For the wives

A Perimenopause Letter to Your Husband, From One

By Phil, The Perimenopause Husband

To the husband reading this.

She came home from the doctor. I had just walked into the kitchen to have a chat with her, and she was already there at the bench.

She said the word to me. Perimenopause.

I nodded. Righto.

That was the whole of my answer.

If your wife has sent you this, she is saying the word to you now. I'd like you to do better with it than I did.

Why has she sent you this?

Because she is tired of explaining it, and she shouldn't have to.

I didn't know what perimenopause was. My wife didn't know what it was either. Nobody brought us up on it. Blokes go through life thinking people just get older, a bit crankier, and we never ask why.

She is not sending you homework. She is not building a case against you. She is handing you the word, the same way mine did across that bench.

What did I get wrong?

For the first couple of years, I blamed her. I didn't know what was in the house.

The short answers, the nights she was up, the heat when the rest of us were cold. I had all of it filed under her. Her mood. Her being difficult.

I'll say this part plainly, because it matters. It was never that I didn't care. I didn't know how big it was. From where she was standing, those two can look exactly the same.

That's the gap this letter is trying to close for you.

What is she actually carrying?

More than you can see from the other side of the room.

In our house it was awake at two or three in the morning and not getting back to sleep. Burning up from the inside, fast. Walking into a room and forgetting why. Sad with nothing attached to it. Heart palpitations bad enough that we ended up in hospital. A shoulder that froze.

And one sentence that was harder to hear than all of those. I don't feel like myself any more, and I don't know why.

None of it runs to a timetable. It turns up whenever it wants, and she has no idea when. That is not every symptom there is, just the ones from our house. Yours will have its own.

Anything new, or anything that frightens either of you, she sees a doctor or a specialist in this field. And you go with her, if she wants you there.

You don't need to be a doctor to get this. Just imagine carrying all of that, and still being expected to front up and function properly every day.

And this is the bit I wish I'd heard first. It isn't happening to her while you stand next to it waiting for it to finish. It is happening to the two of you. Respect, both ways, is what gets a couple through it.

What do I do with this?

Here's one of the tools. There are plenty. This one is for tonight.

Find her, and tell her you read it.

That's the whole thing. Don't defend yourself. Don't explain what you were thinking all those times. Don't ask her to walk you through the rest of it tonight.

I read it. Then let her decide what comes next.

Righto told my wife the word had gone nowhere. I read it tells her that this time, it landed.

Will it get better?

I can't promise you how it goes in your house. Nobody honest can.

I can tell you about ours. We came out of it closer than we'd been in years, and we were close to start with.

Your wife is your best friend. Mine is. She was living it inside herself while I stood at the bench saying righto. She's worth the effort. And you are more capable of helping her through this than you've ever been told.

From one husband to another,

The Perimenopause Husband

If you're the one sending this

You don't have to find the words for him. That's what this is for.

Send it on an ordinary day. Not on a Storm Warning day, one of the five weather patterns we use in our house, when the pressure is high and close to the surface, because then it can land on him as blame. No explanation needed. He'll know why you sent it.

And if you want his side of it first, I wrote you a letter too.

The whole story, and every tool I found along the way, is in Stepping Into the Storm With Her.