I am, right now, waiting for my period to start. Not because I’m worried it might not come, but because I want to get it over with. For the past four days I have been trying to live my life, see friends, get work done–—the usual—all the while I’ve been moody; I've had cramps; I’ve been constipated; I’ve had a migraine. I’m 47 years old and I’m wondering how much longer I have to put up with this. The light at the end of the tunnel is waiting for the day menopause hits and this will all be over. Honestly? I welcome it.
It has only been the last few years that menstruation has been intolerable. Since I originally got my period sometime around 12 and a half years old, it was never this annoying. I’ve been lucky to have fairly short and light periods my whole life. Sure, they were often a little irregular (ask me about the time I wore a white linen dress to a festival on an island only reachable by hourly ferry and got my period two days early) and sometimes I had symptoms like cramps or irritability but not for days before my period and never, like now, all at once.
I understand this is all part of perimenopause, the extended and not-so-fun prequel to menopause. Maybe it’s the body’s way of marking the end of my period—having days with a big finish, or making it so I won’t mourn fertility or get too caught up in aging.
Menopause, like all markers of growing older, seems to affect everyone in ways they can’t quite predict. Growing older has not been all that difficult for me. My blond hair started going gray in my mid-twenties and I highlighted it until there was enough platinum to grow it out white. My body is saggier, but as someone who has been on various diets since I was in elementary school, having a hot body was unfortunately never something I associated with myself. I have dabbled in Botox and fillers but none of them felt life-changing enough to justify how expensive they were.
So I have let myself age, dare I say it, naturally. But don’t get that confused with letting myself go. I get Brazilian waxes every month on the dot. I wore a miniskirt with a sheer black blouse to my birthday party last summer. The last serious relationship I had was with a man over 15 years younger than me (and I had more of a sex drive than him, so no issues in that area yet). I don’t know if I look the best of my life in my perimenopausal era but I do feel my best. I feel the most like myself, like it has taken this long to finally feel fully embodied. I’m me, and I’m imperfect.
I have certainly heard all the complaints from friends and strangers on TikTok alike about feeling invisible to the world as they age. I see it instead as more of a correction. Perhaps the outside world doesn’t give you as much validation but that has rarely been the way I’ve found it anyway. My body was for public consumption but mostly for strangers to mistake my belly for being pregnant or ask me who cut my curly hair.
In that respect, aging rewards someone like me who spent my so-called prime years as a woman wrestling with my own confidence. As a woman in the world, I feel vibrantly, deeply visible. I am opinionated to the point of being a loudmouth. I don’t feel weird about going out to dinner alone if I feel like, nor do I feel self-conscious about staying out until 4 am at bars every once in a while. It’s not so much that I’ve remade myself into some middle-aged new but that in midlife I’ve given myself permission to just live my life without a lot of second-guessing.
Instead of grief over getting older, I am finding freedom in this slow, extended walk towards menopause. And you know what will be the biggest indication of freedom? The one thing I can’t wait to never deal with? Never having to buy tampons again.