Time, Tide and Midlife Blessings

You are transfixed by the ocean waves. Squatting, encrusted top-to-toe in sand; you scoop, and mould barriers and structures designed to hold back the tide.

Defences built to fortify the land against the insurgent waters with their tumultuous roar.  

Grand, parallel and cylindrical turreted castles, monster-inhabited moats excavated and engineered to precision.

Your tiny, voracious fingers push and shape with unfaltering optimism. For you believe without question, this time, this structure (like none that came before) will defy the white frothy fingers of the Atlantic Ocean tide.

As if, with the strength of your skinny four-year-old body and that mighty heart, this ebbing tide will flow no more.

As if this could never be a fruitless endeavour.

Until another conquering wave breaks, dissolving your architectural wonder to nought. The crafted turrets and driftwood drawbridge acquiesce into this wild, expansive beach of boundless curiosity and wonder right here where we spend our Summer in the Medoc Atlantique.

While you squeal and dance and spin on your heels. Electrified in delight.

Before beginning again. Building, crafting, defying. With even greater endeavour. Morning until dusk until the calling of your hungry supper-time tummy draws you landward.  

Sandcastles. A four-year old’s folly.

Watching your face in sheer delight; your enthusiasm perennial as the ocean waves, I wonder where the last five years have gone.

Between your arrival, those years lost in a perfect storm of exhaustion, overwhelming love and gratitude, and this moment here, now, with midlife at my door, with all its shifting sands and the fear of the unfamiliar.

Surrender the first half century. The end of fertility. The cloak of perimenopause now enveloped.

End of chapter one.

This journey, destination menopause, began in the 2020 Winter Covid ‘lock down’.

During my government prescribed one hour per day exercise allocation, I found myself walking beside the river, tears streaming down my cold cheeks; a deep sense of despair.

At 44 I had finally achieved everything I had ever dreamt of. A happy marriage, a successful career, a beautiful home, close friends and family, a young healthy son born after many years of infertility treatment.

There were no obvious life detriments and no knowledge of the impending doom that I felt and could not fathom.

And yet I was so sad. Sadness interrupted only by uncontrollable bursts of anger on par with that of my son’s terrible twos, then three-year-old, toddler meltdowns. Anger with very little basis or provocation – on either side.

The hot flashes – could this be ‘long Covid’?

The perpetual itchiness under my skin throughout the long sleepless nights – a long term skin condition?

The brain fog. Had I drunk that much wine?

The heart palpitations – “Am I having a heart attack?” I asked my perennially patient GP (hypochondria, I later learned, is a common symptom of perimenopause).

The insomnia – oh the insomnia. The deadliest ammunition in the perimenopause armoury. Insomnia: the point at which you know the abyss really does stare back at you.

Was I depressed? But what did I have to be depressed about?  I had it all, after all.

I had no idea what was happening to me. I was unrecognisable to myself. Perhaps to my husband too.

I felt as though I stood on a precipice.

No one had told me about the menopause. I don’t remember it ever being discussed - at home, at work, in the media. I knew, from experience that fertility declines with age but the symptoms and effects of what I remember my Mum calling ‘the change’ were alien to me.

My eureka moment was Davina McCall’s Channel 4 documentary Sex, Myths and the Menopause.

Sat cuddled up on my sofa with my always patient, loving yet confused, egg-shell walking husband, I leapt up shouting: “That’s me! I am not crazy or sick! It’s The Change!”

You are now approaching your fifth birthday. We have found our new normal and somehow this parallel journey bonds us - neither one of us really understanding how or why.

For the most part (with the occasional wobble) I have returned to a semi sane, even keel.

And now I wonder if I can help others navigate the ebb and flow of the beginning of midlife and the menopause. How do we bust the myths that menopause is an ‘ending’? Something to be mourned.

Should we not focus more on our midlife blessings? How do we change the narrative?

As the tide of my 40s retreats, something is left in its place. Something more nourishing perhaps. Certainly, new and unpredicted.

To borrow the words of William Blake, ‘Auguries of Innocence’.

“To see a World in a Grain of Sand 

And a Heaven in a Wild Flower 

Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand 

And Eternity in an hour”.

Like this tide, you took something from me. Yet in your wake you gifted me a sense of optimism and the knowledge that nothing is more precious than time and once lost it can never be recaptured.

A quiet inner steel. And sweet surrender to life’s turns, ebbs and flows. For life, it turns us inside out. It brings storms we can’t avoid. This tide, more than any other, brought renewal and opportunity. The anger and the helplessness replaced by fortitude. A new reality.

This feels like a new beginning, not really knowing what tales this chapter will tell. But knowing that what I have built will not disintegrate nor succumb.

Older. Weathered but full of hope.

A voyage embarked.

Chapter unwritten.  

ENDS