It’s hard to explain how different menopause is from what you’re picturing…

Because when you’re 11 or 12, you learn about fertility as a simple egg-dropping span of years bookended by the gentle onset of menstruation at the front and its gentle cessation at the back. And your first clue that this is not the whole story might be when you wake up with a brown smear in your day-of-the-week underpants and then your entire life immediately turns into the movie Carrie, with a bucket of blood and total mayhem and someone explaining to you that you can put in more than one tampon at a time, although you probably shouldn’t, even though you are now mopping up the bathroom floor with your Tuesday and Wednesday undies, which you will bury at the bottom of the kitchen trash.

But I digress. Because everyone’s experience is different — you might sail through menopause with a gentle breeze at your back (lol) — but here’s what I wish someone could have told me 10 years ago:

Your period will not go gentle into that good night; it will rage, rage against the dying of the light by doubling down in a completely bizarre and aggressive way that involves clots the size of large jellyfish and a color that would be called — if it were a lipstick — Black Gore. “I think I literally have my period more days than I don’t have it?” you will say to your doctor, and she will nod sympathetically and say, “Yeah.”

Speaking of rage — you will be fizzing with a rage that has neither suitable object nor end in sight. If you have teenaged children, recommend to them that they not stand in front of the refrigerator speculating idly about the fact that there’s nothing good for lunch because when you open your mouth to suggest that they make a quick run to the market for cold cuts, the only thing that will come out is flames and T. rex roaring. When you put a hand to your chest your kid’s eyes will grow wide — “Oh my God, Mama! Are you having an actual stroke?” — but it’s just acid reflux from eating all the ham.

Your hair will somehow be thinning and receding even as it relocates to your chin and upper lip, where a full beard and mustache situation will demand constant betweezered vigilance and, thanks to your dwindling eyesight, an illuminated magnifying mirror. You have never especially wanted to look like Burt Reynolds in Smokey and the Bandit, but you will. Probably you even have the sideburns, too, but you can’t turn your head far enough to check because you slept funny and now your neck is broken.

You will, to quote Nora Ephron, feel bad about your neck. You will suddenly understand the adjective ropey. Also the adjective crepey, which is about the wrinkly party streamers (your skin), not the flat pancakes (your ass). You’ll have tons of weird skin growths: moles and tags and, yes, still, acne and also something that looks like a cracked and waxy piece of elephant hide under your boob but is actually called seborrheic keratosis and of so little concern to your dermatologist that she will practically nod off while you’re showing it to her. Probably you will pull a muscle in your back hoisting your boob up in the first place, given the boob’s almost supernatural relationship to gravity. Or maybe your back still hurts from when you opened a tube of Pringles.

Wait. There were Pringles? You already forgot. You also cannot remember the name of your high-school principal, the book you are currently reading, or the actor from Dirty Dancing. “Patrick Stewart?” you will say to your partner, who will say back, unhelpfully, “Make it so,” which would be a funny Star Trek reference if you had any memories of anything at all from before last April. “Swayze!” you will announce triumphantly at four in the morning while you’re peeling off your soaked T-shirt, since you’re having a hot flash and also you no longer sleep. Prepare to change your undies, too, not only because you’re incontinent but because your vajay sweats in the night.

Your teeth and gums look weird (gappy?) and so do your nails (ridgy?) in a way that you can’t totally put your finger on, but that you recognize from having seen old people before. Ditto the gray pubes, which ring a faint bell from the YMCA ladies’ locker room when you were seven and nervously changing for your swim lesson. That said, the silver streaks in your head hair are actually kind of hot? Unless you hate them — but that’s why God invented dye.

Picture all those gorgeous Georgia O’Keeffe flowers: the lushly petaled poppies and velvety, vulval irises. Now picture a tumbleweed, which is what she would paint if she were trying to capture your menopausal minge. Prepare to hear the horrifying words vaginal atrophy, which means that your hoo-ha has dried up and withered away. If you’re planning to ever have any kind of front-hole sex again, you will need to treat this or else you’ll be in a lot of pain and also you’ll get a UTI every time you so much as think about your hoohoo. Whatever the question is? Lube is, sadly, not the answer. Here’s the actionable part of this entire piece: Ask your gynecologist about vaginal estrogen or hormone replacement therapy and follow Jen Gunter on Instagram and on her Vajenda Substack (this is a great post.) Ignore the Facebook ads for products called Silky Peach Cream or Beaver Saver. VAGINAL ESTROGEN. Say it with me, young Catherine: VAGINAL ESTROGEN. If your insurance won’t cover it, buy it from here.

If you have been reproductively inhabiting that body of yours, you will never again pee on a pregnancy test, and this will likely be all different shades of bittersweet. But you might sit on the beach one day in your comfortable swimsuit, eating a massive fried-clam roll while you dig your happy toes in the sand and feeling like you can finally get on with your life. The part of it that’s rich with beloved people and treasured experience. The part of it that’s burnished to brightness and yours alone.

Catherine Newman is the author of Sandwich, this summer’s buzziest novel. You can follow her on Substack. She has written for Cup of Jo on many topics, including what it’s like being an empty nester and raising teenage boys, and will be sharing her 10 favorite things this week on Big Salad.

P.S. Catherine Newman’s joyful and warm house tour and the beauty of cold plunging.

(Photo by Eloisa Ramos/Stocksy.)