An Open Letter to Anyone NOT in Perimenopause

If you are reading this and you are in perimenopause, before you do anything else, please send it with abandon to partners, bosses, and that one guy in your yoga class who gives you the stink-eye when you get wobbly in triangle pose.

Everyone, listen up: Perimenopause is an unmitigated, unrelenting, confounding shit show.

If you think you get it because you saw some dude’s reel about his wife? Nah, bruh. Although @whatthemenopause’s post about how to safely handle an alligator is a scientifically validated depiction. Still, you don’t get your perimenopause PhD by watching memes.

In fact, you don’t get it at all, because there is no canon of research that explains what the hell is actually going on. Some doctors are finally trying, bless their hearts. But they are so far behind the eight ball, they might as well be drying glasses behind the bar, as we stagger around drunk from a hormone cocktail invented by a madman.

This is not just hot flashes and fewer periods (you may actually have more and constant periods, yay!). Yes, some of us exist in meat suits that function like human incinerators on the fritz, but a few of us (who knew!) are so cold we wear two pairs of socks to sleep at night (*raises hand*).

And that’s the least of it.

This swath of our lives is a complete upending of how we understand ourselves and our bodies. Sleep has become a wistful notion we may never know again, unless we medicate ourselves into a stone-like state in which we don’t dream and stay in the same position all night. If we resort to that, it’s because an underslept perimenopausal woman is a not-so-distant relative of that tiger that took down Roy. Or was it Siegfried? I don’t know. See #brainfog below.

Our joints hurt all the time and for no reason. “Did I overdo it during that weight-bearing workout, or do I have rheumatoid arthritis?” is a fun game we like to play.

Anxiety, our old roommate, invites her friends to crash. So, we spend the hours we aren’t sleeping placing bets on which will happen first: the end of the country as we know it or our family members learning how to load the dishwasher correctly.

Hey! Wanna talk about vaginas? I do!

For many of us, they have turned into sandpaper deserts where vehicles can no longer pass without roadside assistance. Or they don’t — a small portion of us live in a constant state of Swamp Crotch™, releasing rainforest-level moisture that portends a fecundity that is either a bald-faced lie or a useless fact in the face of our fallow libidos and complete loss of interest in parenting.

An elite bunch of us have underwear that has taken on the distinctive odor of the facilities where some of our grandparents or parents (hooray, sandwich generation!) currently reside. The technical term for this is Old Man Smell. It happens when you pee yourself a little bit all day long.

OMG, so fun: Orgasms get even more elusive.

Our boobs are killing us; don’t touch them.

Our periods act like the moody, unpredictable tweens and teens some of us are raising — showing up, expecting us to be ready without ever telling us their plans, and then disappearing just when we think we’ve figured them out.

And then there is our new arch nemesis: brain fog. Have you ever had a nightmare where you have become profoundly stupid? Well, perimenopause is it.

Your mind evaporates when you need it. You can’t find words on the regular. You say things like, “Can you put the trash out with the laundry?” Those are the cute little gaffes! Before I increased my estrogen patch, I went through a month where I constantly transposed the first letters of each word in a sentence. What did that sound like? Lixing mup ly metters at the weginnings of bords.

Forget last week — we don’t remember this morning. We worry we may have early Alzheimer’s (and maybe we do, how are we to know?). Should we get that cognitive eval? Half of our perimenopausal FB group says yes, the other half says no, and the last half forgot to go back to my post and respond. Do you know what it’s like to lose your mind? I think I do.

And while this is all going down, our partners just don’t get it unless they’re also people in perimenopause (and I gotta be honest, perimenopausal partners does not sound great: Are y’all OK? Or are you wandering your homes with strings tied to all your fingers, trying to remember what day you decided it was? Seriously, we can come over if you need us).

For the rest of us, we live in families or relationships where our partners and/or children have NO understanding of what it is like to live inside ourselves. It’s business as usual for them, and if we bring up perimenopause too many times, we become an easily dismissed trope.

We are not memes. This is a very real biological experience based on hormones that make it possible to create life (if we so choose to — for now, at least). To quote Amy Adams in the amazing movie Nightbitch, we’re basically gods.

Gods who are now falling apart in front of you.

And we are expected to just “manage” it: keep going, keep smiling, keep taking care of *everything*. Well, thank the goddess for sneaking one little gift into the eye of this midlife cyclone: rage. Rage may not sound so great on the face of it — and no, I did not like the brief period where I was getting so mad I was slamming my hand down on my desk. But if you can soothe the beast with some HRT or other method, you can then let it lead you into a brave new world of boundaries.

This turbulent sea change offers us a chance to see how the other half lives. Wanda Sykes nailed it when she said it’s not that we start caring less in menopause (although there are quite a few things we no longer care about), it’s that the hormone (estrogen) which has made us so empathetic all our lives — and prone to saying sorry “all the time for no damn reason!” — is plummeting.

“It’s not the older you get, the less you care,” says our Lady and Savior, Sykes. “It’s the older you get, you’re just becoming a man.”

Related: Did you know that “no” is a valid and versatile response to almost any kind of request? I didn’t. Until now. Try it out, have some fun with it, add some adjectives or curse words for emphasis. Someone recently suggested I run for PTA co-president next year. I swiftly replied, “Not on your GD life!” Though I added, “but thank you for the vote of confidence!” because I’m not a monster.

I am also not quiet quitting. This revolution will be Facebook-ized.

As a matter of fact, I decided to broadcast my new philosophy by ordering a sweatshirt from Mahogany Mommies that says: “Due to not wanting to, I will not be.” Only, oops, I accidentally sent it to my mom’s house. That’s OK, she can use it too.

No hugs,

Kate… and your mother, and your sister, and your aunt, and your partner

Kate Rope is an award-winning journalist and author of the forthcoming Strong as a Girl: Your Guide to Raising Girls Who Know, Stand Up for, and Take Care of Themselves and Strong as a Mother: How to Stay Happy, Healthy, and (Most Importantly) Sane from Pregnancy to Parenthood. She is on a mission to help everyone feel Strong as a Human.