October 6, 2024 by Amy
It’s getting hot in here
Warning: this post is sweary. Given the topic, I had no choice. Forgive me. If you don’t like expletives, you are dismissed.
Why isn’t it called womenopause?
Seriously. Why isn’t it? No men suffer from it, so why is it named for them? Why is everything about men? (Ok, I googled it. It’s because in Greek “men” is moon, or month, and “pause” is, well, you know. But still. It’s always about the men.)
Let’s talk about heat, friends. Not the delicious warmth of the sun as you lie on the beach. Not the perfectly calibrated grill that makes your steaks juicy while leaving those crispy char marks. Not the oven with its scrumptious offerings of melty chocolate chip cookies. No, let’s talk about the insane heat that women around 50 years of age start to generate at random and with no notice. If we could tame this fire, if we could in some way relieve our weary bodies of it and harness it, we would solve all the world’s energy problems. And probably establish relationship harmony across the land.
My beloved hubs, engineer that he is and full of love for and concern about his wife, is desperate to find a solution. No less than five times now he has peppered me with questions about whether there is a medication I can take to alleviate the symptoms. This might be helpful except that he starts the game while I’m suffering from an internal bonfire. He especially likes to come near and feel my arm. “Hmmm. You don’t feel hot.” You can imagine how this has gone over. I’m actually shocked that, given my tantrums, he chooses to even stay in the same room with me, much less get close enough to touch. It’s like looking at the sun. Don’t do it, man. Nothing good will come from that. The whole episode ends with me screaming at him about the patriarchy and how there are multiple medications to help men get it up when only 18% of the male population suffers from that particular malady while every single fucking woman in her 50s deals with these shit symptoms on the regular. That’s usually when he flees.
My hot flashes aren’t even that bad. I’m still on the pill, mostly because it helps regulate my hormones so I’m not consistently a raving lunatic four days a month, and because this particular medication has kept me from suffering what the youngsters call Shark Week for a couple of decades now. (Blessed be the chemists who created it. I am forever in your debt.) I am probably past the age where it’s necessary to keep me from getting pregnant, but as I told my OB/GYN, “I’m not willing to become your newest ‘oldest woman to ever conceive.’” That record in his practice currently stands at 48, which was three years ago for me, but I’m not takin’ any chances. Two years of infertility makes me think that my body would seriously like to fuck with me one more time just for shits and giggles. So I’m on it for at least one more year. Plus I’m a little scared to go off the pill because I’ve heard that stopping it after long-term use catapults women headlong into menopause, and I gotta say that the introductory symptoms I’m experiencing aren’t exactly a party.
I’ve got Menopause Lite. I’m menopause adjacent. Flirting with menopause. I have just enough of the symptoms to say, “No thank you, ma’am.” Besides the random times when I spontaneously start sweating despite being fresh out of a cold shower into the chilled, air-conditioned house while standing in front of a fan, I’m experiencing what could kindly be called “mood swings.”
I fear that phrase isn’t descriptive enough. Let’s try again.
I am randomly and without warning turning into a combination of Cruella de Vil, the Wicked Witch of the West, Ursula the Sea Witch, that bitch from Rapunzel, and Nurse Ratched, with a little Bellatrix Lestrange thrown in. One of my beloved family members says something innocuous, or tries to make a funny little joke, and the top of my head flies off and snakes come pouring out.
Last week I tore my beloved husband a new asshole because he made one of his hilarious jokes about preferring to stay home for dinner (wherein I cook) versus going out. Let me preface this by saying that this is not an irrational assumption on his part. We usually eat dinner out about once a week, on the weekend. Every other night I cook or we nuke leftovers. We’ve done this for years, at the beginning because we didn’t have much money and it’s far cheaper to cook at home than go out, and now because I enjoy cooking and I like having control over ingredients (i.e. I can make it healthy). It’s relaxing to turn off my brain after work and focus on something else. I might enjoy a beverage, and if M is home, we catch up on our days and watch (I listen) to the news. Truman is hanging out nearby and just seeing him makes me smile. It’s relaxing and I enjoy the routine. Also, I really like the food I make. But sometimes, I just want to eat out. I scheduled our night out this week when I put together our meal plan, and the night I chose was Wednesday. It was on the shared calendar. All was set.
Until I made a comment before work Wednesday morning along the lines of, “Hey, think about where you want to eat tonight,” and M, comedian that he is and clearly still not used to his wife’s wildly fluctuating mood swings, said, “Home.” Normal Amy would laugh and say, “Whatever, dude.” Menopausal Amy lost her fucking shit. There was screaming. There was ranting. There were wild gesticulations. There was creeping up to the edge of crying. (The only thing holding back the tears was that I had done a decent job with my eyeliner that morning and I’ll be damned if I’m gonna fuck that up over some stupid shitty joke like ha ha let’s eat at home again for the fourteenth day in a row.) M looked at me wide-eyed, putting his hands up in the “I surrender” pose and saying, “Hey hey hey, it was a joke! I was joking!” Whereupon I screamed back that it’s not funny. In my mind, it was so far from funny it might as well have been on Mars.*
While this is all taking place, a small portion of my brain is saying, “Whoa, girl. Rein it in. You are way over-reacting. This is so not a big deal. You have got to Get It Together.” Then the larger part of my brain, the part that is jacked on some sort of menopausal roid rage, bludgeons that small, reasonable portion with a meat tenderizer. It just gets more angry when, basically, told to “calm down” by the rational part. As we do.
So I fear, with good reason, that when I go off the pill I am well and truly hosed. I predict that within 48 to 72 hours of stopping said pharmaceutical support, I will spontaneously burst into flames while disemboweling my sweet husband with a dull corkscrew because he sneezed too loud. This is not how I prefer to live. I imagine that I won’t get a personal fan in jail, which I use all the time now since my body can no longer control its own temperature. Plus, most of the time I do truly adore my husband and laugh at his jokes.
Honest to god, it’s a wonder our prisons aren’t overstuffed with women between the ages of 50 and 60. Well done, ladies. Well done. Just like your steak would be if you could open up my torso and cook it on my insides.
Addendum: I’m not even touching on the subject of my bladder betraying me by relinquishing all self-control. Yeah. It’s real funny that every time I stand up now I damn near piss my pants. Christ almighty, what women deal with.
*I received a text later in the day from M asking where I’d like to go eat and at what time, so he could make reservations. All ended well.
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