‘Menopause makes me want to kiss the mirror’

Everyone can do with a little menopause now and then. It arrives like a fairy godmother and turns you into a pumpkin. However joyful you may be, your face advertises you as someone who just bit into a lemon. Who’s that gnarly gnome in the shop window? Men stop openly staring – you are slowly vanishing from sight. Once you were ‘hysterical’, then came a free upgrade to ‘eccentric’. Someone calls you a fishwife. O, to find yourself a fish-husband!
It begins as a slow shake of the head, saying ‘no’, before the full-blown anger takes over. Every slight, every rejection, every humiliation – the body remembers it together all at once. Even your hair is flammable.

That time of the month is now that time of the life. You neither cook nor…let’s just say the kitchen is as unused as the bedroom. Hot flashes and rashes, brain fog and mood swings, these are a few of your not-so-favourite things. With the conspiracy of silence around painful periods, labour pain, post-partum depression, and perimenopause, the uterus might as well be a UFO. Time then for menopause to get itself a PRO.

● When the menopause first started coursing through my body, taking away what was hitherto free that I neither knew nor appreciated at the time, I consulted a friend who’d been through the homicidal rage of it. Why was everyone so… annoying? She smiled very serene, very Buddha, and said, yes, it’s normal to stab someone roundabout then. If a marriage survives menopause, it really is a match made in air-conditioned heaven. So that’s a plus right there – menopause weeds out the bad husbands.

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