship of eight years ended during menopause when her fiancé left for a woman 20 years younger. Lisa has written openly about that relationship in her book, but sitting across from her, the conversation moved into shared experience.

The intensity at the beginning. The attention. The strange relief of feeling understood by someone who seemed to notice not only the obvious parts, but those we thought were harder to see.

Love bombing never feels like manipulation while it is happening. It feels like someone has finally caught up. Like they can see the scale of you and are not frightened by it. 

Sitting with Lisa, I was not speaking to a woman who had avoided pain by knowing more. Knowledge does not always rescue us in real time. Sometimes it gives us language afterwards.

It made me trust her more.

I am suspicious of the language surrounding female power. I have watched spiritual fluency coexist with cruelty. I have seen people speak beautifully about consciousness, embodiment and healing while causing harm in the most ordinary parts of their lives.

My body tends to brace before my mind has decided why.

Lisa’s ideas about the spiritual and psychological possibilities of menopause remain connected to anatomy, hormones, tissue, pain and the accounts of women she meets in her consulting room.

She does not ask the body to disappear so that the spiritual message can sound more beautiful.

That matters to someone like me.

One of my favourite moments came when Lisa described a friend who told her she did not want sex during menopause. She wanted to prepare for an art exhibition and plant trees in her garden.

Lisa called her the poster girl for Sexy Menopause.

Not because she was having sex, but because she was living according to her own nature.

I understood the point immediately, although I am still turning it over.

How many things do women genuinely lose interest in with age, and how many do they simply stop performing?

What happens when being desired becomes less interesting than having desire of your own—even when that desire is for art, solitude, work or a garden?

The newspaper article came easily after that. “Sexy” might mean rediscovering intimacy. It might also mean choosing the garden.

Ninety minutes later, the café was still loud. But I was more optimistic about Menopause 

Lisa's book is available on her website sexymenopause.com

Images by Kate Nutt Photography 

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