Why older women are hot

It’s October – happy Menopause Month… Yes, it’s World Menopause Month, which is fitting because it’s also the month in which I turn 53, and my menos are definitely pausing.

Recently I ran into a girl – sorry, woman – I used to work with long ago.

Within minutes we were discussing our hormones or lack thereof, HRT tablets (mine), vaginal pessaries (hers), abdominal patches (hers) and hot flushes (neither of us, because we both have understanding, informed doctors who keep such frustrations at bay).

And we discussed this readily in a bookshop. We didn’t even whisper.

ALSO READ: Hot flashes, not hush-hush: Why menopause needs a seat in the boardroom

Menopause here, menopause there…

Menopause is in the newspapers, on social media, on the radio, in apps, on bookshelves, everywhere… so much so that a publisher recently told me she was actively looking for menopause fiction.

Naturally, I sent her my novel about menopause, the one that was rejected multiple times five years ago because, while the editors loved it, the sales teams couldn’t figure out how to sell it; there just wasn’t a market for change-of-life novels, they said.

But now menopause is in the ether, it’s the zeitgeist – and about time too.

ALSO READ: How to cope with menopause

The flipside of puberty

After all, it’s the flipside of puberty, the thing every woman will go through if she lives long enough, from early-onset menopause – I knew a woman who hit it at 28 – to into her 50s and occasionally 60s.

For too long it’s been yet another thing 51% of the world population have had to pretend isn’t happening to them. When it started for me over a decade ago, I thought I was having a heart attack.

Nobody warned me.

There I was on the beach in Camp’s Bay one summer evening with my sons when suddenly everything went wild: my heartrate, my temperature, my colour, my anxiety, and my panicking children rushed me to the supermarket where they stood me in front of an open freezer.

After a couple of years fighting it, I cried at my doctor’s rooms. But why was I suffering, she wondered, and popped me on pills.

Easy as that. Twenty percent of women sail through menopause.

The rest of us don’t. We need to talk about it: we need women – and men – to be informed, like we tell them about periods and pregnancy.

And afterwards, well, there’s a full life ahead – all your own – without all that messy stuff.

NOW READ: Sex delays menopause, study finds