Menopause - from Bawl Baby to Bossy Bitch

Menopause is not just a physical condition. It is also an emotional condition.

Some women go through menopause, or the change of life as it is called, with hardly a twitch. They breeze right through it as though menopause is not even a consideration.

Other women get some of the physical symptoms and some of the emotional symptoms, but its not bad enough to be considered a life changing event.

But there are others of us who get everything menopause has to offer. We get the whole shebang, both physical and emotional, and we're lucky if we come out the other side still sane.

The emotional side of menopause can sometimes be worse than the physical side of it.

During menopause, our emotions are likely to run wild. One minute we are sitting there happily exchanging recipes with our mother-in-law and the next minute we are nastily telling her to mind her own business because she has reminded us that our husband, her son, doesn't like fish.

The un-technical term for this emotional side of menopause is "mood swings". And when they say "swings", they mean just that. Swinging from one emotion to the next in the blink of an eye.

From my own experience with menopause and from watching and talking with a few hundred other menopausal women, it seems that the three main emotions that come to the fore during menopause are sadness (depression), impatience and anger.

Notice the lack of any of the fun emotions here... happiness, love, cheerfulness, lust.

Menopause, for some reason, seems to bring out the darkest parts of us. Sometimes it brings out parts of us that we never even knew existed. During menopause we can have varying degrees of these changes of emotion. Some women just get slightly emotional and some women run through the whole gambit of irrational emotions on a daily basis.