Pause for thought
Television presenter and author Philippa Forrester talks about her experience of the menopause in her new book about women who work in nature, Hannah Stephenson writes.
PHILIPPA FORRESTER is recalling all the symptoms of menopause that she had in her mid-30s, which remained undiagnosed until she was 49. “I had years of it,” says Forrester, now 55, who made her name on CBBC and appeared on Tomorrow’s World, The Heaven and Earth Show, Robot Wars and natural history documentaries and has a new podcast, Conscious.
“I had hot flushes, night sweats, brain fog, putting on weight, all of that stuff, which nowadays somebody would immediately go, ‘You’ve got the menopause, go and get your hormones tested’. Nobody mentioned hormones to me at that time. I thought maybe I had a bit of PMT or something. I didn’t have a clue what was happening. So my fingers are crossed that if the same thing is happening to somebody else, now they’ll know because we all talk about it way more.”
She talks about her menopause in her new book, Wild Woman, which celebrates women, past and present, working in nature around the world, from female conservationist heroes to botanists and those who do extraordinary work in the field, through grit and determination. Her research takes her across continents and harsh landscapes as she records anecdotes of discovery and danger.
Those stories are interspersed with her own painful journey – a broken marriage (she was married to wildlife photographer Charlie Hamilton James for 18 years) and a reluctant return to the UK after six years in the wilds of Wyoming, her life in disarray, back at the family home in South Gloucestershire with her three sons and dog, but minus her husband. That was back in 2020, during Covid. Forrester felt she had completely run out of fight, left to grapple with her overgrown garden, feeling loneliness engulf her and her self-esteem at rock bottom.
“The grief over leaving my wild home in America and all my friends – on top of the relentless pain of losing my husband, the man I loved and thought loved me – became too much,” she writes. Today she says that had the marriage not broken up, she wouldn’t have returned to the UK. She had counselling in the US and embarked on a “nature coaching” course, which helped. “I had way too many tabs open, from the logistics of moving us all across the sea to the emotions around leaving that place, leaving all our friends as we had built such a wonderful community there, and the place itself, the wilderness, which I really felt connected to. There were feelings of loss about the marriage and then coming back here into this really strange world – because we came back between lockdowns. It was the weirdest of times.”
The depression that enveloped her had begun with menopause, family deaths, her son Fred’s cancer (he was diagnosed with a brain tumour in 2016 but is doing well now, she says) and finally with what she calls “my husband’s change of heart”. Today she doesn’t want to elaborate too much on the split.
“Obviously it wasn’t my decision, which makes it even tougher. I think anyone who goes through any divorce knows it’s tough anyway, but when it’s out of your hands then it’s even tougher. Anyone going through any kind of tough time, whether it’s grieving a loved one or a shock, or something awful happening to them, there isn’t ever a handbook on how to cope. Grief isn’t easy. There’s a reason it’s noisy. There is no ‘Do this and it will go away’. Humans don’t have the Alt Delete Escape option.”
Forrester says there were duvet days when she didn’t want to leave her bed, or when she felt unable to function because of mental and physical exhaustion. But she finds inner strength outdoors. The book records that slowly, through the seasons and her wild garden, which she gradually tries to tame, she finds a healing power in nature. She clears the silted pond, swims in the river, watches wildlife, contemplates the great outdoors, and as her neglected garden starts to take shape, so begins her recovery and a path to find joy again.
But the undiagnosed menopause – the constant fatigue, not sleeping properly and feeling depressed for years – had been a barrier to happiness, she reflects. “I felt awful a lot of the time. I was really struggling with it and not knowing what was wrong with me. Another symptom I had was terrible migraines,” she recalls.
“The doctor said to me, ‘You need to go running more’, but I did go running three times a week, so he didn’t have an answer after that. Then another doctor, who was a woman, said to me, ‘Maybe you’re just a miserable person’. And I took that on board for a while until another female doctor said, ‘I’m going to check your hormones’. She later told me, ‘I don’t know how you’ve been operating because you’ve got no hormones – you are meant to have some!’”
She stopped drinking and put herself through an intensive exercise and healthy diet regime to try to lose the weight she had inexplicably gained. Her garden, and its once overgrown, disorganised state, seems to have evolved into a less frenetic environment, in parallel with her own state of mind. “It felt like a metaphor, for sure,” she agrees. At the beginning, she tearfully swiped overgrown brambles with a machete, cutting nothing, until she found a technique, a flow, which gave her the rhythm to move forward. And the joy has crept back in, she agrees. She used to scoff at tree huggers, but now she’s tried it and quite likes it.
‘Grief isn’t easy. There’s a reason it’s noisy. There is no “Do this and it will go away”. Humans don’t have the Alt Delete Escape option.’