I was in perimenopause when I was in the depths of post-partum depression. I absolutely believed I was falling apart. I had NO IDEA that I was in perimenopause. I hadn't even heard the word perimenopause and was convinced at the age of 40, that menopause was miles and miles away. It would have been impossible for anyone (doctors included), to be able to separate out my post-partum issues from my perimenopause symptoms because guess what? They can be identical! Yay.
Retrospectively, when I squint through the foggy memory of raising our twins in the first twelve months of their lives, I recognize that I was crawling to some imaginary finish line to convince myself that tomorrow was going to be a different day; that on the other side of this depression, hopelessness and exhaustion, the real me was waiting with a warm blanket, some Gatorade and a huge medal, assuring me that I never had to run another marathon again (note: I have never ever wanted to run a marathon, nor do I understand why people do). But clearly, that never happened.
Our night doula was the first person who saw me struggling. She came twice a week for the first two months so that my husband and I could get some sleep (though I was waking twice a night to pump anyways). I'll never forget what she said when I was doubting if I could continue breastfeeding and pumping for two, "Remember, this is a marathon, not a sprint". No wiser words were ever delivered at the right time.
Several months later, I was at my naturopath's office desperately looking for support, for someone to put me back together. She didn't have to test my cortisol and serotonin levels to see how rock bottom I was (but she did) and immediately prescribed me SSRIs. I was a blubbering snotty mess in her office that day. About a year later, I decided I was back to normal and tapered off the medication. Then, BOOM! It was so obvious what was waiting for me then.... perimenopause!
Rage, mood issues, sleeplessness, exhaustion, changes to my digestion, alcohol intolerance, more therapy, overwhelm, just generally not feeling like myself. Sure, twins are hard, especially as your first pregnancy...but twins while in perimenopause was hell. I wish I had a community like Mothering and The Menopause way back then, but it's there now. Fast forward a decade later, countless doctor's appointments and a running list of over twenty perimenopause symptoms, here I am building community for women to not menopause alone, to encourage them to slow down and rest, to breathe, to do the hard work of reframing this whole messy transition.
As a Gen Xer, it's clear none of us want to experience what our mothers or grandmothers went through. It's also clear that people going through perimenopause and menopause have way more support than ever before, though it's still not enough (medical training, patient education, workplace benefits, decades of health research owed to women, the uphill battle for accessing hormone therapy after the disastrous Women's Health Initiative presumptively claimed estrogen increased the chances of breast cancer. (The enormous number of caveats needed to deliver a conclusion like this was never delivered and panic ensued globally).
Ultimately, the point of all of this is to acknowledge and normalize that each of us have a unique experience of this massive life phase, that the decisions we make to manage our symptoms vary from one person to the next and that there is NO ONE WAY to get through this. You also have to believe (in a blind faith kind of way) that you aren't falling apart. In fact, it's quite the opposite. You are raging now in order to reframe and reclaim your "next", whatever that is. Your brain is literally telling your body to morph, evolve, let go and emerge as something even more fabulous on the other side. You've done this before (puberty, pregnancy, now menopause) and you can do this again.
As Heather Corina writes in What Fresh Hell is This, "We're not less of ourselves on the other side of this. We're more...Well, as Aretha Franklin said of her own many crucibles, "I paid my dues, I certainly did." Aretha was already a badass of epic proportions at twenty-five when she literally taught women and girls everywhere how to spell self-respect. But the postmenopausal Aretha who was that fur-shrugging, swaggering queen? She showed us how to fully inhabit it. That's the kind of more I'm talking about." All hail the Queen.
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