We had been married for twelve years. Twelve years is long enough that you think you know each other completely. Long enough that when something changes, the other person notices before you do.
He said it on a Sunday morning, quietly, while I was making chai. You have not been yourself lately. I asked him what that meant. He said: shorter. More angry. Like you are always on the edge of something.
He was not wrong. I had been snapping at him, at our son, at colleagues who did not deserve it. I would say something in a meeting that I would immediately regret. I would lie awake composing apologies for things I had said and things I had only thought. The gap between who I was and who I was behaving like had never felt this wide.
What he did not know, what I did not know, was that I was not becoming someone else. My oestrogen was crashing and spiking and crashing again on a schedule that had nothing to do with my intentions or my character or how much I loved my family.
I told him about perimenopause six weeks after my gynaecologist explained it to me. I had spent those six weeks feeling like I needed to understand it fully before I could explain it to him. Sitting at the kitchen table, I showed him what I had been reading. He listened. He asked a few questions. Then he said: so this is what has been happening. Not a question. An understanding.
Things did not change overnight. But he stopped interpreting my reactions as personal, and I stopped being ashamed of having them. That shift, that small factual shift, changed what was happening between us more than anything else could have.
He did not need me to be fixed. He needed to understand what was happening. They both do, our husbands. We just have to tell them.