Menopause remains embarrassing, it reveals the truth - we are ageing.
Another great article by Suzanne Moore in the Guardian, I like were she says: "Tell middle-aged woman that their rage is not an individual problem to be feared, it’s fuel for the fire of the next stage of their lives."
Suzanne Moore is a 'pull no punches' journalist of the right age, a great voice to listen to at menopause. Here are a couple of extracts from this article that I enjoyed:
"Then comes the time of life when you can no longer have children, and feel tired and grumpy (can you tell?). You must also do everything you possibly cannot to look your age and soothe yourself with hormonal replacement therapy (HRT), which now increases your risk of breast cancer nearly threefold. Give me a break. Literally, give me a break. Except, now we are to supposed to work till we are 67 because the pension age has been shifted."
"If your sense of self-value is so absolutely bound up with how you look and not with how you feel, you will never be “worth it”, whatever age you are. This is how we live now, with ordinary women comparing themselves with those whose faces and bodies are their fortunes, while these most gorgeous creatures hate themselves for ageing.
The biggest compliment you can give a woman is not “Well done on that PhD”, but: “You don’t look your age.” This overvaluing of how we look and undervaluing of what we know, this mismatch between our insides and outsides, is a huge cause of misery right through a woman’s life-cycle, and it’s getting worse."
Read the full article here.