24 Shocking Facts About Menopause

Found on menno-pause.com

 

1. You need to carry out a full risk assessment before you wear a white dress ANY TIME during the month.
2. Some days your boobs are as dense as when your milk came in after giving birth, other days they have the limpness of overcooked pasta.
3. There is a reason middle-aged women veer towards a line and voluminous tent dresses – to allow for the sudden bloating caused by the most minor food intolerances or hormonal reactions to stress.
4. Wind is harder to contain in private and has become an eager performer that can burst forth in public without a moment’s warning.
5. Your body no longer ‘glows’ or ‘perspires’ – it sweats like a racehorse at the end of the Melbourne Cup, and usually at the most inopportune moments, or in bed at night.
6. ‘Libido’ becomes a foreign word, that leaves you feeling puzzled and these days you find sex scenes on the tv quite repugnant. You can’t actually remember what wanting to make love ever felt like.
7. You finally realize that dieting is a fruitless exercise when food becomes even more enticing because your body is forcing you to get fat lay down carbs to protect your brittle bones. You decide to take the ‘let it go’ approach to sugar.
8. The art of sleeping is lost. Anxiety has kicked in so hard that your brain goes into overdrive the minute you turn off your bedside lamp at night, every sound is intensified and you’re hot, FUCKING HOT, ALL THE TIME. This is obviously why your parents ended up in separate bedrooms, you realise. You finally fall asleep around 5am, just before you need to get up.
9. You become particularly intolerant to men. Your procreation work is done so you don’t need them physically any more and they have become a tiresome drain on your emotions. You take pleasure in windows of opportunity to plan your divorce.
10. You research ways to get your young adult kids to leave home even earlier than they planned.
11. God might have made your body less tolerant to wine in a final attempt to test the superiority of women, but you won’t go down without a fight and so hangovers have taken on a new degree of pain.
12. Comfortable clothing has become hugely attractive. You make a beeline to the top floors in Myer and the plus-size sections. Wide pants, flat shoes, floaty dresses – bring them on! – your brain assures you that they suit your new shape. ‘Invisibility’ is a godsend if it means you don’t have to give a fuck anymore about what you look like.
13. You become more insular, less sociable and nothing is more appealing than bed before 10pm in the company of a good book. You get excited about getting up early to make the most of the day.
14. You focus your energies on friends who still drink and REALLY care about you.
15. Going for walks suddenly becomes interesting.
16. Hand cream becomes interesting and T2 is your new favourite shop.
17. You research ways you can convince your doctor to give you a hysterectomy.
18. You cry at the drop of a hat, but especially when you run out of wine, during adverts and when you stick your mascara wand in your eye because you’re too longsighted to know what the fuck you’re doing with it.
19. Fuck ‘goals’! Your new approach to life is just ‘living’, ‘surviving’ and making the most of what time you have left.
20. Fuck ‘saving’ money.
21. The dog has become your new best friend because your teenagers hate you, you hate them and you ran out of conversation with your long term partner around your ten-year anniversary. The two of you have perfected the art of a long and meaningful conversation through the dog. It is an interesting fact that all dogs lisp.
22. Everything your long term partner does, irritates you – not replacing the toilet roll, stealing the doona in the middle of the night (even if you are burning a hormonal fever) and not wiping the bench top down can turn you into a vengeful psychopath who ruminates over the torture scenes in Game of Thrones.

    

    A toilet paper roll (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

23. People you fantasise about killing include all white-coated, orange beauty assistants in department stores, men over forty, everyone at work, skinny women and anyone who dares to disagree with you.
24. Remembering names is a daily challenge. You confuse the kids names with the dog and sometimes you can’t even remember who you’re married to when you’re bitching about him with your friends.