10 Disturbing Things Nobody Ever Tells You About Going Through Menopause
Red alert!
VH-studio / Shutterstock When you want to keep menopausal madness at bay, here are 10 things that all menopausal women know too well.
And if you have yet to experience menopause due to your age, here's what happens during menopause.
Here are 10 disturbing things nobody ever tells you about going through menopause:
1. You're always hangry.
You go out to sushi with a large group of extended family members. Everyone else is done eating and your order still hasn’t arrived. You go into hunger-related psychosis and, like the whipped-up Calvary coming round the bend at the Battle of Gettysburg, you unearth your waitress in a bus station and demand to have your halibut sashimi.
She makes the mistake of arguing with you, a ravenous, perimenopausal woman, saying it’s not her fault because the sushi bar is backed up. This incites you to yell, “I was a waitress for ten years and you’re a terrible waitress and you better not add a gratuity because we’re a large party and where is your freaking manager so I can get you fired?”
After which you rail at the pretty, petite, Japanese manager who smiles the entire time you’re yelling because she doesn’t understand English and thinks you ordered a “tuna roll” when you said, “heads should roll.” And then there’s a moment where you sort of step out of your body and look down at yourself yelling and you kind of casually think, “Wow. She's crazy.”
Then you return to your body and the table whereupon your siblings, nieces, and nephews treat you like you’re strapped to a self-detonating bomb. Quickly your mood swings in the opposite direction. You’re overtaken by remorse and leave the waitress a 25 percent tip, even though the kitchen ran out of your halibut sashimi and you had to eat your sister’s soggy seaweed salad.
2. Your moods are completely unpredictable.
You’re offended the next morning when your husband and daughters tiptoe around you as if you were a vat of nitroglycerin.
3. You experience hot tsunami waves of hot flashes
You’re picking up a latte at your favorite Internet cafe when suddenly your entire body is awash in a hot tsunami.
It starts behind your knees, sweeps mercilessly up to your groin, floods your armpits, and rolls into shore at your hair follicles. You ask the manager if you can, just briefly, step into her freezer locker and she lets you, probably because she heard about you from the manager at the sushi restaurant and thinks you might be unhinged. While you’re in the freezer locker you eat a wheel of gruyere.
4. Everything makes you hungry.
Standing up makes you hungry. Looking out the window makes you hungry. Sleeping makes you hungry. Breathing makes you hungry. Your mail carrier thinks you’re pregnant, which both flatters (because she thinks you’re young enough to get knocked up) and appalls (for obvious reasons).
5. You cry at the silliest things.
After everyone’s in bed, you watch the Friends episode where Phoebe Buffay thinks a stray cat is the reincarnation of her dead mother.
Which makes you think about what would happen if you died and your children looked for your reincarnated soul in stray cats or feral possums and how that would ruin their lives and they’d end up living in the gutter with grocery carts full of stolen cat food, which makes you cry ceaselessly, but you can’t help thinking, as you’re crying, that this loss of fluids might waylay more hot flashes?
6. TV shows don't entertain you like they used to.
The following morning you see local billboards for the horror film The Strain. Where a worm is coming out of a woman’s eyeball, which makes you feel that, as a society, we’re basically doomed if this is the kind of stuff we call entertainment.
7. Your body goes through electric-like shocks throughout the day.
That afternoon, while cleaning the house, you feel like your body is full of electric shocks and you’re the kite Benjamin Franklin used to discover electricity. You think you could plug the vacuum cleaner into your mouth and vacuum the whole house.
You don’t want Henry to touch you in case your electric shocks collide with your watery hot flashes and you inadvertently electrocute him. And he already doesn’t have a lot of hair. And isn’t yet in need of an implanted defibrillator for his estrogen-weakened heart.
8. You yearn to have men experience what happens during menopause.
You decide to make a video about menopausal women emasculating unsuspecting men instead of dinner. It seems to be your calling. God and all those crazy menopause facts told you to do it.
9. It seems like your vagina is out to get you.
That night your vagina becomes passive-aggressive. One minute she’s hot and bothered, the next she’s as frigid as Michelle Pfeiffer in Scarface.
10. You become emotional at the thought of losing your husband.
Once Henry’s asleep and you have insomnia, you’re overtaken by a stingingly desperate love for your husband.
Because at 53 he’s already beginning to die more quickly than you. You can’t stop hugging and kissing him. You can’t help smothering his feet with your feet. Then, just as quickly, his irregular sleep breathing pattern pisses you off and you ask him to roll over. That does it! Henry cries. You’re unbearable.
He pelts out of bed and dashes out (as quickly as a dying old man can) to get an emergency supply of your meds from the 24-hour pharmacy.
Ladies, if you know what happens during menopause, how do you combat these symptoms? Gentlemen, what are your woman’s early symptoms, and are you in love with a hooker name Clarisse?
Shannon Colleary is an actor, author of five books, and writer of the movie "To The Stars." Her blog, The Woman Formerly Known As Beautiful, focuses on relationship and lifestyle topics.