This Is What No One Tells Women About What Happens To Your Body In Your 40s

When I was pregnant, other women bombarded me with advice, perhaps because that was supposed to be a “joyous” time and people wanted to share in it, but this was different. This was the darker side of womanhood.

I started researching phrases like “sex in your 40s,” “pissed at my family all the time,” and “left boob pain; am I dying?” When that didn’t garner satisfactory answers, I began making regular appointments with a naturopathic doctor, studying the benefits of essential oils, throwing back vitamins and herbs like an addict, and becoming obsessed with “female” tea ― hibiscus, primrose, milk thistle, anything reminiscent of a beautiful blossoming flower.

Fast-forward five years, at the age of 44, with my son in his tweens, both of us now full-tilt with yoyo-ing hormonal surges, and my husband deep into his own midlife crisis, contemplating giving up his power equipment business and moving us to Central America. I began locking my bedroom door, an apparently seismic shift that offended the rest of the family, but in doing so, I created a small space for myself to think and breathe and read for a few precious hours each evening and further adjust to the increasing changes in my body: the longing for complete silence, the new sensitivity to smell, coping with what felt like sensory overload.

And then, just as I began embracing that long-craved autonomy, a hitch.  

With my first missed period, I denied the possibility, but by the time the estimated date of the second one came and went, I had begun cupping my breasts in the shower to see if they were sore and feeling my belly for the telltale firmness. And afterward, I’d catch my naked profile in the mirror looking for visible differences in my body. Was I glowing? I definitely wasn’t glowing.

Google was no help. As if God, the universe or some other holy power were in on the conspiracy to drive all middle-aged women mad, it turns out the symptoms of pregnancy are almost identical to the symptoms of perimenopause: weight gain, breast tenderness, spotting. I had them all.

My husband was painting the deck when I approached him with the news early one morning. I had waited weeks but my anxiety, always stalking beneath the surface, was now becoming an unmanageable beast. “I might be pregnant,” I blurted out. His brush paused mid-stroke. I could see his unspoken thoughts floating like specks of pollen through the warm spring air.

“Well, we’ll figure it out,” he said, before dipping his brush again.

My first pregnancy had put me in bed for five months, with the label “high risk” slapped on my tender uterus. Aside from the life-threatening complications for me and my baby, I had suffered from both prenatal and postpartum depression that lasted years. Now faced with the prospect of having an offensively termed “geriatric pregnancy” at the age of 45, the odds were stacked against me. Not to mention the logistics. Where would we even put a baby?

Two days later, when I can no longer delay the inevitable ― the blood pressure medication I am on too detrimental to a fetus for me to continue without speaking to my doctor ― I sit on the bathroom floor early in the morning, squinting at the directions on a pregnancy test while the rest of the house lies in quiet slumber. My hands tremble as I peel off the wrapper. I brace myself and wait the three required minutes.

As the clock ticks, I question whether I could muster even the smallest desire to care for a newborn. I have middle-of-the-night hot flashes where I blindly stomp around my bedroom ripping off clothes and cursing the air conditioner because subarctic is not a temperature setting. The very thought of being prematurely awoken from hard-won sleep gives me palpitations. I’m on not one but two medications that say something along the lines of, if you’re even thinking about getting pregnant, don’t be in the same room as these pills.

Friends and I began whispering about our “changes” at book club meetings and writing groups and those all too rare “moms’ nights out,” and soon I found that this is a dirty secret we keep, walking through life, all of us pretending to hold it together, while inside we are unrecognizable to our own selves.

With it out in the open, my girlfriends had been speaking more freely, lauding Botox, fillers, vibrators and therapy as ways to empower ourselves and confront these years. I am in no way prepared to cast off this tribe of unabashedly honest women to form new relationships with young, lithe mothers who have an endless supply of their own collagen.