The Perimenopause Husband
Why My Wife Is Up at Night: Perimenopause Toilet Trips
Every night, she's up to the toilet.
It's a given in our house. It still is.
Even when she hasn't had anything to drink late. Nothing, and still up.
Which means a broken sleep. Every night.
Does perimenopause make you pee more?
In our house, the night trips are on the list.
Up to the toilet during the night sits right beside the heat and the waking at two or three in the morning. Up to the toilet in between is how the symptoms post puts it, and that's how it goes. Up, back into bed, and the night picks up where it left off, or doesn't.
On the way through to menopause, her body is going through a hormonal, biological change. The nights are one of the places it shows up.
If it's new, if it's getting worse, if it hurts, or if anything else comes with it, see a doctor or a specialist in this field. That's theirs to look at, not yours.
What did I get wrong?
I had a fix for it. Of course I did.
Drink less before bed.
It sounded like common sense. Less in, less out.
It wasn't the drink. That's the whole thing. She can have nothing late and still be up. So all my fix did was tell her she was doing it wrong, on top of a night she was already not sleeping through.
Why does one trip a night matter so much?
Because it's not one night. It's every night.
One broken sleep, you get over. A broken sleep every night, with no end date on it, is something else. It sits under every day that follows it.
And she's the one getting up. You're the one rolling back over.
What happens on your side of the bed when she gets up matters more than you'd think, and that has its own post: the creeping, and the sigh.
What can a husband do about it?
Here's one of the tools. There are plenty.
Drop the fix.
Not drink less before bed. Not have you tried going before you turn in. Not did you have a cuppa late. Not a count in the morning of how many times she was up.
None of those help, and every one of them puts the trips on her, like it's something she's getting wrong. She isn't. Her body is doing it, and it doesn't ask her first.
Let it be what it is. She's up, she's back, the night goes on. That's all it needs to be.
What I say to her now instead, and what else we changed about the nights, is in the book, in the chapter called Fixing the Nights.
Will it stop?
I can't tell you that. In ours it hasn't. It's still a given.
But a given you've stopped trying to fix is a lot lighter to live with than one you're both still pushing against at two in the morning.
Start With the Weather
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