Learn from me, Madonna, and embrace The Change
ASTUDY published this week claimed that Hormone Replacement Therapy can help prevent Alzheimer’s disease among women, if it is taken early enough in the menopause. I was thrilled to learn this, because I am one of an increasingly small group of women who is happy to admit she is in the throes of menopause and at the first sign of symptoms I was up at the GP’s demanding my hormones. My symptoms went away, I immediately lost 10 years off my face, and now I’m staving off dementia. Result!
What a shame, then, that none of my girlfriends will admit to being menopausal. If pushed, they will confess to hot flushes mood swings and erratic periods but none is prepared to admit, even to themselves, that they are actually starting the menopause. ‘Sixty-five – the new middle-age’ is a popular notion – but it is as stupid as the myth that 40 is a reasonable age for women to start trying for a baby. The biological clock has a beginning, a middle and an end, whether we like it or not. .
When I said I was pregnant at 45, everyone congratulated me like I was ‘proof’ that female physiology was invincible. Telling girlfriends that I am perimenopausal at 48 is met with protestations that I must be suffering from some freak complaint. ‘You’re not middle-aged,’ they cry. Except, of course, I am. And so are they.
It seems these days that being middle-aged is the worst crime a woman can commit. Like who in the media actually identifies themselves as ‘middle-aged’? Madonna? Please. Totally in denial. Carol Vorderman? Miriam O’Callaghan? Somehow they don’t fit the criteria. They are too glamorous, too perky.
Jane Seymour is more like it. She was in the papers this week looking stunning at some ‘do’ and the English actress is admirable because she doesn’t seem to have gone in for the freaky cosmetic ‘I am young’ look. She has a few wrinkles but she was never a big ‘check out my cleavage’ merchant – a look that does not age well (see Madonna). She still has the trademark long hair, which means she has taken a leaf out of Joan Collins’s book, which is stick with a distinctive look that suits (in her case, Dynasty) then keep working it to the grave. These are the women we look to as middle-aged icons, except they are not middle-aged. They are pensionable. Collins is 79. Seymour is 61.
Madonna is middle-aged. She almost certainly has the menopause and refuses to admit it, so won’t go on HRT. That is probably what is wrong with her right now. Unless she was taking her nipples out onstage to give them a good scratch, I cannot even begin to imagine what the poor woman is going through in her quest to stay young – the very thought exhausts me.
What Madonna should be doing is making herself a poster girl for middle age: helping us discuss the benefits of HRT vs Evening Primrose Oil and warning our pot-bellied menfolk that sudden, mystifying changes in libido and a wardrobe channelling Angela Lansbury is just around the corner.
However, I wouldn’t hold your breath for any big female celeb to take centre stage in the menopause war, because ‘The Change’ in women is still taboo.
Last Thursday was World Menopause Day. In case you missed it, the International Menopause Society celebrated the event by releasing a rather depressing memorandum to the world ‘raising awareness’ of weight gain in menopause. Seemingly body fat moves from your childbearing hips to your stomach, turning you from curvy to apple-shaped. So – that’s that then. The menopause will make us even less attractively fat than we already are.
HULLO? Newsflash? Firstly, is there a person in the world who doesn’t know this already?
Secondly – can we start actually celebrating the menopause please? Women reaching middle-age is a good thing – for everyone. Women, this is your last hurrah at being hormonal. Use it as an excuse: be irrational, lose your keys, enjoy.
Men: no more messy contraception, definitely no more surprise children and in a few short years there will be no more Other People’s Hormones to contend with.
Being middle-aged is great. Yes, there is more maintenance. Grey roots have to be dyed, exercise becomes a necessity, and you have to watch what you eat. But once you get over the shock of hairs sprouting where they shouldn’t, there is this overwhelming sensation of ‘I’ve arrived’.
You have enough life behind you to not be so neurotic and plenty ahead of you to make sure you no longer waste it doing things you don’t want to do and sweating the small stuff. So go on, girls, give in to your hormones and just remember – HRT shaves years off you!