There are lots of M words that are important to me: mummy, mama, Mark, marriage, McDonalds, money, music, movement, muscles. More recently the word menopause has entered my consciousness.  All these M words represent things that are significant to me. Being a mummy is my favourite thing in the world, my husband obviously occupies a big chunk of my heart, I do love a burger – a quarterpounder with cheese being my burger of choice. And now that you can customise – add some lettuce, tomatoes, and extra gherkins. Boom, perfection in a bun. These M words are good, they represent the positive stuff. Except for this new word that I keep hearing more and more about.

I am at an age where my girlfriends are talking about the menopause and being perimenopausal. That it is all pretty awful and that it is becoming increasingly imminent for me – waiting just around the corner ready to jump out and ambush me. I don’t feel ready. I feel like I have only just overcome my teenage angst, surely there can’t be another phase waiting in the wings already?

Scarier than knowing that this ‘old lady’ phase is soon to be upon me when I still feel in my youthful prime, is the fact that I know very little about it. My knowledge base is restricted to night sweats, weight gain, and going slightly crazy. This limited information is not encouraging. I have just spent half an hour this morning googling useful books about menopause and perimenopause and the common symptoms. I found a website called ‘The Latte Lounge’ with lots of information and the 34 symptoms of menopause. 34! The extensive information was encouraging. The fact that I have had most of these symptoms for the last 20 years was not.

So how do you know if it’s perimenopause or not?

Tiredness? I am always tired. I am always tired and I always have been. In my younger years this was due to going out and having fun until the wee hours and working until late in pubs and nightclubs. Then I was tired because I was being kept up all night by my babies. Now I’m knackered because I try and do too much. What are my plans for Tuesday? – I’ll get up at some ungodly hour when it’s just getting light, go for a run, workout with some weights, get the kids breakfasted, clean, dressed and ready (a battle in itself), walk to school, look after the youngest all day whilst trying to simultaneously do the shopping, the laundry, made a few work calls, decorate the spare room, do some gardening as we’re about to be overtaken by weeds, clear up the remains of the latest rodent that the cats brought in, clear up the cat sick brought on by the attempted digestion of the aforementioned rodent, cook the kids dinner, spend half an hour clearing up squashed peas and rice from the floor, then go to work for the evening, finishing at an hour that most people are getting ready for bed. Of course I’m tired. I don’t think perimenopause is responsible for this.

Mood swings? Is there a female on the planet who doesn’t have mood swings? I oscillate from being patient and reasonable, to a crying mess who is upset for no reason, to an angry crazy lady for absolutely no reason, to an angry crazy lady who believes she has a valid reason (yes, putting things near and not in the dishwasher is absolutely grounds for divorce), and back again to patient and reasonable with alarming regularity. But this is not new. This is seemingly me, long term. So what on earth will I be like if this gets worse?! I worry for my little family, it’ll be like living with Frankenstein’s monster. But a monster who can eat her own bodyweight in chocolate in five minutes flat. That’s quite a skill actually.

There seems to be so much thrown at women. We might have careers, we might be mothers, we might be partners, we might be homemakers. But overall we seem to be the organisers. We are the do-ers. We run the show, even if it looks like we don’t. We pull the strings in our understated way, we keep the ship afloat. All manageable stuff. But throw in some unexpected hormones and it can seem way more challenging. And I think the uncertainty of anything to do with hormones makes it all the more challenging.

Take pregnancy for example. For some people it works, for others it is significantly harder, for others it never happens at all. I think that if you want kids and you can have them easily then you are extremely lucky. I really appreciate how extremely lucky I have been in this regard. But you don’t know which of these categories you will fall into do you? Then what will pregnancy look like? Will it be viable? Will we get sick? We could be absolutely fine or we could have our head in a bucket for months? Will we reach full term? Go over it? It’s all very uncertain, you don’t know until you’re there.

And so I guess menopause will present the same gamble. Will it be soon? Will it be in 10 years time? Will I manage it well and rejoice in the money saved on sanitary products? Or will I be a sweaty mess with an abundant midriff, who gets arrested for battering the person in front of me in the supermarket queue with a can of beans because they started faffing around trying to pay with online coupons? It’s scary, I just don’t know. Both seem viable options from where I’m standing.

So, let’s see what the future brings shall we. But if you open the local paper and there’s an article in there about a woman who lost it in Sainsbury’s over the lack of availability of cottage cheese with chives, then it could well be me. We can then assume that the menopause fairy may well have paid me a visit.