I was driving north in a car with a man that clearly I knew, though I couldn’t place him. It was some kind of escape, a getaway. We needed a place to stay for the night and so we stopped with some friends of his, just beyond the border. There was a teenage boy doing his homework at the kitchen table, and upstairs, a very young girl child, asleep. We were given a bed for the night, and as darkness fell, I suddenly realised that I knew how this story ended. It ended with a stranger slipping into the house and knifing all the inhabitants, except for me. How did I avoid the massacre? I wasn’t sure; I thought maybe if I rolled out of bed and hid beneath it, I could pass unnoticed, but then I would have to witness what happened next.
A sane voice spoke to me, saying. I think this is a dream? And if this is a dream, maybe you want to wake up now? Because I really don’t like the road we’re on.
I came to; darkness in the room, but definitely in my own bed. The clock said 3.15 am. I lay back and started playing Julie Andrews on the soundtrack inside my head, singing ‘My Favourite Things’ as a soothing technique. Mr Litlove was stirring. ‘It was just a nightmare,’ I told him. ‘Do you want to tell me what it was about?’ he asked. I thought about lying in the silent darkness with one anxious brain cell functioning, describing knife-wielding maniacs. ‘It was so bad, I don’t even want to,’ I replied. ‘Uh,’ said Mr Litlove.
I should point out here that Mr Litlove has mastered the art of talking to me in his sleep. In the morning, he has no recollections of what he has said. At that point I realised what else was odd: I didn’t have my mouthguard in. This much-detested contraption came about because I bruised a nerve in my gum one night, an experience I have no desire to repeat so I put up with the mouthguard despite the fact that it is too big for my mouth and hateful. I felt about on my bedside table, but it wasn’t there. So I really wondered what I’d done with it. Had I maybe thrown it across the room? I judged my subconscious was wholly capable of such an act.
‘Now what’s the matter?’ Mr Litlove asked. ‘I’ve taken out my mouthguard and I can’t find it,’ I told him. ‘Well I think you’d know if you’d swallowed it,’ he said, a statement that amused him greatly when I repeated it to him in the morning. I put my hand straight down on the duvet and there it was. This was good news; if this was the kind of night my brain was having, I felt that teeth-grinding might well be a part of it.
I am 46 going on 47 and the perimenopause is a reality. There has been a notable increase in nightmares these past few months, and if my chronic fatigue is worse, I think my hormones have a lot to do with it. Fatigue, anxiety, poor sleep, muscle aches and brain fog are all perimenopausal symptoms, and they are chronic fatigue symptoms too. So I feel like I’m getting a double dose. But what I also notice is that this isn’t something that women are allowed to talk about much. It’s not a cultural story, even though every woman alive will go through this rite of passage. And it’s quite a rocky journey for some of us; even at our luckiest we’ll have four years of being hot, clumsy, forgetful and volatile.
Can anyone name me a novel in which one of the main female characters is going through the perimenopause or menopause and this is a significant part of the story? (The spellchecker on this site doesn’t even register the word ‘perimenopause’.) I’ve been thinking but I can’t come up with any. Even women don’t write about it much, maybe because of some dim historical memory of being considered ‘irrational’ one week in four and therefore denied the vote. It’s just another taboo, too much icky information, and very little in the way of glamour or heroism. They don’t print t-shirts saying ‘I survived the menopause’ (and if they did, they’d be sold for male partners to wear). And yet it’s such a powerful, vivid experience.
I tend to think that menopause is the emotional last-chance saloon. Any issue that you haven’t dealt with up until now is going to rise up front and center. My reasoning is that hormones magnify; their task is to take the small thing that bothers you and whack the volume up until your internal ears are bleeding. Denial may no longer be an option.
I saw my reiki practitioner last week, and she was describing the experience of working with a hormonal woman – ‘like she had a thousand volts flooding through her system’ – who was then given HRT: ‘and she was perfectly calm and back to normal; I wouldn’t have believed it if I hadn’t seen it.’ So biology is to blame, as it is with chronic fatigue, essentially, but all we have is our psychology to deal with it, in the absence of drugs that is. I’d been talking to my practitioner about my ongoing issues with my eyes, the worsened chronic fatigue and the perimenopause kicking in, and her advice was to focus on three things: 1) empty my brain and try to avoid overstimulation, 2) practice grounding and 3) try and be grateful where possible, alongside any frustrations. So I have been doing those things, and the result has been good; it helps. But my dreams have been much more vivid.
And it occurred to me that my nightmare could be analysed very usefully. I think my deepest fear is that I will escape what is intolerable, only to end up in an even worse catastrophe. This can grind me to a halt, unable to move forward. On a more everyday level, I think my problem is I treat even small difficulties with the things I feel disempowered over but emotionally invested in (my son, my health) as if they had the potential to become a multiple homicide. I do struggle to maintain a sense of proportion in situations that worry me. Mr Litlove thinks that things will just come right, if he watches television until the crisis passes. Whereas I think things will only come right if I throw masses of my energy at them. We both seem to have lived the truth of these beliefs, and we both recognize that, at present, we need to become a little more like the other. Maybe I can use those pesky hormones to motivate me.
