Menopause Monologue Part 2
The secret nobody should ever keep.
Nobody wants to get older.
Even when, as a teenager, we desperately wanted to look 16, or 18 we were still happy that we looked young, not younger.
None of us thought ‘’I’ll dress like my gran and try to look 60’’
Old enough was enough.
My mom was only in her late 40s when I was at the trying to get into pubs age. If she was taller, I could have borrowed her dresses because back then, in the deep dark 1980s, there was a very clear line of demarcation between mom clothes and daughter clothes. But no matter how desperate I was to go and sit sipping a Cherry B in the snug, looking as old as my mom was just one step too far.
So, as soon as age becomes useful to us, we were programmed to not be ‘that’ old. From there on in we took baby steps to our goals - pub, club, job, career - always wanting to look old enough, but not old.
New year at the pub!
The simple explanation is that old means closer to death and nobody wants to die.
It’s so much more complex than that though.
In ‘The West’ – that totally inappropriate, meaninglessly inaccurate, term we all recognise – old enough but young enough, has equated to good breeding material for generations.
Whilst doing research for my degree we used the terms Minority and Majority World, derived from population count. So, The West is the Minority World.
I’ve read quite a lot on typical gender roles and expectations, and it is often shown that the Minority World has shaken off its reputation as a patriarchal society and that women now have equal opportunities to choose a life path that suits them and not what society expects.
Although things have changed dramatically in a generation, in as far as women can legally kick down any barriers that might lie in their chosen path, but it comes with sacrifices, caveats, difficult choices and physical and mental hurdles and hoops to jump through.
In the UK we are making more progress than other nations, but the secret that women keep, and the need for the secret that we as women perpetuate, is still something that is struggling to be broken down.
Ageing.
Sorry, I haven’t discovered a plant at the bottom of my garden that is going to cure ageing. If I had, I would probably be sitting on a beach somewhere sipping a cocktail.
Preferably this one. Corfu.
Not sitting in my bedroom in a Primark ‘trackie’ that has never seen more exercise than walking to the kitchen and back to my desk.
I’m also not going to burn my bra or throw away my percent of the £10,000,000 spent by women annually on cosmetics in the UK. Apparently, that works out at about £450 each. I don’t spend anywhere near that, but I do know women who spend a lot more.
What I am trying to do is think. Think hard about the impact my actions have on other women.
If we as women constantly project the thought that getting older is something to disguise, a bit like hiding your pack of 20 Silk Cut at the bottom of your bag so your parents don’t see it, we are not going to stop anyone from dying of old age.
What we are doing is making aging a dirty secret.
I’ve expressed my thoughts on filtered photos on social media before, about creating an unreal image. A few years ago, it was a ‘teen thing’, a bit of fun putting a golden halo on yourself or a puppy nose. High-end and low- end magazines were ripped to shreds for showing unrealistic images of women that younger women and girls were desperate to aspire too. The mainstream moved forward somewhat, TV and movies now have heroes that are ’more like us’. But society as a whole has gone backwards – tucking, implanting, injecting and filtering its way into a crisis.
I’m well aware that this altered reality isn’t a gendered thing, I also know it can be fun and done with totally innocent intentions and mostly isn’t done to deceive. It does add to the whole prejudice against ageing.
I’m Guilty!
I was around 53 when I suddenly became aware of my age. I can honestly say I hadn’t really thought about it negatively until that stage. I was bothered about how I looked, I didn’t like that my belly was getting a bit fatter but I was fine with all of it! My wrinkles were fine, it’s just my face!
Then, my ability to do what I did well started to be compared to someone younger than me for no other reason than they were younger. It all came crashing down from there. I don’t honestly believe it was done with any ill intention but the part of me that wasn’t affected by my age had started to be eroded. It was the very essence of me, the outward wrinkles and saggy bits were merely an indicator of how much I had gathered into the inner me. I had absorbed so much over the decades of my existence, from older and younger people. Younger people had such a fresh outlook and I relished being around them until this point.
Over the following months my confidence was shattered. Ageing was something I could do nothing about. Until that point, I didn’t feel the need to do anything about it.
Poignantly, I haemorrhaged my last period on my final day at university.
Yes, I was a mature student. I spent almost half an hour out of one of the most fascinating lectures ripping off reams of toilet roll in a desperate attempt to clean myself up. I had to keep my coat on because I had leaked through a tampon, a pad, my knickers and my jeans.
I was a weird dichotomy of circumstances, my mind was flourishing, buzzing with the thought of opportunities opening up to me and my body was falling apart.
Never mind, I thought, this is the first day of the rest of your life!
It was actually a blood-soaked symbol of the end of the life I had worked hard for.
The secret
It has taken another 4 years to discover the secret that has been kept from generations of women. I don’t blame my mother, I don’t blame anyone really but thankfully the secret is out. The very reason I am writing my own personal experience now is because over the last 2 years or so there has been a monumental shift in attitude to the taboo subject of menopause.
I wasn’t totally ignorant to menopause, but I may as well have been. I knew SOME women got hot flushes but fundamentally, it just meant your periods stopped.
I knew there was HRT but knew nothing about it. To me it was something a few women took, a bit like a few women went to the doctor with period pains. These women got glances from other women who sat back smugly thinking how pathetic they were, it’s just a woman thing, get on with it.
My menopause journey of discovery was a complete accident and, luckily for me, I rode on the wake of a celebrity uprising of knowledge sharing.
I hate jumping on band-wagons, I’ve always wanted to do things my own way, but this was something I would have had no chance of doing without those that have gone before me.
Reflections
I do get a bit sad sometimes, when I reflect on the last 5 or so years, that I didn’t know what was happening to me and that some of the crappier stuff could have been helped. If the secret hadn’t been kept, if past generations had been allowed by other women to talk about ‘how it goes’, if women in the recent past had not been misled by flawed research. If the genders were truly equal scientists would have perfected and made easily available treatments for menopause symptoms decades ago.
Some menopause factlets for you to think about
Viagra went on the market in 1998. It is expected that it will soon be available to buy without a prescription in the UK.
In 2002 flawed Hormone Replacement Therapy research data was released, causing thousands of women to stop taking it.
2 decades later and leaflets in modern HRT treatments often contain this outdated research.
There are still shortages of HRT treatments.
Menopause is NOT a subject that GPs have to train in.
Suicide rates in women are at their highest at the average age of menopause.
At the beginning of the 20th century the average age of menopause was 55. The average age of death in women was 59.
Great grandmother Annie Bott. Right, front row. Matins and Co, Goodhall st, Walsall.