cycles

I'm 49 and I'm tired of menstruating.

I've never had particularly awful menstrual cycles, just the run-of-the mill premenstrual irritability, bloating, spaced-outness, craving for sugar, sleeplessness at night, sleepiness in the day and, in more recent years, mild headaches. (Not all of these every time.) Then when the period itself starts, I sometimes get cramps, bloating, achiness, tiredness and inability to concentrate.

Not to mention the need to buy tampons, the blood stains on sheets and underwear and clothing, the annoying discovery of the need to change tampons when you have gone to the toilet without a tampon (at work). Etcetera.

I've been going through all this for 37 years now. I have one child. There hasn't been a remote chance that I would get pregnant if I tried to for the past few years. So these bodily cycles are redundant, a waste of my time, energy and money.

I suppose you could argue that they put me in touch with my essential physical self. I have myself been known to argue that, when I was in my 30s and looking for rationales for having to go through the monthly fluctuations. Trying to put the best possible face on it. And there's a grain of truth there. It can be fascinating and reassuring to realise that your bad mood is simply hormonal. There's something wonderful about the lifting of the fog hours before the period arrives. It was always interesting to keep a menstrual calendar and watch the variations. To have a very long cycle if something dreadful had happened. Or a very short cycle for the same reason. To realise that an increase in appetite signalled that I had ovulated. To see the stretchy mucous.

As I said, I haven't had particularly bad periods, not compared to those women who have to go to bed with a hot water bottle (this was a particularly popular approach in England). Who have to take compound painkillers. Who have to wear a pad plus a tampon.

And in the past few years, my periods have lightened a lot, a sign that menopause is on its way. But maybe because they have lightened, I keep being caught out by them. A month ago I had to walk quickly home from the local markets as I realised that blood was dripping down my leg. Honestly - I'm 49! This is ridiculous. Today I have blood stains on my newly washed linen trousers. Of course, no one but me can see them, but that's not the point. This is simply tedious. It serves no good purpose.

I'm sure I'll have a moment of sentimentality when they finally stop. And of course there's a much larger readjustment required with menopause, the acceptance of myself as middle-aged, as ageing, as no longer young. I think that's been gradually creeping up on me since I was 45, though. Maybe the fact that I'm now so impatient with having periods indicates that I'm close to accepting it.

I have no particular worries about menopause itself. My older sister has had an easy time of it. My best friend, although she had hot flushes for a number of years, wasn't overwhelmed by them. All the women I know who've had hysterectomies had fibroids and were in their 40s. In fact, come to think of it, I don't know anyone who's had a truly awful menopause. It can't be anything worse than the menstrual cycle itself throws at us, surely. After almost 40 years of hormonal ups and downs, I think I'll manage.

Comments

[Kay]

I'm not ready to give them up yet, for obvious reasons (!) but I do remember a friend of mine was waxing lyrical about how I should welcome them because they signal that my body is doing the right thing etc. Of course, she can use one slim pad for a day, I get through a box of 8 super tampons in the first day (and that's not counting the night!). So maybe I wasn't terribly receptive.

But these days, with the 16 cycles to prove that most of the time my body is in fact *not* doing the right thing to make a baby (hopefully this 17th one will continue to prove the exception), I'm even less receptive. Still, when the gyno told me I may have an early menopause, it didn't thrill me. I definitely I get where you're coming from though.

[Valerie]

:::hugs::: Kay. It took 14 months to conceive my daughter, so I can relate to what you're going through. I'm a computer programmer, and the process of trying to get pregnant felt like I was trying to debug a program that could only run once a month. A very slow process indeed!

[Kay]

Thanks Valerie,that's a great analogy. I'm hoping I've got the program sorted out this month :) but I'm not breathing too easy yet.

[Jody]

My mother had a NIGHTMARE of a time, and my mother-in-law made quite a deal of her hotflashes (still does, talks about them endlessly and she's in her SIXTIES) -- so not good signs for me or for my girls. But I'm hoping that some of my response to the physical manifestations of menopause will differ from my mom's. For example, she was in the dying stages of a disastrous second marriage, and has been prone to migraines most of her adult life. Hopefully I'll be in a better place to deal with the physical stuff.

Hopefully it will be a smooth transition for you.

[Susan]

At 43 I seem to be sliding into menopause myself, and it has been an interesting sort of transition. I don't think my mother had much of a hard time with menopause, and so far, not much with me, either. I had thought it would be a bigger deal, somehow, but you've made me realize that perhaps after all these years of heavy, crampy, periods, I don't find all that much to miss about them. I'd not thought of it that way before (but now that you write it, it seems so obvious).

[Kate]

When I was younger I used to pass out from the pain of my periods... I wouldn't be sorry to see them go.

[Elissa]

I am a tampon plus pad girl. I have had periods so bad that I get gastric symptoms, and I am talking about hands and knees on the bathroom floor type 'symptoms'. I thought I would die from the pain. I remember thinking back on that pain in childbirth because it was cyclical - like contractions. My contractions didn't get as bad as the period pain until right at the end (although they went on for hours and hours longer). That means either childbirth was easy (!!) or that pain was inhuman.

The second greatest blessing of breastfeeding my daughter for 15 months (after a healthy baby) has been no periods for over two years. It almost seems tempting to stay pregnant forever... or until I reach menopause which doesn't seem that bad.

[susoz]

Ah, I got my periods back when my baby was only five months old, even though I was solely breastfeeding him! Which seemed a cruel irony, given that I was 43 and probably beyond fertility.
I think some of my current feeling is a sign that I might be coming to terms with the fact that there was no second baby for me (and the first was hard to come by). I no longer have any hopes pinned to the menstrual cycle, in that almost addictive rollercoaster way, Now that there is nothing at all to be gained from them, it occurs to me that not having them could be a nice thing!
I'm sure it will be more complicated than that, physically and emotionally. But one thing I do have going for me, I think, is having a relatively young child. I think it must be harder to come to the end of your 'fertile' life just when your own children, especially daughters, are blooming into adolescence or adulthood.

[Jody]

Ah, you've reminded me of something else. My infertile aunt finally conceived when she was 36. And thirteen years later, she wryly commented that ending up going through menopause while her daughter went through puberty was not, all in all, the wisest thing she ever did.

She was being tongue-in-cheek, a little: my aunt tried on and off for 12 years to conceive. Every single one of the medications I used had a patent date at least three years past the delivery date for her only child.

I've heard from a bunch of "older moms" that menopausal and pubescent girls really shouldn't be in the same household with so few buffers between them. ;->

[Elissa]

That's an interesting point - I think I will be going through menopause just about the time my 15 mo daughter hits puberty (I was 35 when I had her). I wonder how that will make me feel?