Friday, January 22, 2010

Canadian writer is sick and tired....

Sick and tired of everyone blaming menopause for everything! I have to admit that seriously, she's right on the money, but from a humorous perspective I kind of enjoy blaming everything on menopause--even though I've been through it for many years!

Here's an excerpt from her article with a link to the entire piece. I hope you'll come back here and discuss it.


Use your brain and stop blaming your hormones
By Naomi Lakritz, Calgary Herald
Thanks, Colleen Walsh. It's not that you've set feminism back at least to pre-Betty Friedan days by partly blaming your air rage incident on menopause. Rather, you've set all women back by making us look like ditzes who are ruled by our hormones rather than by our heads. Walsh is clearly a disciple of the Christiane Northrup Progesterone-Made-Me-Do-It School of Thought, but more on that later.

Walsh, a former Toronto television broadcaster, was convicted of assault this week for an air rage incident on an Air Canada flight last March from London to Toronto, which was diverted to St. John's, N.L., due to a medical emergency on board. The sordid little scenario involved Walsh slapping another passenger, hence the assault conviction, and being found guilty under the Aeronautics Act of not obeying the flight crew's instructions to take her seat. She was ordered to pay $2,460 in fines and to remove nasty comments from her blog that she'd posted about the passenger she slapped.
Walsh blamed her behaviour in part on menopausal exhaustion. She said she took a pill as part of her hormone replacement therapy and was supposed to take another one soon; she'd also drunk two glasses of wine with her on-board meal, had taken a sleeping pill, hadn't slept in 30 hours and was in panic.

I'm sorry, but menopause does not cause women to breach the Aeronautics Act. By the same token, neither does the Aeronautics Act, which is a pretty dry and straightforward law, as statutes go, have an inciting effect on estrogen or progesterone levels.

4 comments:

  1. OMG!! Maybe that's what I should have done throughout my bad meno years--blame it instead of taking accountability for my actions! Jeez!

    Sounds like she has a 'victim complex'---"it wasn't my fault!"

    (iluvtolaff)

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  2. Personally, I find it more rewarding to blame my mother for everything... I, too, am a bit tired of hearing people use menopause as an excuse. I am fifty-eight and still get my period. THAT puts me in a rage more often than not, but I just can't blame the chemistry for it... simply my sense of injustice. I feel that Christine Northrup has helped us demystify what happens to our own bodies and gives wonderful advice on ways to minimize and mitigate some of the roller coaster effects. However, I think that we acquire wisdom and vibrance or whatever to go after our dreams because we are... FREE AT LAST, Free at last. We look at our marriages, if we have them, and ask the question: Do I want twenty more years of this? And sometimes the answer is NO. I think that blaming PMS or hot flashes or mood swings is actually totally adolescent. Bad behavior is bad behavior. Drinking is not an excuse for violence. Neither are hormonal mood swings. At least, I don't think so. We didn't accept that excuse from our adolescent daughters, I think we should not accept it from OURSELVES now. Thanks for the article!

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  3. I still use it as an excuse if my newsletter is late...lol. Get it? hahahh

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  4. You people have no idea what you're talking about. Menopause is not disease but it can and does cause severe and REAL problems for thousands of women and changes their lives in ways they (and clearly you) never thought possible. YES hormone imbalances (and therefore menopause) CAN cause unstable emotions in woman, and for any of you to suggest otherwise is simply coming from a place of ignorance. There are countless personal stories and account of women whose lives have been destroyed by the effects of menopause. Some women simply can't understand that statement because they've never experienced it. And I was one of those women who thought like you people here. UNTIL it happened to me. Then I finally understood what these women were talking about. With regards to Colleen Walsh, all I can say is "but for the grace of god there go I". I understand completely how the symptoms of menopause and hormones imbalances can cause this reaction in a woman. And until you've experienced you can never understand what we're talking about.

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