A woman who is about to reach menopause suddenly finds herself mourning the loss of her period and wonders, is it normal to be sad about reaching menopause? Jessica normalizes the sadness and then suggests ways to embrace, or at least accept, the change.
Ask Jessica is an advice column for women in midlife. We cover all things related to midlife from changing bodies to career transitions to parenting teens to sandwich generation challenges to shifts in marital or life partnerships and everything in between. My hope is that in sharing these questions and answers I can women as we face the midlife journey together. Got a question or challenge you would like me to address? Fill out this form to submit your issue! Want to see the answers to other questions, check out our archive here.
Is it normal to be sad about reaching menopause?
Hey Jessica: I am approaching the 12-month mark of not having a period, which I guess means I am about to have reached menopause. I have always joked about how I can’t wait for my period to be over (especially during these past few years of crazy, unpredictable periods), but now that the time is approaching, I am finding that I am really sad. I feel like I will somehow be less of a woman and that it is this threshold that I can never cross back over. Is it normal to be sad about reaching menopause? And how do I accept this new reality? ~Not Ready
Dear Not Ready,
You are most definitely not alone in the feelings you describe! In fact, it is incredibly common for women to feel the way you do. Why? Because, as with any major life change, there is loss. While we may complain about our menstrual cycles, the truth is that they are a major part of our lives. In fact, I would argue that it is one of our body’s functions that we are most familiar with – each month we monitor (or at least notice) how heavy our bleed is, how intense our cramps, how high or low our energy, how fluctuating our moods. I honestly can’t think of any other bodily function, other than maybe pooping, that we track as closely and consistently for so many years. It starts with making sense of our cycles, then monitoring to make sure we aren’t pregnant (if we’re having sex with men), then monitoring to see if we are (assuming we try to have children), then whether things return back to normal after childbirth (assuming we have children), and then, for the final years, how things are changing. So, yeah, it is a deep and long-lasting relationship that we are saying goodbye to and that will come with real emotional responses, including sadness.
And yet, this is not a change that we can stop from happening, so we have to find a way to accept it. For a lot of women, the loss of their period can feel like a loss of their femininity. It is a feeling that I completely sympathize with. What I like to challenge my clients who are struggling with this feeling to do is to take a step back and think back to before the loss of their period was a reality and ask themselves, what was it that made me feel feminine then? Was it the clothes I wore? The way I looked? The relationship I had with my partner? Once you start to note the things that made you feel feminine before, I bet you’ll notice that your period wasn’t actually one of them. And once you’ve seen this, it can help to remind you that none of these other pieces of your feminine identity have actually changed, which means the loss of your period will not take that away from you.
For other women, it is the loss of their fertility that is hard. This may be because they haven’t been able to build the type of family they had hoped for. It may be because the option of having more children had felt like a safety blanket that they are now going to have to give up. Or it may be because their fertility had always made them feel sexier. This can be a hard one to reconcile, especially if you haven’t been able to have children even though you wanted to. So, in this case, I encourage you to really feel those feelings. Allow the grief to come. Give yourself time to mourn this loss. Once you have navigated those feelings, then it may be possible to see other ways in which you can fulfill these needs – it may be focusing on other ways that you can be maternal or others ways you can express your feminine energy. It might also be by putting that energy into other forms of birth and growth, such as creative endeavors, entrepreneurship, or service to a community.
For some women a farewell activity can be helpful. If you are someone who is into more “woo” activities, then perhaps it is a ritual focused around the moon, Mother Earth, or a coming together of your sisterhood. If you are not so into that kind of thing, then maybe it’s writing in a journal, organizing a fun gathering with your friends, or doing some sort of fundraising or service project around menstruation, such as supporting an organization that works to empower women or to help girls to navigate their menstrual cycles. The point here is to find an action you can take, whether emotional, spiritual, celebratory, or service-oriented that can allow you the space to recognize and honor this big change.
Finally, I just want to reiterate what I started with: it is normal to feel these emotions. It is appropriate to see this as a moment of great change – because it is. But it’s also a moment to recognize and celebrate how far your body has brought you and all the great things that are still to come.