Dear Perimenopause:....

[MakersDozn]

More female stuff. Our males have gone into hiding and are....scratching themselves or something. Whatever.

Rather than start another menstrual/menopausal thread, we figured we'd just contain our b*tching here instead of taking our gripes about "Aunt Flo" elsewhere.

The body is 52 (will be 53 right after New Year's). Been going through menopause for roughly a year and a half. Much to our dismay, Aunt Flo doesn't just leave home for good; like a bad penny, she seems to re-appear now and then every few months, causing us enough disruption to want us to tell her to FOAD for good.

From late September 2013 to early January '14, 3.5 months without her presence. Early Feb, early March, then two months without her until early May. Then nothing for the rest of spring and summer. Counting. Three, four, five, six, seven and a half months of freedom.

Then, this past Monday, on come mood swings strikingly similar to that of the PMDD we've experienced in the early stages of menopause. Ugh. We figured it was actually stress from dealing with our parents' estate, cleaning out the house in prep to sell it sometime next year. And ongoing system/T stuff. CPTSD crap.

But no, Aunt Flo has to show her butt-ugly face on Christmas Eve and ruin our holiday. Our family is Jewish, so there wasn't going to be an event to attend. But brother #1 (B1) and his wife were in town and were meeting brother #2 at the house to do some more cleaning. We told each brother that we would see how we were feeling, and not to count on us coming.

On Christmas morning, we called B1's cellphone, and SIL answered it while B1 was driving. We explained to her that we'd had a hitch in our menopause process and were feeling lousy. SIL had gone through it two years ago, even though she was only 45 at the time. We made plans to all meet at the house this Saturday, not for more cleaning, but to exchange gifts and go out to eat.

And here we are. We're not in the physical/emotional/hormonal agony of a couple of days ago, but the setback in the menopause process is discouraging. It's generally not considered done until the body has gone for a year without a period. And now we're back on the clock again.

Bleh.

Laura and others