does anyone else just... not talk about it

idk if this is even the right place for this but I need to get it out somewhere bc I feel like I'm going crazy

so my mom got really sick earlier this year. like hospital sick. and while I was taking care of her I kept thinking about how she went through menopause when I was in high school and literally nobody ever talked about it. not her, not my dad, not her doctor apparently. she just... dealt with it. I remember her being angry all the time and my dad would say "your mother is going through a phase" and that was IT. that was the entire conversation our family ever had about menopause. a phase. like she was a teenager acting out and not a grown woman whose body was falling apart from the inside

and now I'm 46 and I think it's happening to me and I have this sick feeling in my stomach bc I realize I'm doing the exact same thing she did. not talking about it. pretending everything is fine. my husband asked me last week why I changed the sheets at 3am and I said I spilled water on them. I LIED about night sweats. to my own husband. who has seen me give birth. but somehow this felt more embarrassing?? I don't even understand my own logic rn

the first thing I noticed was like maybe 8 months ago, my period just started doing whatever it wanted. one month nothing, next month twice, then nothing for 6 weeks, then so heavy I ruined my favorite work pants in a meeting.

A MEETING.

I sat there for 40 minutes pretending nothing was happening and went straight to the bathroom after and just stood there staring at myself in the mirror like who is this person. I didn't cry, I didn't do anything, I just stood there. my coworker texted me later asking if I was ok bc apparently I looked "off" in the meeting. I said I had a headache

sorry this is getting really long and all over the place. my cat is currently sitting on my keyboard so that's fun

anyway the point is (do I even have a point... idk) I started looking stuff up and apparently there's like a BILLION women globally going through menopause rn and we're all just... not talking about it?? like 2 hundred million in china alone. and it hit me that my mom wasn't being dramatic all those years ago, she was probably terrified and confused and had nobody to talk to about it. and now I'm sitting here at midnight typing to strangers on reddit about it bc I still can't bring myself to say the word menopause out loud to the people in my actual life

the mood stuff is honestly what scares me the most. more than the sweating, more than the periods going haywire. I snapped at my daughter last week for leaving a cup on the counter. a CUP. she's 14 and she looked at me like I was a completely different person and tbh she wasn't wrong. I apologized like 10 minutes later and almost told her what was going on but then I just... didn't. bc what do you even say. "sorry honey mommy's hormones are making her unhinged"

maybe I'm being dramatic about all of this idk. like millions of women go through it and survive obviously. but there's this loneliness to it that I wasn't expecting. like you're in a room full of people and your body is doing stuff that nobody can see and nobody asks about and you just perform being normal all day long and then you come home and change your sheets at 3am and lie about it

I think the thing that made me finally want to say something (even if it's just here, anonymously) was sitting with my mom in the hospital and realizing that she spent DECADES not talking about her body, not asking for help, not complaining, and look where she is now. and I'm so sick of this. I'm sick of the silence and I'm sick of pretending and I'm sick of being ashmed of something that literally every woman on earth goes through or will go through

anyway. sorry for the novel. I don't even know what I'm looking for by posting this. maybe just to feel like I said it out loud for once