Autism & Menopausal Mothers

The menopause sucks.

There's just no way of dressing it up.

But if menopause sucks, going through it while my autistic son goes through puberty sucks even harder.  The politely coined 'peri-menopause' has stopped tapping lightly on my door is and now bulldozing the entire house down.  

It's really enjoying itself.

I'm OK with the whole getting older thing.  It's quite nice not being dead, for example.  And I also seem to get away with pretending I know what I'm talking about (people confuse maturity with wisdom all the time, which is hilarious).  Plus I care less and less about social rules and don't waste time (anymore) worrying what people think of me.  This care-free attitude seems to be inversely proportional to my proximity to death, but life is a double-edged sword like that.  None of this bothers me too much.

It's my body's reluctance to age in a civilised, orderly fashion that's not pleasing me.

This is My Menopause........

Movember is for amateurs.  I spend more time plucking hairs from my face than I care to admit.  I could easily grow a fulsome, luxuriant beard by tea time.

I'm buying enough lube to make my pharmacist wonder if he should be envious of, or terrified by, my sex life.  It's dry enough down there to start a bush fire.  Pun totally intended.

My skin is having a nervous breakdown trying to decide if it's going to have acne, fine lines, wrinkles or total jowly collapse.  So it's doing all of the above.

All of this is crap, but it's manageable crap.

But it's the hot flushes that are the killer.

Hot flushes are sneaky, ninja fuckers that assail me without warning or consistency.  It's hard to appear like a competent parent when my shirt has grown enormous blooms of sweat, and I could wring half a pint of perspiration from my knickers.  Waking up at 2am with my dripping  pj's welded to me leaves me cranky and unfocused.  There's also nothing sexy about wanting to throat-punch my lovely husband for cuddling up beside me in bed, just because I could power a small nation with the heat emitting from my ridiculous body.   

Being strung out by mercurial hormones does not lend itself to dealing with a stinky, horny, autistic teen with more mood swings than a bipolar jack rabbit.  And I'd also quite like to remain married, so there's that.

So I made an appointment with a menopause specialist and have started HRT.  It's got all the lovely health benefits of reducing  the risk of cardiovascular disease and osteoporosis, but mostly it's to stop me feeling like a miserable bitch.  And to help me manage Finian's autism a little better (....and also the marriage thing).

We need to look after ourselves, so we can look after our loved ones.  When there's a way to make life a little easier, it makes sense to go there.  Life is hard enough.

There are no prizes for martyrdom......... although I'd happily accept a nice grooming kit for growing the most impressive beard.

Autism & Hormones

Hormones are impish little chemical messengers we need to stay alive.

We need insulin to transport sugar from our blood into our cells.  Adrenaline activates our primal survival instincts. Melatonin makes us sleepy at night (unless, of course, you're my autistic son who takes this as a personal challenge).  There's about 50 more hormones playing fast and loose with our well-being, trying to maintain some semblance of balance within our insanely capricious bodies.

Hormones are all well and good, though, until they try to kill us.

I'm not so much thinking about the major diseases like diabetes or osteoporosis.  I'm more thinking about the complicated stew that exists within households when everybody's hormones affect everyone else's.

For the past few years, Finian has been surfing hormonal swells and troughs that have left him half-drowned and disorientated.  Meanwhile, I've been busy honing my menopausal skills of  becoming wise (laugh among yourselves, please), developing acne and growing an impressive beard.  

The co-existence of puberty and peri-menopause is the back-lash of women's audacity to live into old age.  A century ago (in the west) the life expectancy for women was 48.  In 1500 we could look forward to the sweet release of death at 35.  Good times.

Menopause was not a thing when you were the geriatric mother of toddlers.  We were pushing up the proverbial daisies long before our ovaries cashed in their pension and retired to a villa in Costa del Sol.

These days, the chemical soup of living in a house with badly behaved hormones is the unwanted gift that keeps on giving..... like the Christmas bath salts that can be multi-purposed as drain cleaner.  We think we've reached the end of it, but it always surprises us with an unexpected new layer.

Recently we took Finian for psychiatric evaluation as we couldn't figure out if his escalating anxiety and self-harming was a result of puberty, pathology or autism.  Or maybe a thrilling blend of all three?  We're still none the wiser really.  It reminds me of the unending new layers of therapy; I dig into the dark places, process the blocks of awfulness and then endure the post-grief exhaustion.  Believing, in my naivety, that it's over.  But it never fucking is.  It'd be so wonderful to take a holiday from myself for just a while; I can totally see the attraction of searching for a little oblivion down a bottle or in a pill.  Of course, there's no real escape from our clashing hormones or from our dark stuff.  We have to be brave enough to live our real lives.  The best route of 'escape' is to work through the shit show with courage and vulnerability.

I bet our ancestral sisters, who never needed a tweezers or hair dye, are laughing in their graves at us.

not a real Christmas gift

Autism & The Dining Room Table

I am blessed to have three healthy, amazing kids. The youngest, tallest and wildest of these is my autistic son Finian.  Sixteen years ago he grabbed normal family life by the scruff of the neck and gave it a good, neuro-atypical shake.  He continues to remind us that if life is indeed like a box of chocolates, then it is unpredictably autism flavoured.

I try to put a positive spin on living with autism but sometimes, much as I love my son, it just sucks.

My life trajectory has not been so much redirected, as plucked out for singular ridicule by the universe, forced through a celestial mincer and presented back to me as a misaligned game of strategy and survival.  The rules are more laughable suggestions than solid guidelines.  It is a game of distorted reflections and unreliable footholds that makes progress slow, tiresome and laced with mistrust.

If God created my life, then evidence suggests he's a drunk toddler driven mad with the power of having too many crayolas at his disposal.  In keeping with the spirit of autism, he may have even eaten a few.   

So, I find myself sitting at my laptop, contemplating the slings and arrows of destiny, when I realise that  my dining room table is judging me.

"Guilty as charged"

The worktop itself is a curious landscape.  

Carefully positioned Bob the Builder toys compete for elbow space with my laptop.   Letters I will absolutely, definitely get around to replying to someday sulk like atheists at a christening. A mirror and tweezers are testament to the many hours I spend plucking man-sized whiskers out of my chin (thank you, never-ending menopause).  Seriously, those hairs should be harvested to build suspension bridges or prison gates or something.  They're tough.

The most notable thing about my dining room table is the glaring absence of food, unless the random bottle of ketchup that appeared there can be described as food.  

This intrepid sauce bottle inexplicably spent the last week in my daughter's bedroom, but seems to have paused to take stock of  life on its pilgrimage back to the larder.  Like it's on a spiritual retreat for condiments.  On my table.

I identify with that bottle of ketchup.

It just spent a hellish week on my daughter's bedroom floor, questioning it's purpose and identity, among a war-zone of decomposing laundry, make-up brushes and dog hair.  It bravely embarked on it's own odyssey to return to its spiritual home (the larder).  Instead, it found itself moored on the dining room table, stranded among the splatterings of life with autism.  The ketchup has an inkling that it would sorta belong on the table if confusion didn't reign.... but really it just wants to return to the safety of the cupboard where it can kick back with the dried herbs and out-of-date mustard.

I am that ketchup.  

I'm a simple, unassuming creature, mostly composed of vinegar and chemical preservatives.  

I also appear to have found myself stranded in a place I didn't chose to visit, in a landscape that doesn't make any sense.  

Nothing works the way it's supposed to (our TV is mostly tuned into Hungarian cartoon channels).  

I can't quite reach the destination I'm aiming for (it would be nice to complete my education before my corporeal expiry date).  

The function of, well, everything is contorted to adapt to autism (see dining room table above).

the artist formerly known as Jean

Meanwhile, the ketchup is delighted with it's own irony.  It represents the food that should be present on my table, while hanging onto the definition of food with the loosest of grips.  It says "yeah, i'm a reminder of how things should be and I'm still kinda crap".

That bottle of ketchup is having an existential crisis.  

My dining room table should be hosting nice, middle-aged dinners with a normal, pleasant family. We would have respectful, engaging discussions about climate change and current affairs. The well-planned meals would definitely not be a hurried concoction of whatever is left in the fridge that (probably) won't kill you.  Instead I am jostling for space with Scoop the Digger, unpaid bills and hair removal implements.  Meal times are about maintaining the curious tension of hitting moving targets with food while not killing anyone.

My table is judging me, as well it should.

Perhaps writing about autism will help me map some meaning onto life's shifting sands.  Sometimes the act of organising thoughts into sentences is enough to untangle knotty ideas.  Perhaps it will also motivate me to clear my table.