Mid-life Chat | Part 2

Hi friends,

{ words below are mostly penned by the wondrous wordsmith

Lindsay Johnstone

! }

We wanted to get this out to you ASAP so you can dig in over the weekend. This is the second part of our chat inspired by All Fours by Miranda July, which far more famous women than us implore you to read :

If anyone knows where I can get one of these…We chat about reframing the narrative around peri and menopause; the seismic clash of life stages (anyone else been breastfeeding and simultaneously battling perimenopausal symptoms?); accepting and loving our midlife bodies and what it feels like to share that body with a new person in new midlife relationships. People who weren’t in our lives to see all the battle scars being formed.

We talk about leaning in to the messiness of midlife; fear of what’s going on inside our bodies; our relationship to our sexual bodies and how midlife offers us an opportunity to (re)discover who we are and what we like. This post from Celeste Davis was mentioned more than once in the chat:

Do you not like sex or do you just not like patriarchal sex?

We dig into what it feels like to emerge from the oestrogen fug - what Dr. Susan Hardwick Smith calls the veil of oestrogen - and recognise that the mothering / caring part of us is evolving.

What can we / do we expect from grandmothers, too? The chat was on fire over maternal burnout and whether it breeds future generations of grandmothers who will be less available when there are (more) small people to take care of.

We talk about the conflicting information we’ve been told about testing for perimenopause and HRT and the complex landscape of women’s health generally, which can make it so hard to know what treatments to try to manage symptoms… Do we need to become our own doctor, too, as well as Jill-of-all-other-trades? One recommendation if you’re interested in going down a specific medical peri rabbit hole is The Menopause Brain by Dr. Louise Mosconi. And if you’re looking for a Substack to follow, Dr. Jen Gunter writes The Vagenda. Over on Instagram, check out The Menopause Sisters,Dr. Mary Clare Havers and Dr. Stacy Sims.

Lindsay’s hugely popular most about losing her orgasm has a wealth of advice in the comments:

I might have started this conversation, but you kept it going

And I share some thought about taking HRT in this post :

HRT - on taking it & being cross about it

as well as some thought on returning to my body after my hysterectomy here:

how my hysterectomy marked the start of a return to myself

Oh, also. We’re all moving to the Vale of Oestrogen which we have decided is a bucolic resort somewhere on the beautiful south-east coast of Wales.

If you’d like to continue the conversation, jump into the comments, or head to this thread: