Michelle Obama talks experiencing menopause as first lady: 'I can't do this'
Former first lady Michelle Obama, who lived in the White House from ages 45 to 53, always managed to appear lovely and pulled together. But as she explained on Wednesday’s episode of The Michelle Obama Podcast, there were some moments when the symptoms of menopause, such a hot flashes, provided an extra challenge.
“I remember having one on [presidential helicopter] Marine One,” she said. “I’m dressed. I need to get out, walk into an event and, literally, it was like somebody put a furnace in my core and turned it on high. And then everything started melting, and I thought, ‘Well, this is crazy. I can’t… I can’t do this.”
Obama said her husband, former President Barack Obama, started to notice that many of the women around him were struggling with the same symptoms as his wife.
“He didn’t fall apart because he found out there were several women [on] his staff that were going through menopause,” said Obama, who’s now 56 and takes hormones. “It was just sort of like, ‘Oh, well, turn the air conditioner on.’ You know? Because there’s a lot of the functions of day to day life when you’re going through menopause that just don’t work.”
Take, for instance, wearing a suit, which is not an appealing option when you’re dripping sweat.
“That doesn’t mean you bring it up in the meeting, but it’s like, we’ve gotta be aware that this is happening, if it’s happening for women beginning in their 40s,” Obama said. “The whole system of the workplace doesn’t work for us in the right way.”
Obama’s guest on the show was Dr. Sharon Malone, an OB-GYN and a long-time friend, who was one of the women Obama used to invite for a regular boot camp at Camp David. The women would have three intense workouts a day, plus healthy meals, meditation and massages.
“We started pretty strict, because I was kinda losing my mind back then. I know that I’ve always had a big commitment to my health, but in the years in the White House, I found that I was more desperate to hang on to that part of myself,” the Becoming author said. “So for me the weekend was important not just for a physical jumpstart, but it was an emotional jumpstart to be able to be surrounded with some women that lifted me up. And I know for me, you all took me out of the world that was stressful and tense and where the spotlight was burning bright, where we felt like we couldn’t make a mistake, and by the end of those three or four days, over the course of the years and years that we did it, I saw some of my friends just physically transform themselves to find a different power.”
Obama marveled at what women are able to endure physically as their bodies transform over the course of their lives.
“How many men do you think could deal with the severest form of cramps, which literally feels like a knife being stabbed and turned and then released and then turned and then released, and you gotta do that and you’ve gotta get up and keep going?” said the former FLOTUS. “You’ve gotta go to work, go to school, go play on a basketball court. Every woman who’s playing a sport now is doing it through all those circumstances. And I don’t know any men who could possibly conceive of what that feels like. If we can’t acknowledge what’s going on with us, we can’t fully celebrate just how amazing we are.”
She joked that women should be formally recognized for their physical feats.
“We got a whole channel dedicated to men throwing a ball in a hoop — and I love sports, I love watching men play sports; I get it — but there should be like some birthing channels, right?” Obama said with a laugh. “Just some, ‘Did you see what she did? Did you see that little woman push a 10-pound baby out? Where’s her ESPY?... There should be an awards ceremony.”
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