There is news abroad - or maybe we should not call it news; maybe we should invent a new word for only-just- substantiated medical theses, such as quasi-medi-news - that the age at which a woman has her menopause can be predicted from the month of her birth. This delights me. I have spent my whole life trying to divine my job and love prospects using my date of birth, and all it ever reveals is: "Gregarious Leos, get ready to shine at parties this month, as the planet of something moves into your whatsit." Experience suggests that all this means is that I'm going to get drunk and, frankly, I could have told them that myself. It would be nice to glean something more meaningful from my August (the month, not the adjective signifying "venerable") beginnings, such as when to expect the curtain call on my fecundity. Yes. I like this quasi-medi-news very much.
If you are in the habit of reading women's health pages in low-grade magazines and newspapers, then you will have at your fingertips all kinds of information about the menopause, but it will all be of a scaremongering, Gynaecologist Ate My Womb nature. For instance, I could tell you about the woman in New Zealand who had a premature menopause at 25, just after - ironically, but also because she's EVIL - she'd had an abortion, and (this is the worst bit) the HRT they put her on made her really FAT.
I could tell you, too, about the woman who thought she was having menopausal hot flushes, which were actually night sweats, because she had tuberculosis which they only just caught in time. Or maybe it was HIV. Sometimes scare stories roll into one another, like the way you can never remember whether it was a wolf or a giant who ate Red Riding Hood. I could tell you about the women who went to the doctors and were told that it was a good job they had the menopause, because they also had a tumour the size of an orange, or was that a grapefruit? I could tell you about the mother-daughter duo who - hilarious, but also quite annoying, you'd think - had their menopause at the same time. I could tell you a million stories, well, OK then, four, about women in the Midlands who thought they were going through "the change" and then gave birth in the toilets of a Happy Eater (as a plot device, I believe this was used by Fay Weldon, in a book called Female Friends. But Take a Break definitely got there first). What I don't know about Christine Hamilton's menopause, I could write on the back of a postage stamp. For a very brief time, when she'd exhausted all avenues of "spouse of disgraced politician pundit" and "head-on-a-stick homophobe", she made a living telling the Daily Mail about how she never got any menopausal symptoms at all. One minute she was a regular Queen of Gore, the next she was - nope, can't think of a sisterly way to say "post-menopausal" - not. I want to say, of her punditry, that it's nice work if you can get it, but I really don't think it is.
I know a few basics, such as what HRT is for (delaying or preventing osteoporosis, I forget which), and whether or not it gives you breast cancer (yes it does. But not very often), but most of the information I could dredge up would be bizarre, frightening or celebrity-based.
In the more serious media, you very occasionally get a story about how the medical profession fails menopausal women, omitting to tell them basic facts, not prescribing certain medicines that are very slightly more expensive than others. And maybe you'd get the odd snippet about how homeopathy was much better at treating associated problems than conventional medicine, with an undertone of "because, people, it was made up by white witches. Whereas western medicine was made up by men. Mean men." Nevertheless, considering how much we know - just as a background hum of shared information - about periods, about childbirth, about IVF, about polyps and fibroids and polycystic ovaries, about STDs and cervical cancer, it's surprising what a blank canvas this section of the lifecycle is.
It is very often said that women of a certain age become invisible. It is said so often that I have a friend who, as we speak, is writing a sitcom about a middle-aged woman who becomes invisible and uses her cloak of invisibility to fight crime. It is less often said that they become inaudible as well, and nobody wants to hear their opinion or experience on anything unless it's so freakish that it might warrant some saloon-bar debate. So, there is a ton of stuff that one really ought to know and doesn't. We, most of us, know that fertility doesn't carry on right up until the point of menopause, but does it sometimes? And what kind of time gap are we dealing with between the first and the second? And is it different for everybody? Is one's menopausal age genetic at all and, if so, does it travel down your mother's line, or will any related female do? Is menopause the traditional time for a mid-life-crisis, and is there any recorded incidence of women buying Harleys and too-tight leather trousers? If not, do they have an alternative money-wasting self-assertion scheme such as, I don't know, installing a flower-arranging room, or experimenting with a whole new sexual orientation (not that that necessarily wastes any money. With luck, it could be free. The sex, I mean, not the new room)?
Of course, only up to a point can you blame your ignorance on society's inability to hear older women. It is also the wilfully blinkered attitude you take to anything that you know will happen but which you are not looking forward to. I personally see the menopause as very much like cancer - it is something I will certainly get, especially if I carry on smoking pretty much everything I can set fire to - but it is in the back of my mind that, by the time it happens, they will have invented a cure for it.
Like so many things, if you want sensible information on this, you have to stop reading the crazy pamphleteering in the hairdresser's waiting room and cast your mind back to the last time you had any formal education about anything.
Strangely, so strange, in fact, that you might think I made this up, but I didn't, at school, we did the menopause not in biology but in home economics. I've batted this around a bit, and unravelled the logic: it's not biological, since this is the point at which your biological function is definitively over. It is anything but biology. But if you think of all that money you save on tampons, it is economical. Anyway, in consequence, we didn't get the goods on hormones released or suspended, on side- or knock-on effects, on anything at all, really, but she did (Mrs Roach) tell us this much (I'm kind of paraphrasing, but I think it's accurate enough to go in inverted commas): "It's God's little joke that a lot of mums get their change at the same time as you girls are going through your business, so with all those hormones flying around the house, it's no wonder that tempers can get a bit frayed."
"A bit frayed?" I thought. "A little bit poxing frayed? Is this woman mad? My house is a cauldron! The atmosphere is green with poison! There are frogs and bats lying belly up!" (I was very keen on emphasis in my youth.) As it turned out, that wasn't my mother at all, her menopause was years off.
Oh yeah, I've just remembered one more piece from the jigsaw-puzzle of my knowledge. You probably aren't meant to lob your mother's biological trajectory into the public forum. Not without asking her, and I know for a fact she's not in. "Well, call her on the mobile," I hear you say, in which case, you have clearly never heard of the Nokia Corkscrew, which is the mobile phone post-menopausal women have but never take out with them, instead keeping it in the cutlery drawer, in case you want to call their knives and forks.
Anyway, I return to the point. I was born in August. Some of you probably were as well. This means we can expect our menopause in... ooh ... not for ages. They'll probably have invented a cure for it by then.
