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Four years ago, I was thrown for a loop by a wave of strange new symptoms including night sweats, an expanding midsection, dry skin, and a strong and sudden intolerance for noise. I suspected they had something to do with the neurological and physiological changes of perimenopause but was frustrated by the absence of clear answers about what was happening to my middle-aged body. Lacking few nuanced representations of this period of life, I began looking at what midlife looks like elsewhere in nature.
It was inspiring. Trees, for instance, illustrate the capaciousness of midlife: as they mature, they add rings to their ever-expanding trunks. Mature trees in urban areas – those 20 years and up – remove higher levels of air pollution, sequester more carbon from the atmosphere and provide much more leaf area and shade than their younger counterparts.
Another example, leaf cutter ants, showed how midlife can bring change in purpose. These ants forage plant material in order to cultivate fungal gardens, which they use to feed larvae. As ants age and become less efficient at cutting leaves, they transition to different but no less vital tasks, including waste management, removing harmful fungus and managing waste. Elder ants continue making meaningful contributions as they age, which may contribute to them living longer.
But the most moving example involved Orca whales, my neighbors here in the Pacific north-west. Humans and orcas are two of only six mammals that experience menopause. (The other four are false killer whales, belugas, narwhals and short-finned pilot whales.)
A few years ago, I heard an interview with Dr Deborah Giles, research director of Wild Orca, that piqued my interest. Giles is one of the world’s experts on southern resident killer whales, an endangered community of just 73 living in the coastal waters of the Pacific north-west. These whales live in three separate pods – social groups of closely related animals led by post-reproductive females – that speak their own dialects but share a common language.
“The older females, besides being the repositories of knowledge … lead very rich lives,” Giles said. While all these whales are very tactile and sexual – young males spar with each other using their prehensile penises – post-menopausal females commonly engage in sexual activity and play with both young males and males of reproductive age.
This was the most intriguing and inspiring morsel of sexual information I’d heard in a decade. Researchers surmise that these older females are educating males about sex, but also participating in encounters that are sensual and playful without any biological imperative – only pleasure.
As my menstrual cycle sputters and revs, my vulvar moisture evaporates and my daily responsibilities accumulate, I occasionally forget that I have a sex drive. Remembering the orcas always makes me smile and reminds me to find time for sensual, physical pleasure – by myself and with my spouse – with no goal beyond feeling good.
The sex lives of these orcas is a juicy subject, but these days I find myself thinking more about what Giles said about these whales being “repositories of knowledge”. They are matriarchs, leaders, navigators and teachers valued and celebrated for their expertise accumulated over a lifetime. It’s a powerful corrective to the ageism older women face – an increasing feeling of invisibility and irrelevance in a society that prizes youth.
Last fall, I curated a series of conversations at the Seattle Public Library about female middle age and invited Giles to be part of a discussion on different models of middle age along with Laura Da’, an Indigenous Eastern Shawnee poet, and Putsata Reang, a queer Cambodian journalist. She agreed, in part because her work at Wild Orca is about spreading the word about the whales’ dwindling population and deteriorating environmental conditions.
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The pods of the Pacific north-west hunt for food cooperatively and share the bounty. But the damming of rivers in Washington state means that when the pod leaders lead their families to familiar hunting grounds, there is not enough to eat.
More from Angela Garbes’s Halfway there:
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No sex drive and a ‘tanking libido’: how I redefined intimacy in midlife
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First my left knee, then my right: my middle-aged body’s betrayal
As food supplies dwindle and reproductive females have a harder time carrying calves to term, the lives of these older females take on even more significance. They hold the memory of life before the natural world was disrupted and disturbed by humans – evidence of a world we benefit from but can barely comprehend.
The oldest known orca fossil is at least 2.5m years old and scientists believe killer whales have existed in some form for more than 50m years. The scale and scope is staggering – modern humans only have a 300,000-year history on this planet. The plight of these whales saddens and frightens me, but their existence makes me hopeful. We humans know so little about life and survival, and we have so much still to learn from our elders.
