My Body Sent a Memo and I Didn't Read It

I want you to picture me last Tuesday at 2:14 AM, sitting in bed with my reading glasses on, googling "am I dying or is this perimenopause."

The internet, in its infinite wisdom, returned both answers as equally plausible.

I want you to also picture that I had spent the previous forty-five seconds standing in the kitchen doorway. I had walked in there for a reason. I knew I had walked in there for a reason. The reason was, at one point, in my brain, and now it was somewhere in the troposphere, drifting away from me at a steady rate while I stood under the overhead light in a sleep shirt looking like a woman who had been paused mid-sentence by a force more powerful than her.

I gave up and went back to bed. Halfway down the hallway I remembered I had gone in there for water, but I did not turn around. The water and I had a complicated relationship at this point, and I needed time.

This is not the part of perimenopause they warn you about. Actually, let me amend that. They do not really warn you about any part of perimenopause. They mention hot flashes the way someone might mention rain at a wedding, like, yeah, possibly, deal with it. Nobody tells you that your knee will develop a personality, or that your skin will change texture all over like someone updated your firmware overnight, or that you will lose your car keys in your own hand, or that you will cry watching a commercial about home insurance and not be able to explain why, even to yourself, even later, even with wine.

My body sent me a memo. I did not read the memo. The memo was not actually a memo, but a series of small, increasingly insistent malfunctions that I attributed, in turn, to:

• Stress
• Bad mattress
• Wrong vitamins
• Right vitamins but wrong dose
• That one bottle of wine on Sunday
• Being the wrong age
• Being the wrong woman
• A curse, possibly mild

Then, eventually, in week sixteen of waking up at 3:47 AM exactly, regardless of when I went to bed or how much I did or did not drink or whether the day had been pleasant or had contained a particularly aggressive PTA email, I sat down with the entirely insufficient pamphlet my doctor had handed me twelve months earlier, the one I had stuffed into a kitchen drawer with a vague intention to "deal with it later," and I read the bullet points.

It was, simply, all of it. The knee was on the list, and so was the insomnia, and the brain fog, and the unscheduled moisture, which had begun to redistribute itself across my body according to a logic I could not parse. The rage that arrived like a Greyhound bus, fully booked, with a full tank of gas and a determined driver, was on the list too.

It was not stress and it was not the mattress and it was not the wine, although I suspect the wine and I will be having a separate conversation eventually.

It was a phase change, like ice becoming water, or water becoming steam. Something in my body had decided that the form I had been was now over, and the new form was, well, that was the part nobody could tell me. That part I had to find out the way I was finding out everything else, at 3:47 AM, in a kitchen, in a doorway, in a Google search that had no good answers and several truly disturbing ones.

Here is what I want to tell you, if you are also in this. It is not all in your head. It is in your knee, your hip, your sleep, your skin, your hormones, your hands, and your teeth if you are particularly unlucky, and yes, also a little bit your head, but not in the way they meant.

You are not lazy or soft, and you are not failing to "manage stress." You are undergoing a chemical event of nontrivial scale, and the only people who really seem to grasp this are other women in the same chemical event, currently exchanging knowing looks with you over restaurant tables.

You are allowed to take it seriously. You are allowed to be furious. You are allowed to schedule the appointment, ask the rude questions, and leave the conversation or the room or the entire dinner party, because you have just become aware that your body's needs have been promoted to the front of the agenda whether or not the agenda was prepared to receive them.

I have not figured this out, and I am not about to dispense wisdom from a high bench. I am here in a sweater, with a sticky note on my refrigerator that says WATER and another one that says WHY ARE YOU IN THE KITCHEN, IVY.

The memo was real, and I am reading it now, late but reading it.