‘Menopause Makes Me Want To Kiss The Mirror’

Everyone can do with a little menopause now and then. It arrives like a fairy godmother and turns you into a pumpkin. However joyful you may be, your face advertises you as someone who just bit into a lemon. Who’s that gnarly gnome in the shop window? Men stop openly staring – you are slowly vanishing from sight. Once you were ‘hysterical’, then came a free upgrade to ‘eccentric’. Someone calls you a fishwife. O, to find yourself a fish-husband!

It begins as a slow shake of the head, saying ‘no’, before the full-blown anger takes over. Every slight, every rejection, every humiliation – the body remembers it together all at once. Even your hair is flammable.

That time of the month is now that time of the life. You neither cook nor…let’s just say the kitchen is as unused as the bedroom. Hot flashes and rashes, brain fog and mood swings, these are a few of your not-so-favourite things. With the conspiracy of silence around painful periods, labour pain, post-partum depression, and perimenopause, the uterus might as well be a UFO. Time then for menopause to get itself a PRO.

�� When the menopause first started coursing through my body, taking away what was hitherto free that I neither knew nor appreciated at the time, I consulted a friend who’d been through the homicidal rage of it. Why was everyone so…annoying? She smiled very serene, very Buddha, and said, yes, it’s normal to stab someone roundabout then. If a marriage survives menopause, it really is a match made in air-conditioned heaven. So that’s a plus right there – menopause weeds out the bad husbands.

Yet menopause can be fatal, especially to those around the menopaused. The angry old woman has replaced the angry young man. A red haze permanently clouds her vision. While one woman may detonate flamboyantly during dinner, another may laugh uncontrollably through her partner’s description of a tragedy that befell him. No two menopauses are the same.

�� The best thing about menopause is that it doesn’t care, it just doesn’t care. How you look, what you say….There is a glorious freedom from overthinking and second-guessing.

Not only are you liberated from what people say but you start your own sartorial revolution. No longer worried about trouser lengths, it’s you who decides whether the hem kisses ankle or knee. Personally, I am partial to ill-fitting robes and uncombed hair; I fondly imagine I evoke the Old Testament when I walk into a gathering. When in doubt, A-line.

As you toss and turn, sweaty and sleepless, perspective follows. This is the most epic battle of them all – between the body and mind. As a war general, you realise you have no troops. There’s only you by your side. Armed with herbs, perhaps a drop of rosemary oil, and hormone replacement therapy, you stumble into the battlefield.

�� You forgive the body its bulge and sag. That acceptance of its flaws and foibles soon enough attracts a new breed of admirers. And though your twacha rarely gives away your umr, you repeat your age as a talisman, not wanting to be anybody’s timepass.

No one evokes Electra or Oedipus when it comes to romance; there are just men and women who want to be together. Amour is finally freeing itself of ageist paranoia. For every ten men who talk to you like you are going deaf, there is that one man who waits ardently for you to say something, anything.

The male gaze is now subjected to your female gaze. You scrutinise men as they once scrutinised you – in bulk and as a generalisation. You neither miss the aimless flattery nor the faked interest. Instead of aching for their call, you struggle to recall the name that flashes across your phone. Menopause may occasionally demand human sacrifice, but it is mostly satiated by cake.

�� Blinding clarity is a byproduct. Priorities are sorted, everything starts to come together at last. It takes some doing but you are finally with who you want to be with: it could be a parent, it could be a sibling. Finally, the permission to be imprecise. To let the awry remain awry. And never to straighten a cushion again. To step back and let it be, as Mother Mary told a Beatle. The world settles itself around you. Sixty is where you always wanted to be – it takes a bit of menopause to get there.

Gone is the need to impress, comfort is the new mantra. If it is itchy or pokes, discard the garment. If he squeaks and whines, replace with newer model. After a lifetime of wearing this, eating that, saying the right word and doing the expected thing, feel free to unapologetically and spectacularly be you. Now go kiss the mirror.

Antony is the editor of ‘Hell Hath No Fury’