God is a bloke. What else could explain all
the biological ordeals women endure? It begins with menstruation, where we get
taken hostage by our hormones once a month, then pregnancy and childbirth,
where you stretch your birth canal the customary ten kilo metres. Mastitis
follows, then finally the menopause. And then just when everything goes quite,
do you know what happens? You grow a beard. Is that fair, I ask you?
What
else could explain all the biological ordeals women endure?
The telltale sign that I had entered the
perimenopausal phase was that I started having my own weather. About 20 times a
day, I would start sweating so much I thought I was being interrogated by the
Gestapo. Of course, a hot flush is rather convenient if it coincides with an
English winter. But not so comfortable when you’re on the tube in rush hour.
Beet-faced, boiling away like a lobster, shirt wringing wet, I wonder why
mother nature puts women into meltdown? Is there a giant fry-up going on in our
ovaries of all those remaining eggs? Experts aren’t sure. But endless nights of
interrupted sleep meant that I had so many bags under my eyes, I belonged on a
luggage carousel.
As if being delirious from sleep
deprivation wasn’t bad enough, I was also having major mood swings. It was like
being a hormonal teenager again, except this time with wrinkles instead of
pimples.
Drastic action was needed. But what? HRT
patches? Synthetic steroids? Black cohosh and other herbal remedies? A toy boy?
Or…just move to the Arctic? I asked around. One girlfriend has taken to
carrying a fan everywhere she goes. I tried fanning for a week, but the
continual frantic waving gave me repetitive strain.
Other girlfriends swear by natural
remedies. But, after a month of pill popping, I felt like donating any money I
might have spent on herbal “remedies” to charity because they just didn’t work
for me. Swallowing a herb to counteract hormonal upheaval is as effective as
trying to kill Genghis Khan with a paper cut.
Hormone replacement therapy seemed the only
solution. I asked my doctor to prescribe some patches and slapped one on my
rump. But I was slightly put off by the fact that HRT is made from mare’s
urine. Would I start counting with one foot and tossing my name in the wind?
Despite all my experimentation with
treatments, all I seem to say of late is, “Is it hot in out loud. To my
mother’s generation, the menopause was a shameful secret. I vaguely remember my
mother huddling with my aunties in a cardigan ED coven in the kitchen,
murmuring darkly about “the change”, while glancing nervously over their
shoulders as though Dark Lord was about to descend with a chariot of gargoyles.
Having the menopause seem the equivalent of catching dengue fever or
diphtheria.
But my girlfriends and I are always
comparing flushes and fanning each other to us, the menopause is liberating. It
frees a woman from the anxieties of fertility and contraception. What joy to
never again take the one test you can’t cheat on – the pregnancy test.
What
joy to never again take the one test you can’t cheat on – the pregnancy test.
The other great positive about the
menopause is that it gives us licence to behave badly. After decades of
mollifying overwrought teenagers about their acne and broken hearts or
pacifying an irascible husband over car dents or huge heating bills, my family
are having to tiptoe around me for a change. Come the menopause, it’s allowable
to turn into Attila the Hen. I now cuss and curse and shake my fist when 4 x 4s
vroom past, shuddering with doomf doomf bass. I make scathingly sarcastic
remarks about nose piercings, corporate jargon and people famous for just being
famous. Selfish, opinionated, curmudgeonly – in short, menopause lets you
behave like a man. The expression “the change will do me good” has never seemed
so apt.
If you need more inspiration, just think of
all the women in positions of power around the world, from Hillary Clinton to
Angela Merkel to Christine Lagarde. Are all of them menopausal? You Betcha!
I feel I’m on the brink of the most
exciting phase of my life… once I get over these damn heat waves. For anyone
else going through the menopause, let me just say that I’m thinking of you… and
have a bucket of ice at the ready! Kathy Lette’s latest bestseller is The Boy
Who Fell To Earth (Bantam).
