Curls, Slipt! Ringlets, Be Gone!
ELIZABETH HAYT
I’M NO SAINT
SELECTED ARTICLES
MEDIA HIGHLIGHTS
ON a sparkling Monday in June, the first session of the Flying Point Summer School surf camp was about to begin, and the beachfront parking lot was filled with cars: scrappy vans and pickup trucks belonging to the camp’s instructors, side by side with luxury sedans and a Maserati left by the mothers and nannies dropping the campers off.
Congratulations for highlighting something many of us have now realized for several years. That menopause is not a taboo subject, and women have been expressing openly their thoughts, concerns, fears of certain treatments, and yes, jokes, for quite some time.
It was 8 a.m. on a Friday and Deb Caruana, 51, a personal trainer in Manhattan, had just finished working out with two of her clients, Jackie Greenberg, an interior designer in her 30s, and her father, Ronald Greenberg, 59, an art dealer.
The three were chatting when Ms. Caruana, who is in menopause, suddenly blurted out, “I’m having a hot flash.”
Only two months into my career as a sex columnist for the New York Post, I was informed by my editor that I was falling down on the job: It seems I wasn’t on my back enough. My sex life was an unaugmented bust. My weekly first-person account,”Love & Hayt,” dwelled mostly on past triumphs and current failures–especially the failures, since, to me, they were funnier, not to mention truthful.

One late summer evening a few months ago, I was about to steep myself in an Aveeno oatmeal bath. Opening the doors to the vanity below my bathroom sink, I reached around a mountain of beauty products for my Lady Gillette. It was a regrettable move. I unleashed The Great Avalanche.

Motherhood has always been a stretch for me. I was 27 when my son was born in 1988, and I hoped that having a baby would save my marriage to a workaholic, and give me a sense of purpose.

ON Oct. 19, the day the obituary appeared, my mother, Maxine, called to tell me in a flat voice that the cancer had finally killed Marcia Tucker, the renegade museum curator, feminist and political activist.

The news prompted a jumble of reactions and memories. This woman had changed my mother’s life and, in so doing, turned our family upside down.
During my childhood on Long Island’s North Shore, I always wanted the sort of parents who kissed each other when Dad came home from work, spent weekends playing doubles and danced cheek-to-cheek at bar mitzvahs. But mine were not quite that.