Perimenopause is a time of significant change in women’s lives before menopause, which is characterised by a fluctuation in the hormone levels alongside irregular menstrual cycles.
It typically begins in a woman’s life during the mid-40s and lasts for a few months to several years in multiple cases. Unfortunately, this is the same time when your parents reach their 70s or 80s. Talking about this transitional period in every woman’s life, nutritionist Rashi Chowdhary in a video posted on Instagram says, “Nobody prepares us for this part of perimenopause, which I believe is the hardest. We’re obviously dealing with our own ageing bodies, and we’re adapting to that, but there’s this quiet grief that we carry that we’re not able to express. We start watching our parents age.”
She captioned the video as: “It hits around the same time. Your hormones start shifting… and so do theirs.” She mentions that issues such as mood swings, bone loss, low energy, and brain fog not just hit you at this stage, but also your mother goes through this. Meanwhile, she notes that at this stage, fathers start to struggle with memory, health, and the small day-to-day things.
Check out the video here:
Rashi then reveals the real reason behind this, mentioning, “You’re trying to care for them… while learning how to care for yourself. With all the things we’re not told about perimenopause, no one mentions this – that it would collide with our parents growing older. If you’re navigating both, I see you.”
She continues in the video, saying, “You go visit them (your parents) after six months or one year, and you suddenly see that their walk is slower, their voice is softer, their skin has more folds, and you know we pretend. We pretend not to notice, but I think our heart always does, because the child inside of you starts to panic because the first time you realise you’re not just their daughter. You want to be their caregiver, you are their reminder, you’re their support you know and somewhere in that switch I think we all start to feel like we’re losing our childhood and it’s really hard because how do you prepare yourself to lose humans that raised you right and I think the answer is you just don’t.”
As Rashi Chowdhary weighs down the transitional period, key takeaways according to the nutritionist are: “You just cannot prepare yourself for something like this. I think you just show up more, you take that trip, you know, you make those phone calls, you ask those questions, and I think you hug longer, you know because because while you’re so busy worrying about like your own ageing body, you also realise that you need to hold space for theirs right.”
“I think at around 40 during perimenopause, we just do it with more softness, we do it with more presence, and it’s really quite knowing that this, like right here, what we have with them just won’t last forever,” she concludes.