The Perimenopause Husband
What Every Husband Should Know About Perimenopause
For a couple of years, if you'd asked me what was going on with my wife, I'd have shrugged. Getting older. A bad patch.
And I said it to her. It's just a phase. You'll get through it.
Nobody had told me one thing about perimenopause. Not my dad. Not my mates. Nobody brought us up on it.
So here it is, written down. Ten things I'd hand any husband on day one. Every one of them comes from our house.
What should every husband know about perimenopause?
1. It's real.
Not a phase. Not her being difficult. Not getting older. I filed it under all three for a couple of years. It had a name the whole time.
2. It starts years before menopause.
Menopause is one day, the point her periods have stopped for good. Perimenopause is the years leading up to it, and that is where the weather is. I was waiting for her periods to stop as my marker. They went all over the place instead.
3. It turns up whenever it wants.
She gets no warning either. One day her hip went so badly she could barely cross a room, and she had done nothing out of the ordinary to bring it on.
4. Two of the big hormones are in it.
Oestrogen and progesterone. You can Google them. They have a hand in the parts of her brain that look after mood, sleep, memory and her body's thermostat. In perimenopause they rise and fall with no pattern, and over time they drop. There are others too.
Here's what that looked like in our house. She was hot when the rest of us were cold. That's oestrogen. It helps keep her temperature steady, and it wasn't holding the line the way it used to.
5. It's not only moods.
In our house it was heart palpitations bad enough to take us to emergency. A shoulder that froze. Hair coming out in the shower. Not every symptom there is, just the ones from our house.
6. She can't explain it.
I found her once on the end of the bed, tears rolling down her face. I asked what had happened. She said, I don't know, I just feel sad. That was the true answer, and it was the whole of it.
7. Home gets the flat version.
She'd come home from coffee with her girlfriends and the light would go out the minute she was through the door. That isn't a ranking. Home is the one place she can stop.
8. Most of it isn't about you. Some of it is.
The cheek instead of the kiss at the door was the weather. The way I hang the pegs on the line is me. Her way is better. Learning which is which is half the job.
9. You don't need to be a doctor.
The night her heart was racing, my only job was to get her there. When something is worrying either of you, she sees a doctor or a specialist in this field, and you go with her if she wants you there.
10. It runs in five weather patterns, and you can learn to read them.
Storm Warning, when the pressure is high and close to the surface. Overcast, flat and tired. Fog, there but nothing landing. Clearing, lifted a little but fragile. Sunshine, the days she's herself. She can go through all five in one day. One morning in our house was a full Storm Warning. By that afternoon she was out buying fresh food for dinner, in Sunshine.
What's the one thing I should do first?
Here's one of the tools. There are plenty.
Go back to the top of this page. It's just a phase, you'll get through it. That's the line to retire first.
Swap it for this: sit down, I've got tonight.
The first one tells her to wait it out on her own. The second one takes something off her, tonight, without asking her to explain a thing.
Say it, then do it. Dinner, the kitchen, whatever tonight was going to ask of her. If you say it and leave her to it anyway, you've just made the old line longer.
Where's the rest?
Every one of those ten has a chapter behind it in the book. The other lines I had to retire, and what I say now instead, are in The Things I Got Wrong.
You don't need all ten tonight. You need the first one, and the swap.
You are not a bad husband. You are just uninformed. That changes now.
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.