Disclaimer: This is not a post about Florida road trips. It happens.  

My generation — Gen X — is the first one to really talk about menopause.  Our mothers didn’t. Our grandmothers didn’t. And lord knows our health teachers didn’t bring it up. But now that we’re here, some of us are kinda pissed that no one warned us about… well, all of it.

This post is about one specific experience I had with menopause.

I’m 52. My perimenopause started when I was in my 40s. I was in menopause at 49. See, I’m not even sure what those words mean. I started having hot flashes, night sweats, and what I like to call “enhanced rage” (because honestly I’ve struggled keeping things to a low boil from a young age) around 43 or so. By 50, that had all stopped (and I can’t say enough about how much acupuncture helped with all of it). I am squarely in postmenopausal territory.

Or so I thought.

I’d gone a year without a period, and when that happens doctors agree that perimenopause ends and menopause begins. I mean, doctors consider other factors, too, like your hormone levels, but you must go a full 12 months without a period  before you’re considered menopausal. Which is somehow actually the same thing as being post-menopausal. Yes, that’s confusing. This is how the Cleveland Clinic defines it: “Once you’ve reached menopause, you enter the post-menopausal stage. ”

Right.

The website goes on to explain, “you’re now at an increased risk for conditions like osteoporosis and heart disease.”

But hey, you don’t get a period anymore, right? So there’s that. And also the symptoms of perimenopause also start to go away.

Earlier this month, I started spotting.

This hadn’t happened in years, and my first reaction was annoyance. The reward for bone loss, decreased tolerance for asshattery, wight gain, night sweats, a shitty memory, and random bits of rage… the reward at the end is that you stop getting your period.

I threw out my Diva cup years ago. The closest thing we have to tampons in the house are cotton swabs. I googled. I called my doctor. She ordered bloodwork.

“I think you’ve had a period,” she said when I saw her today.

“What the fuck?” I said. (Given that my ob/gyn is amazing and has, on occasion, used the word “cooter” in reference to anatomy, I felt OK with the language.)

She reviewed my bloodwork with me, showing me that my FSH (follicle shedding hormone) indicated I had ovulated last month.

“I’m in menopause,” I replied.

“Not this month,” she said.

“Wait, am I going back? That’s so not fair.”

I wasn’t mad at her, of course. I was mad at my traitorous body and legions of women and medical professionals who guarded the secrets of menopause like the damn Holy Grail.

After assuring me that I wouldn’t have to go through perimenopause again (and also that I didn’t have uterine cancer, because that was the first result when I googled “post-menopausal bleeding”) and that we could adjust my estrogen,  I thanked her, we finished my exam, and I left.

On the drive home I called my husband and told him the news.

“Well, I’m glad we escaped having to make an emergency trip to North Carolina,” he said.

“Oh, GOD,” I said. “I could have gotten pregnant. I could get pregnant…”

He got real quiet and then I realized he was joking… I had my tubes tied 17 years ago.

At least the memory lost that accompanies menopause is consistent.