If I’d had a pack of matches I could have burned the place down. “It’s like living in Hoarders!” I ranted. What is this, a goddamned student house? In this state, I noticed things I had missed before: bags spilling out of cupboards, stacks of receipts and change on a table, my son’s stuff everywhere. It made me want to start breaking things. I woke up the other day and noticed that my husband had placed a couple of champagne corks on top of a picture frame. Sometimes my own perimenopausal moods are more rage than anxiety. Our bodies and our moods frequently betray us, but one of the worst parts of perimenopause and menopause is that no one talks about them. And, as we may remember from puberty, transitions can be awkward. But the years before that cessation – called perimenopause – can be more emotionally and physically fraught than we anticipate. Menopause, defined as a full year with no period, hits women on average around the age of 51. “Turtles don’t have hobbies.”Īnd that was the moment I realised that Jenny the turtle had become my very own paper-towel teddy bear. “When was the last time Jenny had some fun?” “Jenny looks bored,” I said, gazing into the tank. Twenty-five years later, struggling with a career that felt over, facing various physical problems and trying to get my child into a good school, I found myself paying a lot of attention to my son’s pet turtle. In retrospect, I think that my then middle-aged mother – dealing with a grouchy teenage daughter, dying parents, marriage problems and an acting career ending because she was no longer young – might have been finding a way to express her feelings without bothering anyone except a supervisor at that paper-towel company.
“Did you just call the Bounty paper-towel company to complain about these teddy bears?”
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