I expected the hot flashes and night sweats. I braced for the mood swings. What I wasn’t prepared for was the anger: the white-hot, surging-through-my-veins anger. Offenses that I had successfully overlooked for the previous five decades pricked this vein, including: being talked over, being called a girl (women over fifty are definitely not girls), and having doctors disregard my legitimate concerns.
My poor husband was disoriented. Prior to this time, he had only heard me swear once: during the transition phase of my (unmedicated) second delivery. Now, I could rarely get through the week without letting a few choice words fly.
Anger was unfamiliar to me. Well, more accurately, expressing anger was unfamiliar to me. Truth be told, hitting menopause simply tapped into fifty years worth of anger.
I got the message early on that good girls don’t get angry. Because I valued acceptance over emotional integrity, I submerged these feelings. As a teenager and young adult, I channeled all my anger (and other non-acceptable emotions) into athletics. That worked in high school and college but upon graduation from the latter, the river where I had deposited my anger dried up. Several years later, I remember walking past a tchotchkes booth at the local mall and feeling the desire to smash the fragile, glass figures with a baseball bat. It did not occur to me that my anger was screaming to be heard. I passed it off as a quirky impulse.
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