The timelapse of menopause

Also known as, what the hell is happening to me?

Hello (again, if you’re returning!) 👋🏾 I’m Ingrid and I publish Permission. I share words about my world as a grieving woman, in middle age, as a mother of boys, as an Australian living in The Netherlands, and all the nuance (and mess) that goes along with these. To know more you are welcome to check out my About page, and to read more you are welcome to check out Permission.

After

I creak. Really. My joints creak. I figured perhaps it’s because I now live in a house with two flights of stairs (hello, tall and narrow Dutch houses) and my body is still adjusting to going up and down those stairs what feels like 150 times a day but is more realistically around 12.

My period came twice this month. And before that, she didn’t visit for about four months. And then another three-month break before that. Since regular periods entered my world aged 12, my cycle has been like clockwork on a 29-day revolution. I could have set my calendar by it. But we all know how stress can impact periods, and an overseas move with two children is not a stress-free experience.

My breasts hurt a lot of the time. And no, I’m definitely not pregnant, as this was one of my key clues early in each pregnancy. But with all the weight fluctuations, it’s likely that I’m just wearing the wrong bra size. Speaking of weight fluctuations, the roll of extra around my midsection has increased more than it ever has, again, outside of pregnancy. The rest of my body doesn’t seem to have expanded in size, just the belly area, which is uncomfortable and difficult to accommodate. But I’m older now, it makes sense that my body will change, even if the changes are dramatic and unfamiliar to how my body has previously fluctuated.

Annoyingly I have a headache most days, a band of pain right behind my eyes. Pain killers have so little effect that I’ve stopped bothering, and kindly massages from the husband don’t help either. But I haven’t been drinking enough water, so it’s probably from dehydration. Or the bad sleep I had last night.

And oh, let’s talk about sleep… I don’t think my sleep has been this interrupted since I last had a newborn seven years ago. I was very lucky to have two babies who slept often and well, but even so, waking throughout the night felt torturous. With no baby crying now, surely it’s the lumpy mattress to blame, or the too-soft pillow, or the thousands of thoughts whirling through my mind incessantly?

Over-thinking, one of my favourite anxiety traits, has been a constant companion for as long as I can remember. I’ve always over-prepared for upcoming changes, over-analysed interactions to find all the ways that I could come across as awkward, and replayed situations that I could have handled better. These days, I worry so much less about how I come across and how I’m perceived, but infinitely more about what I terrible mother I am. For transparency, I don’t generally think I’m terrible a mother – my children are loved and cared for, they’re wonderful and kind people, and motherhood guides most of my choices – but at 3am when sleep has departed for the night, I relive every second of bad parenting (and at 3am there are many seconds to relive) and I cry and cry and cry.

Also, I’m not much of a crier.

Oh, and I get hot flashes in the middle of the night too. Or are they night sweats? More on these later.

I haven’t yet tried standing around in an open robe with a pineapple over my groin… maybe I should? Photo by Marvin Meyer on Unsplash

As you can see above, and as millions of women before me and alongside me, I have been trained well to minimise my symptoms, to pass them off as nothing, to dismiss the messages my body is sending me. I have been taught to trust outside experts to know, advise and treat what my flesh and bone need. I have been taught, and have accepted, that they know better. And no doubt, there are medical and health professionals who know oceans more than I do about perimenopause. But there is no one else living inside this body at this moment, feeling what I’m feeling. That means I have the responsibility to listen to my body when it's telling me things and take action accordingly. No one knows me better, no one is waiting to advocate for me, and no one is coming to save me.

I am incredibly lucky and incredibly grateful to have had a wonderful GP who flagged that my initial symptoms (the weird periods and hot flashes-slash-night-sweats) were likely perimenopause. But because I was so young at the time, not quite 37, we went with the wait and see approach. Whilst this approach sounded practical, to me the subtext was:

“Let’s wait and see how bad things get, and then we’ll decide whether it’s worth taking action.”

So I did. And I’ve been waiting and seeing ever since.

I’m almost 41.

The Timelapse

The brilliant Gina Chick talks on the MID podcast about the “timelapse of menopause”. Gina explained how she looked much the same from her 20s to her 50s (same here; I’ve looked broadly the same since my 20s) and she described how she spent much of those 20s and 30s with a very glib attitude towards aging (same here; “oh I’ll age naturally, of course. Why fight nature? It’s so much more evolved to love ourselves and be proud of our age.” <shudder> I’m so, so sorry.).

Please don’t get me wrong, I am grateful to be in my 40s. I’m feeling the most me I have ever felt, as opposed to when I either didn’t know myself or didn’t like what I did know. My life is the most intentional it’s ever been, rather than feeling like a series of happy or unhappy accidents.

But the timelapse. It so perfectly encapsulates what feels like an overnight change from healthy and well and strong to creaky and sweaty and teary. Who even am I? How did I go from that to this? And so fast? So dizzyingly fast.

Hiding in plain sight

What I’m stuck with is the constant question, how do I not know anything about this? From what I understand, all women who live long enough will go through this for one reason or another, and to varying degrees. And, without harping on the obvious, menopause is not a recent development, like Hinge or Sneex. This means that generations of women before us have experienced what we’re experiencing, and yet there is such silence and shame around it.

I am loathe to blame my mum for anything, as I love to see her through rose-coloured glasses, and also because she’s not here anymore to have these conversations with. But even I can acknowledge that she never spoke to me about the symptoms she suffered through, the changes she endured, or the lack of understanding she felt. Part of it may be because, as an Indian-Malaysian woman born in the 1940s to loving but conservative Indian parents, those conversations were never shared with her either. Mum was a private person about her health and her body, and I doubt it ever occurred to her to share the physical and mental effects of menopause with her two daughters.

And while we’re not blaming, I’m not sure I can legitimately blame the western education system. I do think schools need to teach us more about real-life things such as financial literacy, taxes, and the Oxford comma. But I don’t know if a high school classroom is the time or place for discussions of libido loss, vaginal dryness and brain fog to be taken seriously and understood in an appropriate way. On the other hand, I don’t recall learning much of anything about health, wellness, body changes, hormonal fluctuations, or the dramatic evolutions our bodies go through in a lifetime. Perhaps there needs to be some middle ground, where we learn about minds and bodies in holistic ways so as not to be caught unawares in our 30s, 40s and beyond? Or perhaps this is a problem for another conversation.

Regardless of the root causes, there’s clearly a gap. And whilst I know so many women have far more knowledge and a deeper understanding of this subject than I do, I also know there are a great many women who have almost no knowledge of perimenopause, menopause or post-menopause. Many of us have likely heard something about hot flashes – that grossly understated term for what feels like burning from the inside out and is used as a catch-all symptom for anything and everything menopause-related. Even Mum mentioned her hot flashes to me when I was a teenager. But she mentioned them in the way she might mention a mosquito bite – annoying but temporary, and not worth getting worked up over. If the effects and impacts of menopause were this short-lived and benign, then it perhaps wouldn’t matter that we know so little. We don’t know what to look out for, what’s ‘normal’ and ‘abnormal’ for this time of life, or who to turn to if our medical practitioners aren’t able or willing to help. And this is problematic.

This. Hot flashes feel like this inside my body. Photo by Ricardo Gomez Angel on Unsplash

My next step

I’m on day 5 of hormone replacement therapy because my doctor and I decided it was the best way for me to manage my symptoms at this point in time. Do I feel slightly nervous to step through this door into medicated perimenopause? Yes absolutely. Do I feel inadequately prepared because there is so much often-contradictory information out there, and I can’t read it all, so I constantly feel under-informed? Yes again. Do I know for sure this is the right way forward for me? Nope.

But it’s an option. It’s a privilege I get to explore because of who I am, what I earn and where I live. I’m aware and infuriated that these options, these opportunities for a reduction or resolution of debilitating symptoms, are not more widely available to every woman who may want or need it. I’m not a staunch defender or attacker of HRT or any other treatment for perimenopausal, menopausal or post-menopausal symptoms, and I’m not saying HRT is or should be for everyone, but I am saying that the information and the conversations should be available to every woman who wants them.

This is usually the part of the conversation where the expert writer shares the solution. But sadly, I’m not an expert on this and I don’t have the solution. It can be easy to switch back to the glib mentality of my 20s – embrace my crone era, rock the salt-and-pepper pixie cut, and transition to a braless existence – but that doesn’t help me understand what I’m going through, or what else is coming for me, because I have a strange feeling this is only the beginning.

If no solution is immediately forthcoming, at least we’re having the conversations. I’m grateful to women such as Gina Chick, Grace Lam and many others who are having these conversations out loud and in public. And I’m grateful that we can learn from experts like Dr Louise Newson and Dr Naomi Potter who are giving us access to more information about ourselves than we have arguably ever had before.

Because of these women, I feel less alone. And I hope, if any of this is familiar to you, that you feel less alone too.

If you have experience of perimenopause, menopause or post-menopause, I’d love to know how you informed yourself about what you were going through. Did you feel able to make an informed decision about the choices available to you? Did you have to advocate for yourself to get the treatment you thought most appropriate? How are you coping with it all? I’d so love to know!