Menopause: More of a full-stop, really...

Mar 3, 2015

FINALLY, it looks as though (maybe, if we do it in suitably hushed and self-deprecatory tones while sparing the menfolk and the kinder the gory details) we might be able to start not only acknowledging the existence of the Menopause but actually admitting that its impact on our life may not be, well, 100 per cent positive…

Having fought the Fembot-battle for 100 hundred years, declaring we’re fit for any purpose, I sense that we’re REALLY going to have to gird our loins for this one...  because it involves admitting that a lot of us — temporarily and for all sorts of reasons — may not be.

Scary. But first, some background reading. Origin of the word menopause? Here you go:

http://www.menopausesupplement.com/blog/Origin-of-the-Word-Menopause

And I found this piece (about the menopause lasting up to 12 years) quite interesting:

http://www.theguardian.com/society/2015/feb/18/menopause-symptoms-12-years

And then last week it was the unmissable story that ‘Women *battling* [see my note about the use of military metaphors at the end of this post] Menopause are ‘being forced out of jobs’. I first saw the piece in the Sunday Times, however that News UK paywall stops me linking, so:

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2974904/Women-battling-menopause-forced-jobs-Campaigner-says-companies-ignoring-impact-employees.html

(Good luck with the legislation for that!). And then of course there was Jimmy Carr:

http://www.mirror.co.uk/3am/celebrity-news/jimmy-carr-slammed-ageist-after-5236578

All of which has made rush into *print* with a quick MenoBlog. It’s a subject I’ll be returning to regularly, however here are a few salient details, bashed out in the spare hour I have before the school run.

At nearly 51 I’m now menopausal. However, several months after giving birth (traumatic) to my youngest son, aged 42 (you try giving birth to a 42 year old man… *cymbal crash*) and after my periods had returned and I’d stopped breast-feeding, I noticed a shift in my levels of PMT — from the usual week-grumpy/sad for a week before-my-period to, well, muchlonger. However as there was so much else going in my life I just cracked on. My then-partner believed I was suffering from PND; I wasn’t — far from wanting the world to go away while I hid beneath the proverbial duvet, I was a) in love with my new baby, and, b) absolutely driven to do stuff… so I did.

A couple of years later I was in a new relationship and it was this man who identified the cyclical nature of my mood-swings and energy levels. To cut the subsequent (year-long) story short, I eventually found myself at the Wimpole Street offices of HRT Guru, Professor John Studd (www.studd.co.uk) where I was, finally, properly diagnosed — and prescribed HRT.

Even if the Pros outweigh the Cons (they do for me but won't for everyone), HRT is far from a one-size-fits-all approach. For example, I have a progesterone intolerance, which makes things more complex. However, though my budget no longer runs to visiting Prof. Studd’s practice I’m back on HRT after a six month window-of-wonkiness (hello the vile sweats and the ‘Here’s Johnny’ mood-swings and not remembering my best friends' names… and goodbye again). In short, I’m feeling great.

However if you are Of An Age and feeling a bit — how shall we put it? —messy… and maybe you’ve gone to the Doc and they’ve patted you gently on the head and slipped you the Happy Pills, then I strongly urge you to read Professor Studd on the subject of women being prescribed anti-depressantsfor what are in fact hormonal imbalances. ‘Rife’ isn’t the word.

Which brings me neatly back to my own personal menopausal ‘journey’. Floundering around in the dark while knowing nothing about menopause at all doesn’t come close. For example, I haven’t had access to my mother in any sort of meaningful way for the past 35 years so I learned nothing about it from her, while anything I have learned was passed on, Wise-Women-round-the-Watering-Hole style, from friends or gathered from the Webs or gleaned from (overly-earnest and very American) self-help books. Still, I have a handle on it now, I like to think, so here are a few swift observations:

• Just because your body allows you to become an Elderly Gravida doesn’t mean it relishes the process. I instinctively know that the pregnancy and birth of my beloved youngest son catapulted my body into peri-menopause.

• The menopause and its environs are not a nurturing space. They are however an I am Woman, Hear Me Roar space. This can create a pretty tricky dynamic if your body is still nurturing young children or coping with caring for elderly parents while your head is saying Climb Everest Now/ Enter Bake-Off/ Become a UNICEF Ambassador/Stand for Parliament/Direct an Award-Winning Documentary/Enter The Red Room of Pain… With Another Woman(For the record, my head has never said any of these things).

* Red wine and the Menopause does not a happy cocktail make. Just saying.

• Unless they are medically qualified don’t bother discussing this stuff at length with Male People—it really scares the shit out of them. Yes, even the nice ones are baffled by your alarming new 'behaviours', especially if they think they know you very well.

• And yet of course unless we start ‘fessing up — to men, other women, the kids, our poor aged parents; everybody — about the quite extraordinarygeneral head/body-fuckery that can (and I stress ‘can’ because it isn’t a given) come with Menopause, then we’re never going to get anywhere. 

• Finally, for the record: it  isn’t always *fun* but I can honestly say that Menopause has made me far cleverer and wiser and my synapses are currently firing like something very expensive at CERN. I am indeed *hot* — just not that kind of *hot*. (NB I do not suffer fools either a) gladly or b) at all. I never did, tbh, but now? Pffft!).

* Which is probably why it’s so fucking annoying to be 'invisible', to be (possibly) consigned somewhat prematurely (in my opinion) to the career scrapheap, to be (maybe) considered an also-ran when, inside, I feel likethe CEO of The Fucking World*. 

Let me know your thoughts.

(*on a good day!)

[PS re *battling menopause*. If you haven't already, do read Susan Sontag's 1977 essay 'Illness and Its Metaphors' — later re-worked as the seminal 'Aids and Its Metaphors'. These words properly changed my lifewhen I first read them while bedridden with a chronic illness in the early 1990s]