Perimenopause, the Unseen Phase, 

even at the Level of the Rose

The rose we think we know.

This time I want to continue my journey through the floral kingdom. I began with the Dandelion in another post; now I move on to the Rose.

Rose is my mother’s second name. No, it’s actually Georgette; she didn’t “wear it” for most of her adult life. When she made aliyah (from the words meaning “going upwards”; in everyday language simply “moved”) to Israel as a young woman, they told her she had to change her second name from Georgette to Shoshana. She didn’t like that advice, to say the least, and never used the new name. Shoshana… Shoshana in Hebrew means both a rose and a lily. It really should have been Vered, which is the closer translation of Georgette.

Let’s take a closer look at the rose.

There are times in the year when everyone wants her: not only on Valentine’s Day, but yes, mainly then. Most people admire her. She looks cultivated, as if planted on purpose to add beauty. She symbolises aliveness, especially when she is in red. In white she can symbolise the opposite: saying goodbye to loved ones, at funerals. Unlike the dandelion, she is invited. She is welcomed. She is the symbol of love, of the heart, of connection and romance. She is given at weddings, on first dates, on Women’s Day. She speaks a language everyone understands: love.

The archetype: the princess

If we use the language of archetypes, which I’ve been learning to “speak” in recent years (mainly from Caroline Myss), I’d say that if the dandelion is the overlooked midlife woman, the rose is the princess, or the Maiden in life phases; young, full of colour, blushed cheeks, desired, celebrated. Her value is in her blooming.

The four phases and their medicine

I see the four phases in many themes of our lives (maiden, mother, matriarch, crone, or the four phases of the menstrual cycle, the four inner seasons). And as mother to two boys, of course, in both men’s and women’s lives there are the four life phases: childhood, young adulthood, older adulthood, and the process of dying. Let’s look at the rose’s phases as found in most searches:

The bud. Still closed, protected by thorns. The thorns are not a flaw; they are her boundaries, her protection before she blooms.

The bloom. Fullness. The petals are open, the fragrance can be smelled, appreciated. The petals themselves are medicinal: traditionally used to support hormonal balance, cool hot flashes, calm the nervous system, lift the spirit in grief, and support the heart both physically and emotionally. You can make things from them: rose water, rose tea, rose petal jam. The bloom is the medicine of the fertile years, the time when inner and outer beauty are at their peak together.

Cut at her peak. Taken from her roots to be placed in a vase, admired until she fades, then replaced by a new one. Valued only while she blooms. Her presence now has no roots. So how long can she survive that?

Left connected to her roots. The petals fall. They are big and heavy, and in their own time they dry out. She will look worn out. But when looking closer, there are really eight (see the image).

If you are a garden owner, maybe try something else: wait. Pause, and see what nature does.

The personal moment

I first fell in love with rose hips in a children’s book I read to my kids. It was a picture of autumn: red hips on bare branches. Something in me paused at that image.

It stayed with me for fifteen years or so. Only recently, while polishing my menopause workshop, that image came back. I realised I had been walking past rose hips my whole life without really seeing them. In small city gardens, in parks, along fences. They were always there, at the right time of year.

It reminds me of what happens in the forest in autumn, when I learned to look for mushrooms. Once you know how to look, you cannot stop seeing them. I started doing the same on my walks in Amsterdam, and suddenly rose hips were everywhere.

The unseen becomes seen when you give it attention…

It’s a universal law. Some things are waiting to be seen; others are simply being themselves, unaffected by whether you notice them or not. They are nature doing its beautiful thing: grow, bloom, dry, and die, but only so that from this form’s dying, another form is reborn.

Maybe that is true for the menopausal woman too?

The rose hip: the fruit after the bloom

Let’s do something different, and not cut her dried petals. What happens if we simply wait?

If we pause and let the petals dry and fall, what comes next after a flower? The fruit. When? In late summer and autumn, after the flower has been pollinated and the petals drop off. What is inside the fruit? Seeds. A new beginning. If you miss that phase, there is no continuity. Your own plant will blossom again next cycle. But where does its potential go? How is it that after the beauty of the rose petal, we cut her the moment she begins to dry and die, not aware of what she still has to bring to the world around her?

Back to us

If you look beyond the outer appearance, something remarkable appears. It can start small: orange, red, not as bright as the flower at its peak. The rose hip. The most medicinal part of the whole plant. And it only comes if you let her complete her cycle, just after the phase that looks like she is d(r)ying.

The medicinal properties of the rose hip are, in a wondrous way, especially supportive for the menopausal phase:

• Traditionally used to ease hot flashes and night sweats
• Supports joint health, reduces inflammation and pain
• Boosts collagen for skin elasticity
• Rich in vitamin C and antioxidants; supports immunity, bones, digestion, and cells
• Can be taken as a tea infusion, jam, or oil

What even the images skip

For this very post, I could not easily find an image of the whole cycle. I was trying not to get frustrated, but to look at the metaphorical side of it: the fruit phase simply isn’t shown. It isn’t included, even though it is there in nature.

It was an interesting process to eventually create the cyclical, natural phases with AI, and it was not a smooth one. When you type “the phases of the rose” into Google or an image engine, the phases run from planting to petals. Most skip the seed time; very few show the fruit, the hip. Even where the written descriptions name four phases or botanical phases, the images almost never arrive there. So I made my own: with the help of AI, a rose in eight phases, a whole cycle.

My conclusion

My conclusion is that we are skipping autumn, in a symbolic way, all the way through, like layers of cake…

Skipping the rose hips is like skipping the autumn in nature, like skipping our inner autumn. Maybe it’s not surprising, then, that women in their autumn life phase, menopause, are the ones being skipped. (I see that changing in the last three years, but that’s another post.)

If we look at nature, as I showed with the rose’s growth-cycle phases, the same holds metaphorically in us: we are ignoring an important phase, a full quarter of the cycle, the part that holds the seeds.

We hear now that many women complain about “autumn-time” symptoms. Autumn, in our lives, is actually the perimenopause phase and menopause. And if we look at a woman’s body from a monthly perspective, the inner autumn is the “PMS” time, the bad rap that season got. It is the time when the hormone progesterone should be preparing our uterine lining, when we should feel nurtured, and should mirror that, and nurture ourselves.

Instead, we just keep going… not paying attention to this other aspect of the monthly cycle. In autumn nature sheds, prepares, becomes lighter, letting the leaves go so the snow can simply fall. And the fallen leaves create a lining, a layer that protects the earth, keeping her and all her small creatures warm through the cold months.

How dare we skip autumn? 

How dare we not even let it happen, cutting her (and I speak now at the level of the rose)? Not letting her be complete, not letting her go the whole circle, just as society expects women to keep going, to stay at the peak, blossom, refusing to accept that there is a drying time. A drying time that leads to a different essence, a deep knowledge: the holding of the seeds, and the medicine, for herself, and for everything around her.

The princess has her season, the rose “as we know her”.

But the wise woman, the one left to complete her cycle, produces the fruit: the most nourishing, the most healing, the most needed.

The rose hip does not bloom. But it feeds.

With Love,

Oda