Love Letter to the Menopausal

It's hell, but there's a big prize at the end of it.

The Poet’s Perspective

To all my darling menopausal, perimenopausal friends, and those living with those going through the menopause.

It gets better.

But for now - you poor bastards.

I’ve been passing through this biological portal for at least six years. I’ve had hot flushes, or as I experience it, spontaneously being boiled from the inside, up to fifteen times a day. Night sweats, heart palpitations, insomnia, vulvodynia, lightening fast moodswings between fury and despair. I've had to grab my arm to stop myself punching someone I love when they say something vaguely annoying. I nearly stopped performing because I was terrified of clamming up on stage, floundering in porridge-like brain fog. All desire, all sense of my sexual self had vacated the building, the void it left behind guarded by a troll screaming, Don’t even fucking think about touching me.

I have at times, completely lost myself.

I was kind of handling it in an I'm pretty fit, eat well, only occasionally drink, have a regular Yoga and meditation practice type of way. I took some herbal supplements which made it …bearable. 18 months ago though, a bout of Covid sent my symptoms into overdrive. It felt like I was driving a speeding car with no brakes on a mountain road full of hairpin bends, rockfalls and the cliff edge falling away a few centimetres to my right. I gave in and got HRT.

I started to come back. Or rather, a different version of me. My sense of humour returned, but with a sharper twist. My confidence bloomed, as a woman who realises how much time she has wasted, distracted by playing small and proper. I started to feel desire again. A lot of it. Wow, I thought, is this how it feels to be a man, walking around, thinking about sex all the time?

A couple of months ago, the hot flushes started again. After a year away, I’d forgotten the intensity of burning up and drowning at the same time. I wanted to to scream. I did scream actually, out on an isolated dog walk or two. While I was waiting for a GP appointment, I asked a doctor friend of mine why we have to even go through the  menopause. And why does it take so freaking long?

Well, she said, A hundred years ago, you would have been dead. Evolution hasn’t caught up with how long women are living now. Give it two to three hundred years, and the menopause will hardly exist.

An explanation which was both depressing and strangely reassuring. And naturally, led to a poem.

A Puff of Dragon’s Breath

Evolutionarily, I’m on the extinction list.
By now, I should’ve guttered out ten babies, and,
dehydrated by each raging placenta,
expired from exhaustion; a charred husk
of umbilical cord, my last sacrifice
to decompose myself into some sort of compost.

But no, I’m still here, shaking my obsolete feminist
credentials towards anyone who doesn’t
mistake them for a bus pass. And just when
I think it’s okay, when the low neurotic thrum
of my twenties, constantly trying not to get pregnant,
or the high pitched whine of my thirties
- Oh Jesus, why can’t I stay pregnant - has finally
winnowed off into the void of forever
and I get a small window of fucking when I feel like it,
with no planning involved, no taking of personal responsibility,
no ovulation cycle or calendar to tick —

I catch myself hurling saucepans at an innocent wall,
not in jest, but fuelled by bile from the dregs of my liver,
and it hits me with a two ton migraine that
Sybil, as I call her, is back. The subtle patches
that tattoo my buttocks are no longer secreting
their soothing song into my skin, or if they are,
they’ve been incinerated by the rancid breath of
this lizard, who’s chameleon’d herself back into dragon.

A dragon who roars and drowns, simultaneously.
She is a tyrant of well-founded
self-pity. Worst of all, she actually knows some shit
but no-one’s listening, least of all the doctor, and this private hell,
this roasting of viscera has to take place beneath
a beige Marks and Spencers’ cardigan.

I thought I’d passed through this portal.
Graduated to witch, a crone
who wears her gown of charisma to charm
innocent princes into her lair.
An inexorable carefree march
into growing old disgracefully.

But they couldn’t let it be a journey, could they?
It had to be another mother-fucking cycle.

On fire. Doused. On fire. Doused. On fire.

A screeching, lacerating re-birth.

Finally, I saw an experienced doctor. Not the one mentioned in this poem, who just gave me stock menopause advice, including offering me anti-depressants. No, thank-you, not depressed, menopausal. (I do realise anti-depressants are helpful if you can’t take HRT, for instance, so if you are on them, keep going, it just wasn’t right for me). We discussed what was going on, she tweaked my patches prescription.

Last night, I drank a glass of Primitivo. It’s a full-bodied Italian red wine. It was woody, redolent with promises and heat. I’m coming back again.

I told you it gets better.

Coming Up

Poetry Slam time at Offbeat Festival, Oxford, Friday 13th September. We don’t just need poets, we need audience too. Come along and help judge who will be the slammiest of them all! Free tickets here

Everything’s Working Out Poetically, Old Fire Station, Oxford, Sunday 13th October. Come and laugh at poets doing silly things with words. Special guest, the one and only Vera Chok. More details here

Also, I have a story, called Dickie Thinks, long-listed in a competition for Motherhood Uncensored. You can read it here, and if you like it, vote for me to be shortlisted. (If you’re reading this after the 31st August, sorry, it’ll be gone.)