Culturally, conversations about perimenopause and menopause are coming out into the open.
It’s as if we’re learning about this for the first time.
This is not a new illness that has suddenly appeared on the scene. Women have been going through these hormonal changes for as long as humans have existed on this planet.
Every woman going through this today has a mother. If her mother lived long enough, her mother went through these exact changes.
Yet many women are unprepared for the physiological, psychological, cognitive, and emotional changes that come with this stage of life.
The question is: WHY?
Why, when generations of women have gone through this before us, are these symptoms taking us by surprise?
It wasn’t that way at the start of this journey.
As young girls, we endured the awkwardness of the health class in which we learned about what would happen when we got our first periods. We learned how to use pads and tampons. For many girls lucky enough to have a mother willing to discuss these things, their mother filled in the gaps and shepherded them through those scary moments of that first major transition in a girl’s life.
And if your mother didn’t fill it in, authors like Judy Blume helped out.
It’s a different story on this side of the journey.
Now we’re scrambling in the dark, trying to make sense of symptoms and conditions that we may not have heard about before.
This is the part your mother never told you about.
Not because she didn’t want to inform you, but because she didn’t know either.
Even though she’s been through it.
In defense of our mothers, nobody in their generation talked about this at all. If they did, they spoke about a very narrow version:
Hot flashes. “The Change.”
Nobody spoke about mood swings, joint pain, or sleep disruption.
Nobody talked about brain fog, memory lapses, or fumbling for words.
And nobody dared to speak about the rage, emotional volatility, sensory overwhelm, or the feeling that your entire operating system had collapsed.
They couldn’t talk about those things then — at least not publicly.
Women were still fighting for equal standing and equal pay in the workplace. They couldn’t acknowledge these symptoms.
When they told their doctors, doctors dismissed them as stressed, anxious, emotional, overwhelmed, depressed, or simply struggling with the demands of work, marriage, motherhood, and caregiving.
Instead of connecting the dots between women’s experiences, doctors treated their symptoms as unhinged complaints and personal problems.
Our mothers didn’t know that their experiences were universal. They thought it was just them.
Instead of finding commonality and community through conversation that could help identify patterns, many women suffered in silence, suppressed by shame.
From that lens, speaking about symptoms feels like burdening someone with your shame instead of sharing your experience.
The signs and symptoms of perimenopause aren’t new.
We are unprepared because, until very recently, there has been no public conversation about this.
It’s only when we speak about these things in public that we start to realize:
It’s not just me.
And that’s why the public conversations happening now are so important.
The truth is, perimenopause lands differently in every woman’s body.
Information may not help us feel more prepared for the experience, but the conversations can reduce the shame that results from feeling isolated in the experience.
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