I remember clearly when my mom began the journey into menopause. She was 42 and I was in the midst of my obligatory teen angst. This made for an extremely ugly time of hormonal head-butting. As often happens when one is an ignorant, pig-headed kid with little to no life experience, I swore it would be different when I had children (one of many bone-headed statements I have proven incorrect).

Well, here I am, mere weeks away from my 44th birthday and a full 12 months into perimenopause (yep, 42 was the magic number). You can’t wait until you are old enough to get a period like “all” the other girls. Then you get it, hate it, and can’t wait to stop having them. Then you begin the decent into middle age and menopause, and you wait expectantly like a pre-teen for it to come again. Then it does, and you’re as hormonal as an expectant mother.

Welcome to the reality that is my life.

Today was one of those terrible days, played out in slow motion, where not one of my children did anything right (according to the exceptionally hormonal Mean Mama Menopause). Homeschool was too long, whined one (five minutes into school, mind you). Another had one answer for every question I asked, and the answer was, “One!” Another was hormonal himself, both dealing with body changes and new meds that make him irritable.

Yet another recipe for hormonal head-butting, some two decades later.

One got fed up with the attention her brother is receiving for his new condition, so her remedy was to lie her head off today, in addition to taking things that are not hers, somewhat blatantly in hopes of getting caught so that the spotlight could once again shine on her. Another seemed to enjoy having his brother and sister call his name repeatedly in exasperation to stop one thing or another. The other kept telling his younger sibs to leave him alone, yet would not go to his very own room … the one place in the house guaranteed to give him the privacy he supposedly craved. Yet when he got it, he cried because he missed his brother.

So, what did Mean Mama Menopause do? She lost it.

I’m up throughout the night anyway to check my eldest’s blood sugar due to his Type 1 diabetes. Now with the new diagnosis of epilepsy, every tiny noise sends me into alert wakefulness. So today, after four weeks of sleeping lightly at night, I was bone tired. Combine that with the fact I actually have a period this week for the first time in months, I was in hormonal overdrive.

Tiredness exacerbates everything.

Yep, I blew my stack. I’m sure I bought them an extra ten years each of therapy (myself as well). I can only hope and pray my kids, in their adulthood, look back on this snapshot in time as I did, and have that, “Aha” moment that most of us do when we realize what we did to our parents and why they did what they did because we are doing the same to our kids, and realize you’ve crossed the Generational Divide, and lived to tell the tale.

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