Am I well prepared for menopause?

Knowledge

A Tuesday evening, ten past eleven, everyone is in bed. You opened your phone to check something else and you find yourself typing "first signs of menopause" into the search bar. The results come up, and in four minutes you have read a list of thirty-two possible symptoms, an article explaining that it all starts much earlier than people think, and the account of a woman who did not sleep properly for two years. You close the app with an unpleasant feeling: you know more than you did five minutes ago and you are more worried. The next morning, all that is left is the worry, and none of the information. During the day, twice, you catch yourself watching for something in your body — a hot flush that is not one, a tiredness like that of any Wednesday. That monitoring did not exist the evening before last.

To try: Don't look for what might happen, look for three specific things: how long the transition can last, what falls within the ordinary, and what justifies seeking advice. Write those three answers on a sheet of paper and stop there. A list of thirty-two symptoms prepares you for nothing — it installs a state of monitoring. Three reference points, on the other hand, stay in mind and genuinely serve you on the day something appears.

Practical anticipation

One Thursday, in the car, you hear a program discussing this period. What the guest says strikes you as right, and you tell yourself very clearly: I ought to make an appointment, ask the question, get myself a little organized. That thought is sharp, it lasts about thirty seconds. Then you arrive, you have to park, there is a message to send before four o'clock and some shopping to do on the way home. Three weeks later, a conversation with a colleague brings back exactly the same thought, in the same terms, with the same sharpness. And you realize you have had it before, without knowing how many times. What strikes you is not having forgotten: it is that nothing, in the meantime, has happened that could have made that thought anything other than a thought. It left exactly as it had arrived.

To try: The next time this thought comes, don't let it pass: give it thirty more seconds and a date. Open your diary and put down something tiny — call for an appointment, look for a name. This kind of resolution almost never fails through lack of will, it fails because no moment has been assigned to it. An intention without a date comes back identically every month, indefinitely.

Attitude and openness

Lunch at work, a Monday. Someone makes a joke about hot flushes, the kind you often hear, and two people laugh. You don't really laugh, but you don't tense up either. You ask a question — simple, direct, about what the colleague concerned actually went through. There is a small silence, because that is not the expected sequel to a joke. Then she answers, briefly at first, then at greater length. She tells you things you did not know, and you realize that no one else round the table knew them either. Lunch resumes its course, but you leave with something you did not have when you arrived. Going back up to your desk, a thought comes to you: she may have been waiting for months for someone to ask her for something other than a polite laugh. And one question was enough, asked without any particular care.

To try: Remember this sequence, because it measures your resource exactly: it was your question that opened the conversation, and one was enough. This week, ask another of the same kind, of someone else. You are not trying to collect accounts, you are checking something useful — that the silence around this subject is not down to a refusal to speak, but to the absence of someone to ask the question.

Network of resources

The doctor's waiting room, a Friday morning. You have come for a repeat prescription, it will take ten minutes. Sitting there, you tell yourself this would be the moment to ask what you need to know, whom to turn to, what to expect. Once in the consulting room, the appointment goes quickly and efficiently: the reason for the visit, the prescription, a question about your work. Nothing in the way it unfolds makes room for a subject that is not yet a problem. You leave with what you came for, and without what you really wanted to ask. On the pavement, you tell yourself it will be for next time. It is the third time you have told yourself that. What is striking is that nothing stood in the way: no one cut you off, no one seemed rushed. There was simply no moment set aside for a question that is not yet a nuisance to anyone.

To try: Two steps completely change this scene, and they are simple. First, state the reason when you book the appointment: "I'd also have a question about menopause." That reserves time and removes the question of legitimacy. Second, if you have not done that, keep the question for the moment when you stand up. A great many important things get said with a hand on the door handle, and they get said all the same.

Willingness to talk about it

One Sunday, lunch at your mother's. The conversation passes close to the subject — a program, a neighbor, a remark about tiredness — and you feel there would be room for a question. You hesitate. You tell yourself she has never talked about that, that she might find it out of place, that it is not the moment with the children in the room. The conversation moves on to something else and the moment closes. In the car on the way back, you wonder what she would have said. And another thought arrives, stranger: perhaps she too has been waiting for someone to ask her the question. You try to imagine whom she could have talked to about it at the time, and you can't think of anyone. That silence, you realize, does not come from her: it was passed on to her exactly as it was passed on to you.

To try: If you open this subject, ask a question of fact rather than a question of feeling: "how old were you when it started, and what would you have liked to know beforehand?" It is concrete, it obliges no one to open up, and it almost always gets an answer. Questions of feeling on this subject close the conversation; questions of fact open it, and the feelings come afterwards of their own accord if the other person wants them to.

A failure of transmission, not a failure of preparation

This is the reading that this report favors, and it must be presented as a hypothesis. It proposes that what you lack has nothing to do with your disposition but with what no one has passed on to you: neither your mother, nor school, nor ordinary consultations. Your scores support it, since your attitude is high while your knowledge and your resources are low. But a profile of scores does not establish a cause, and the opposite reading remains possible: a discreet reluctance to approach the subject could produce exactly the same configuration, while presenting itself as openness. If, in reading these pages, you feel that something more reluctant is being dismissed too quickly here, it is your experience that is right, not this text.

A question of availability, not of your relationship to menopause

A competing reading, more prosaic and often accurate, would be to consider that this subject does not get dealt with simply because it is not urgent, and that nothing which is not urgent gets dealt with in an already full life. Work, children, aging parents: the period in which one might anticipate menopause is also the one in which responsibilities pile up most. On this reading, your low score measures neither your relationship to this stage nor your worry, but the state of your diary. The argument supporting it is your high attitude score: someone reluctant would not be so open to the subject. This hypothesis has the advantage of pointing to a simple action, requiring no inner work but ten minutes set aside.

A worry that goes beyond this subject

A third reading, more demanding, would be to consider that what you feel in the face of menopause is the current form of a more general worry about what the body can do without warning. On this hypothesis, menopause is not the cause but the object of the moment, and the same apprehension has shown itself elsewhere — before a medical examination, faced with an everyday symptom, at other stages. Settling the matter calls for frankness rather than analysis: is this fear of bodily unpredictability familiar to you? If the answer is yes, finding out more will relieve less than expected, because the problem is not ignorance. It would then be a question to take, if you wish, to a professional — and it goes far beyond the subject of this test.

What if anticipating nothing suited you?

This reading must be put seriously, and it is perfectly defensible. Nothing establishes that one must prepare for menopause. Many women go through it without having anticipated anything, and some live distinctly better discovering things as they come than documenting in advance what might happen — because finding out, for an anxious temperament, sometimes amounts to starting to monitor. It is therefore possible that your low score measures no deficiency at all, but an implicit choice that works well for you. Just one reservation, and it is important: this reading holds for knowledge, it holds less for support. Not knowing what lies ahead is a defensible choice; not knowing whom to turn to if the need arises is a vulnerability that can be corrected in two minutes, and there is no reason to do without.