The Perimenopause Husband
Hot Flushes: What One Actually Looks Like, and What to Do When It Hits
Middle of winter. Genuinely cold, the kind of night where you pile every blanket you own on the bed and still feel the window from across the room.
I woke up at some point and she had taken her clothes off. Pushed the covers half off her side.
In the middle of winter.
Was she sending me a signal?
My first thought went exactly where you think it went. A bloke wakes up, his wife is undressing next to him in the dark for no reason he can see, and his head does the one bit of arithmetic it has always done.
I read it completely wrong. It had nothing to do with me at all.
She was burning from the inside out, and getting every layer off as fast as she could was the only relief available to her.
What does a hot flush actually look like?
Not what I expected, and this is the bit I want to be plain about.
I had heard the words. I thought a hot flush meant she felt a bit warm. A bit warm is a feeling. You notice it, you comment on it, you take the jumper off, and a minute or two later you have cooled down and you have forgotten about it. That is what I assumed was happening to her.
This was not that. It was a switch flipping. Fast, no warning, no build up, and her body dealing with it the only way it could. One minute she was asleep under three blankets in a freezing room. The next she was throwing everything off and lying there in the cold trying to get her temperature back.
Then she would be fine. Then it would happen again.
It goes on the same list as the rest of it, the mood that arrives out of nowhere, the fog some mornings, the tiredness that sleep does not fix. Nobody had ever sat either of us down and said the years running into menopause could do this to a person. So I had no map for it, and neither did she.
That is worth sitting with. She was not managing this well and choosing not to tell me. She had no more warning than I did.
Does it only happen at night?
No. In our house it lands most often of an evening, so that is what we notice, but there is no timetable to it. It turns up in the middle of the day. It turns up in the car.
Early morning, freezing, windscreen fogged over. Every instinct I have says put the heater on, clear the glass, warm the cabin up before we go anywhere. And I cannot, because she is burning. So the heater stays off, or the air con goes on, in the middle of winter, and I drive in my jacket.
There is no warning on it. She will just say she is feeling really hot. That is the whole announcement.
It does not last all day. But when it is there, it is there, and nothing about the weather outside gets a vote.
Why is she hot when the room is freezing?
Because the heat is not coming from the room.
That sounds obvious written down. It was not obvious to me at the time, and it is the single thing I would go back and tell myself. Every time I reached for a window, a fan or a setting on the wall, I was working on the room. The room was never the problem.
We got lucky in one way. We never had the fight about it. No blow up over the power bill, no standing in the hallway arguing about the air con. What we ended up with instead is simple enough that we have never had to discuss it: she owns the dial. She puts it where she needs it, and I do not touch it and I do not comment on it.
I know plenty of houses do have that fight. If yours is one of them, that is what it is. She is not being difficult and she is not exaggerating. She has nothing to point at. You have a number on the wall and she has nothing, and pointing at the number is not winning, mate. It is just proving you are still working on the room.
What do you do when one hits?
One thing. Move to help her, and do not talk to her about it.
Move means get up. Not in a minute, now. And here is what you are actually moving for, because I would have wanted this spelled out.
Take the doona off her side and leave it off. Open the window. Get the fan and point it at her. Cold water on the bench without her having to ask for it. In the car, hand her the dial and keep your hands off it.
That is the moving half. The other half is that you do all of it without saying a word about it.
The mistake I made for a long stretch was treating a flush as something for the two of us to discuss. What is going on, are you alright, do you want me to do something. Every question was one more thing she had to answer in the middle of the worst thirty seconds of her night. She did not need a conversation. She needed the layers gone.
So get up, do the practical thing, fast, and then leave it alone. No commentary. No making it a thing she then has to manage.
Does it stop?
It changes. Ours did, and the nights in our house got a lot easier once we stopped trying to solve two different temperatures with one blanket. How we actually fixed the nights, and the two habits that came out of it, is the Fixing the Nights chapter of the book.
But you do not need any of that tonight. Tonight you just need to get up and get the heat off her, and stop working on the room.
And if something about it worries either of you, see a doctor. That is not a fob off. We spent a year finding out one of hers was not what we assumed, and I would rather you asked early.
Start With the Weather
The Weather Report is the two-page guide to reading these days: telling a storm warning from an overcast day from a fog day, and knowing the one thing to do in each. Free, on your phone in thirty seconds.