BY JENNIFER MCKENZIE
At 42, menopause was not even a friend of a friend on Facebook. Hell, six months ago, my partner was considering a vasectomy reversal so we could try for a baby. Now, I am guzzling hormones like they’re M&Ms and extending my baby-fix horizon out to grandparenthood.
My first thought, when my period went AWOL and I mentally lined up the candy was ‘OMFG, I’m old.’ (That was pretty much my second and third thought, too.)
Finding out you’re menopausal is pretty similar to getting your first period – except nobody gives you a bedside heads-up chat and a booklet, and you don’t get a Pandora bracelet or high tea with the girls to ‘celebrate’.
I didn’t recognise the symptoms. Then again, why would I? I probably just shrugged when my mum graduated from sniffling in Ghost to bawling and blubbering through Lassie re-runs and Christian Television Association ads. I know I laughed when a colleague suddenly became surgically attached to the May issue of Gardening Australia, fanning herself with it whenever she turned that peculiar shade of beetroot.
I can just see the older generation, squaring their shoulders, zipping their lips and stoically soldiering on through the fatigue, strange BO, boob ache, fatigue, fatigue, chronic pains, moodiness, bloating, fatigue, itching plus those sneezes where you wee yourself a bit…