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