Happy new you!

Cherish it while you can 

At 52 I ought to be worried – menopause is, after all, inevitable, and, at my age, apparently imminent.  I haven’t noticed any obvious signs just yet – apart from being fatter around the middle, which is all to do with the body trying to max out on any extra oestrogen it can produce in its tummy fat stores.

But, listening to Jenny Éclair on Woman’s Hour, I couldn’t have agreed more that the menopause’s timing is to say the least unfortunate – our loss of looks, confidence and sense of purpose coinciding with our children becoming independent at the same time as our parents are becoming alarmingly more needy.

There is, according to Jenny, a sense of life being over – and many of my friends, who seem to have got there ahead of me, are talking about a feeling of purposelessness.

Woman’s Hour decided to revisit the menopause a week after Jenny’s remarks – this time talking about the fact that many men find it difficult to look at their menopausal wives, because seeing them age is a reminder that they, too, are getting older. And, as if that wasn’t jolly enough, the show rounded off with a few comments on midlife marriage breakdown – apparently the result of dwindling libido, another symptom of menopause.  Thank you Woman’s Hour!

Desperate for a bit of light relief, I reached for my all time favourite health book – Xiaolan Zhao’s Traditional Chinese Medicine for Women: if anyone could talk a bit of sense on the subject, Zhao could. And I was sure I remembered her talking about menopause being a special time of a woman’s life when she was revered and respected. So, I leafed through, sighed with relief when I reached the chapter headed Natural Transition, and then read these golden reassuring words: ‘menopause is the harbinger of old age’.

Thank you Xialon Zhao – that’s just what we were worried about!