In my family, menopause was not a word we said. It moved through conversations sideways, never directly. My mother referred to it as that time when she spoke of it at all. My aunts would lower their voices. It sat in the same category as things that were too intimate, too bodily, too much.
So when the symptoms started at 40 and I eventually, finally, found out what they were, I did not tell anyone for four months.
Not my husband. Not my mother, who would have, in her way, understood. Not my closest friend, who had told me things I know she has told no one else. Nobody.
I carried it alone. And carrying it alone made everything worse. The anxiety sharper, the sleeplessness more frightening, the rage more shameful. There was no one to say this makes sense, or I have been through this, or simply I am here.
The silence around menopause in Indian families is not malicious. It comes from a generation of women who were themselves not told anything, who were handed the experience with no language for it and made something out of it anyway. Our mothers were not trying to leave us unprepared. They were working with what they had.
But the silence has a cost. I felt, for those four months, like I was ageing badly and privately and wrong, like something was ending that was not supposed to end yet, and I had to carry the embarrassment of that alone.
I told my husband on a Tuesday evening. He listened for a long time. Then he said: why did you not tell me earlier? I did not have a good answer. I said: I think I was ashamed of the word.
He said: it is just a word.
I know it is not just a word. Words carry everything that has ever been said and not said around them. But he was trying, and the trying mattered.
I am saying the word now. Perimenopause. Menopause. Out loud, with my name attached to it. Because the silence cost me four months of unnecessary suffering, and I would rather someone else not pay the same.