My mood swings got so bad in the few days leading up to the first day of my period, that I finally saw a gynecologist about it. This was back in 2019. The mood swings had been going on for years. That’s actually not that bad; between noticing a mental health challenge and getting help, the average amount of time people take is 11 years.
I was prescribed Prozac. Take one a day during the 14 days leading up to the first day of your period. I downloaded a period tracking app and set it up to let me know when my day 1 of 14 started so that I could begin taking the Prozac.
I don’t think it did a damn thing. The gyno never mentioned perimenopause even though at the time she prescribed the Prozac I was 42 and well within the typical age range (40-50) for the hormonal shit show that had probably started but only recognize as a hormonal shit show in hindsight.
I still didn’t know what was happening when I started having night sweats back in 2020. I would wake up from the chill of sweat soaked sleep t-shirts and underwear. Once I changed into dry clothes, I had to sleep on top of my covers because the sheets were damp and chilly, too.
But when the month long night sweats stopped, I was left vaguely wondering with my foggy brain, What was that?
My night sweats recently returned. 2024. This time I knew what it might be. Then the night sweats suddenly stopped after a week. Immediately afterwards, I had the worst weekend of mood swings, that included a rage-filled weeding session. I’m not talking about marijuana. I re-sprained my wrist from weeding my yard and my forearms were covered in thin red welts from some asshole weed. I knew my period was approaching. That was why I was having mood swings, right? Yeah. That must be it, I thought. Is it?
But what about the night sweats? Is it?
A week after the rage weeding, I went in for a follow-up visit with a gynecologist. She told me that my hormones levels were totally normal, like 30 year old normal. During this visit, my period was already 4 days late. I had never been 4 days late until this cycle. This is a fact backed up by my period app that shows my menstrual cycle for the past 3 years. It’s been like clockwork. My period never showed. I had never skipped a period before, except when I got pregnant those 3 times.
She said she couldn’t prescribe hormone replacement therapy, but she could give me birth control. At the time, this struck me a bizarre pivot in our perimenopause conversation, but now after learning that birth control contains the same hormones as HRT just in larger amounts, I think I know what she was thinking. I think she didn’t have the lab results to justify for insurance purposes a prescription of HRT for me. So, instead, she offered me an alterative of HRT packaged as birth control that would be covered by insurance. It especially made sense since I also got my nearly a decade old IUD removed that same day.
So I left her office still kind of wondering, is it? I’m pretty sure it is . . . it probably is . . . right?
***
So? Is it?
Forget the blood test. Forget the hormone levels. Forget the night sweats and the mood swings.
The real test of whether or not I was perimenopausal came from Netflix.
I watched The Mayfair Witches.
It’s a show based on Anne Rice’s books by the same name. I used to read Anne Rice as an angsty, angry, horny teenager going through adolescence. I remember being obsessed with vampires and witches, wishing I could just become one of the undead or have powers that would allow me to leave my tormenting teenaged life.
It was odd: a part of me watched another part of me select this show. I was perplexed. I watched her press next even after the terrible first episode. That she managed to finish the first episode at all was perplexing. I couldn’t understand what was happening.
After finishing that terrible show, I started another terrible show about witches and vampires called A Discovery of Witches. I actually cried in several episodes. I shed real 47 year old tears over sappy dialogue and the endless declarations of love delivered by unimaginative interpretations of a millennia old vampire and the most powerful witch that ever was in the entire history of histories. The vampire, by the way, refused to put his dick inside the witch’s vagina for several episodes, because he was terrified of blood sucking her to death. They would just cuddle after cunnilingus. And I didn’t gag or roll my eyes. Apparently they were both totally fine with this. And so was I. I watched the entire series.
After hours and hours of this Netflix litmus testing, there was no doubt: it is.
***
Matrescence is new word I learned recently in my digital strolls through IG.
It describes the process by which a woman goes through a number of changes in order to go from being a woman to a mother. There are changes in her hormones, her breasts, her hair distribution, her brain, her mental health, her relationships.
It sounds a lot like that other time in my life when enormous changes were happening in all those categories and I fantasized about being a vampire: adolescence.
In a way, matrescence is like a second adolescence. And it was about as pleasant for me.
Not all women will go through matrescence, but we all went through adolescence.
And now comes to the third and final adolescence, obligating me by time and by my sex to endure, through gritted teeth, this final upheaval of hormones, breasts, bones, hair, mental health, brain, and relationships: mortescence.
That’s what I’m calling this whole period of time in my life when I’m basically sliding toward mort, Latin for death.
It’s a real kick in the teeth for women as far as I’m concerned. That’s 3!! adolescences. I’m especially aggravated by the hair loss and the wrinkles.
Things I have to look forward to in my artificial hormone lubed slide toward menopause, this fucked up section of mortescence called perimenopause, include: severe mood swings, depression and anxiety, brain fog that looks like dementia, heart disease, high cholesterol, poor sleep or hypersomnia, steep and sudden bone density loss, steep and sudden muscle mass decline, sagging skin, belly fat, death of the libido.
I want to address this last one because my perimenopause is overlapping my divorce. Not great timing, am I right ladies? But nothing to be done about that.
I still have some libido. I think. And while my ex (who has become a high conflict delusional fucker who can’t seem to let me go without making a lot of drama even though he’s the one who left and he’s the one who filed the divorce papers) left me thinking I was done with men and intimate relationships forever, now I’m thinking I need to take whatever libido I have left in this dying body and start fucking enthusiastically toward the bottom of the hormone slide.
My hormone levels are rolling down a steep and very bumpy hill into death valley. In about 2 to 3 years, my libido will flatline.
Right now, I can manage to look like I’m in my mid 40’s. Because I’m 47. Once menopause hits, my whole body will melt like a tub of margarin in the sun.
I need to start fucking now like my sexual history is about to end. Because it is.
***
I missed the whole app dating scene, which blew up after I was married with kids. So I’m now exploring this option as a way to start dating.
But dating this time will not be at all for the purposes of getting picked by a man who might want to marry me. I have no interest in marriage or being picked by a man. I’m not even exclusively interested in men anymore. I’ve decided or rather I’m inspired to expand my ideas of physical intimacy and sexual pleasure. I want to use this time in my life as an opportunity, an opportunity to awaken and broaden of my ideas of pleasure, to explore all kind of bodies: female bodies, male bodies, nonbinary bodies, trans bodies, young bodies, old bodies, hairy bodies, hairless bodies, dark, medium, and light bodies, skinny bodies, fat bodies.
Sexuality in the West suddenly feels static and hemmed in. So prescriptive and narrow and unimaginative. I’ve been led to believe for a long time that heterosexuality and more recently homosexuality are known and defined and acceptable quantities, that attractiveness and what turns me on are also known and defined and acceptable quantities. Well I don’t accept the definitions anymore. The known is boring af.
I now question these known things. I’m curious about how my body would respond to bodies belonging to people who aren’t just cis-het males around my age. I mean, how utterly boring. How parochial to limit my vision of eroticism and sexual pleasures to just heterosexual males around my age. And almost all of them white up until now. Get a clue, I say to my former self. Imagine eating boiled meat and potatoes all your life, every single fucking day while knowing about jerk chicken, shrimp vindaloo, and kimchi jjigae and never, ever trying anything else.
Well, I’m trying it. Time’s a tickin’. This is more than disallowing the hurts of an abusive ex to define my relationship with relationships. This is about expanding my erotic horizon, blowing up my range of intimacy, my capacity for pleasure to an extent I never had the vision, the awareness, or the guts to pursue before.
Maybe that’s the fluctuating hormones, destabilizing my identity, making me feel loose and open. Maybe I’m losing the thread in the narrative of who I am, what I’m about, who and what I’m allowed to be.
Maybe this is me embracing disorder, being a messy woman. The messy woman: she’s distasteful, so unseemly, so unacceptable to society. There’s nothing more gross and derided and yet utterly ignored than a messy disheveled woman. You know, that middle-aged woman at the grocery store with her roots an inch long, hair pulled up in a half falling bun, wearing dirty jogging pants, and crocs with socks, listening to some stand up comedian’s latest podcast episode on her earphones and laughing out loud in the store and not giving a fuck. People don’t like that. And whether it’s life experience, wisdom, or my fucked up hormones, I just don’t give a fuck anymore what strangers at the grocery store like or don’t like about me.
I am, however, very interested in what I like and what I don’t like. I am so excited to meet more of me during my mortescence. It gives a new and fresh meaning to la petite mort. Transcendence in sex, yes!, but especially transcendence in existential intensity.
Now go fuck somebody, all you beautiful people.
***
UPDATE:
2 weeks have passed. I was prescribed birth control. So I start taking birth control to level out my hormones. My libido has subsequently deflated like a sad grocery store balloon after a birthday party.
I found out Ali Wong is dating Bill Hader after her 2 years long sexcapade. But I don’t have Ali Wong’s independent wealth, a supportive family who lives in close proximity, or an ex-husband who is a best friend. LOLOL. I have none of those things, things that would eliminate money worries, emotional support worries, parenting worries, divorce process worries. How am I supposed to get my dick up with all these worries sucking up all the blood to my brain?
Also, someone on IG said that if you are newly separated or divorced you should wait at least 2 months for every year you were with your partner/spouse. That means a minimum of 24 months of being single and not dating. Now does that mean refraining from relationships but okay to fuck? Shrug. The 24 months guideline gave me permission to let out a giant sigh of relief. I should give myself more time. IG told me so.
I’m also almost 50 years old. Fucking around doesn’t even sound fun or even plausible. I’m sliding swiftly into old age and I know too much. I know, for instance, that attachment free sex isn’t possible. That’s a lie that my body will disabuse me of just as it has in the past but I failed to acknowledge like a grown ass woman. At 50, do I really need to learn that lesson again? No thanks.
How about I start with some friendships first?
So here’s my proposal for anyone reading this who would consider adding as a friend a mentally (fairly) well adjusted middle aged woman, with tons of life experience under her belt, who drinks occasionally, is trying to quit smoking (so please don’t be a smoker yourself), who has big dreams for her career as a therapist and a published author, who loves stand up comedy, museums, plays, and reading books, who has a wicked sense of humor, who’s favorite thing in the world is a long dinner party. If this sounds like someone whose company you would enjoy once or twice a month, contact me. You don’t have to be particularly anything. But for god’s sake be interesting one way or another. Being not boring is my only condition. TTYL!
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