§ We came to this world to LIVE OUT LOUD!
The Power of Our Badass Hormones
Women in their 40’s and beyond are badass! And it’s all thanks to our hormones!
Female hormones get a bad rep especially as we enter our 40’s and get towards the end of our childbearing years. Society starts telling us that we are close to being over the hill and no longer sexuality desirable to men.
I say that’s bullsh*t!
Our 40’s and beyond can be the best years of our lives if we do it right. (And the French have known it for centuries – they consider mature women to be even more sexually appealing and alluring. Most of all, because we don’t care nearly so much anymore whether we are even attractive to men. We want to be attractive to ourselves and be authentically who we are. Now that’s hot!).
In fact, here’s what I heard from an amazing wise woman who is in her 70’s this morning: “Actually every decade gets better and better. If you consciously grow, everything gets better, your life, your career and your relationships.”
I have heard this from countless women in their 50’s, 60’s and beyond. Women who I respect and admire and want to be like as I age.
And it all begins with our hormones.
Here’s the hormone story as I understand it (I’m not a doctor or even particularly scientifically inclined but I have read a lot about the subject and credit Dr. Christiane Northrop with most of what I have learned about the role of hormones in women’s lives):
As we all know, estrogen, our primary female hormone, helps us get pregnant and nurture our young. Estrogen’s other role is to make sure we don’t get kicked out of the tribe, that we play nice with others because for many millenia, women needed the protection of the clan to survive and make sure their children survive. Being kicked out because you went around saying what you really though and pissing everybody off could often mean death to a woman and her offspring. Thus, estrogen was there to not only to make sure that we wanted to make those babies and nurse our newborns but also to keep us in line and help us get along with the rest of the tribe.
Simply put, estrogen fuels our desire to be there for others even if we have to compromise our own needs to do so. We constrain ourselves to be liked, loved and win others’ approval. We put on the back burner our own needs and wants and convince ourselves that we are being good mothers, wives, daughters and friends as we put the needs of others before our own.
Our own desires are often “not a good idea right now” or inconvenient or just something we plan to get to later, when the kids are grown, when our partners get their promotion or their businesses off the ground. In short, when everybody else’s needs and wants are met.
No matter how much we may seem to rebel, at heart we are often “Compliant Good Girls”, not making too much of a fuss so as to not be unattractive.
You see, our hormones don’t yet know that a woman today can support herself and her offspring and she doesn’t have to worry about being kicked out of the tribe. That she can create her own tribe of badass women, willing to speak their truth and live their lives as they see fit.
The amazing thing is that we don’t even realize all this until our hormones start to shift in our 40’s. We may think of ourselves as empowered women while at the same time really caring what others think of us. And doing way too much for everybody else.
And then something really amazing starts to happen in our late 30’s/early 40’s – we stop giving a crap! Or at least, not as much as we did before.
In my case, it kind of snuck on me. All of the sudden, things that were perfectly normal before started to annoy me or just not seem quite right.
The “friends” who just didn’t seem all that supportive or just drained my energy.
How sick and tired I was of volunteering at my kids’ schools.
The way both my husband and I subtly prioritized his career as I cut back on work after the kids were born while he toiled away providing for us.
At first it annoyed me and then it started to piss me off. Why weren’t my needs just as important as everybody else’s?
Little did I know at the time, but my estrogen was dropping and my rose-colored glasses were starting to come off. I was starting to see things as they really were, through the eyes of my badass, authentic self. The one that was no longer willing to accept the excuses of my younger self.
In my 30’s all of my excuses for why “this isn’t the time for my dreams” felt valid and stability seemed more important. As I hit my 40’s, that sh*t just didn’t fly anymore.
I wanted more than the life I had. And I wanted it now, pronto, while I still had my energy and health.
As I have worked with thousands of women over the past nearly two decades, I have come to realize that this shift happens pretty much like clockwork. Our hormones shift and we want more.
We come to the forefront of our lives. This is the amazing opportunity of midlife!
This is the gift of our hormones.
So what about you? What are your hormones getting sick of? What are they trying to tell you?
I would love to hear from you so feel free to send me an email at natalie@nataliematushenko.com.
Happy Tuesday!
Natalie
