All the Existential Thoughts I Had While Discussing Perimenopause with My Gynaecologist
Libido, life choices & the loveliness of colonial hotels...
I’m talking about my sex drive on a Thursday afternoon mainly to appease my mother, who has spent weeks haranguing me about making an appointment to get my perimenopausal hormones checked.
“I will support you in any rash, stupid or dangerous decision you want to make, but only if you go get your hormones and your head sorted, and then you can go fuck up your life as badly as you wish,” she had told me as we lay on the floor of her bedroom, bums smooshed up against the wall, legs raised at a ninety-degree angle because I’m having heart palpitations that threaten to turn into a full-blown panic attack.
It has only ever happened once before: the night before I hosted Steven Bartlett on stage at an event I had dreamed up for reasons that one hundred percent had something to do with my ego. And clearly it wasn’t Steven or the stage that was the problem, because there is nothing I relish more than obliging people to make me the centre of attention. But, as multiple therapists and medical professionals later told me (in a friendly capacity because I refuse to actually get help), it was in fact the accumulation of two decades of foot-to-the-floor pedal-to-the-metal pressure, compulsive productivity, and high-functioning self-destruction mediated by pathological overachievement. My body finally chose that inopportune moment to rebel.
But it was fine because the dodgy doctor my family has on retainer came to my bedside at four in the morning and injected me with something that made me pass out and wake up three hours later with crazy eyes and the strong suspicion that I was now invincible and immortal.
Nothing a pair of vintage Cartier sunglasses, and the thorough prep work I’d already done (I am nothing if not always, always prepared) couldn’t fix.
In fact whatever was in that magical mix helped me put on the performance of a lifetime. (Which you can still see pinned to the top of my Instagram feed, even though Steven has since proven to be rather problematic. But I loved whatever version of me appeared that day so much that I can’t bear to let it slip down the feed.)
But back to my gyno’s office, talking about my libido. Dr G - whom I adore - is the same man who birthed my babies and mediated my miscarriages, and let me tell you, there is something deeply disconcerting about finding yourself in the very same room that saw you at the peak of your reproductive powers, ripe and juicy with either pregnancy or the possibility of it, but is now setting the stage for you to shrivel up and die.
I joke. I joke.
This will quite clearly be my most spectacular season yet, but let us go through the motions nonetheless.
Herewith follows an almost verbatim transcript of my conversation with Dr G who, it must be noted, has officially grown tired of birthing babies and has made it his mission to become a world-leading expert in perimenopause and menopause, ushering all the women he once saw through childbirth into this new formidable phase of their lives.
Dr G: OK Amy, so what’s up?
Me: So I thought we could discuss me having another baby. Hahahaha.
The last time I was in this room, just after my fortieth birthday, I said the same thing to him, except I was serious and he was apprehensive. But I wouldn’t be deterred. Anyway, that ended in tears and blood on the pavement (literally) and me “healing” from my second miscarriage by attending my best mate Omar’s buddy-moon in Nuweiba less than ten days later and getting the most outrageously high and drunk I have ever been.
I spent that entire long weekend only tenuously tethered to reality and everything was either sparkly and hilarious or curiously calm. I danced and danced and danced. I also ranted about colonialism because there is no circumstance in which I apparently can’t do that. Although I was told afterwards that I did concede colonialism also gave us some rather lovely hotels and that very specific feeling of nostalgia and longing one gets when watching ‘The English Patient.’
The buddy-moon ended with me throwing up all over the bed at four in the morning while Mr Y was in it. He cleaned me up, carried me to the sofa and went to sleep on the beach while pretending not to be furious with me, which is basically our whole fucking marriage.
The next morning I stared up at the ceiling and came to terms with the fact of “no more babies.”
The irony is I didn’t even want the baby all that much.
I just wanted more. To be ahead. To be the best.
Two kids sounded like such an average number. I wanted to say, “Yes, I founded a media company, I’m a CEO and I have four children.” Like Emma Grede (now) or Sara Blakely (then), who I loved until she decided to vocally support a fucking genocide.
Rather aptly, Omar was the only one who pegged that my reasons for having another baby were performative at best. We were both in Saqqara just after that mammoth mummy discovery was made - the one that got turned into a Netflix documentary. We’d been invited to see the excavation site which involved being lowered deep into the earth by a rope while standing in a kind of human-sized basket. The minute I refused, he knew something was up because why would I ever refuse something so gloriously ridiculous?
“Well, I wasn’t planning on telling anyone yet,” I whispered in his ear. “But I’m pregnant.”
“Jesus,” he said, rolling his eyes. “That’s literally the opposite of what you’ve been saying you want! Was it planned?”
We had just returned to reality after hiding out in Marsa Alam during Covid with nothing to do but have endless very deep and meaningful and often very unhinged conversations.
“Fuck you,” I said. “It’s exactly what I want.”
It wasn’t what I wanted. Or maybe it was. I don’t know. I really don’t even know.
Dr G: Sure. Let’s do it. Let’s get you another baby.
(He’s joking).
Dr G has seen me and various members of my family at our most unhinged…
For example, when I pulled out my laptop less than an hour after my emergency C-section because my baby company felt just as urgent as the real baby he’d just pulled out of my stomach. (Masterpiece surgery and stitching, may I add. My scar is barely a couple of centimetres and sits well below the line of even the skimpiest bikini. DM me and I will happily give you his details.)
He watched me scream at my mother in the lobby of his hospital when I had my first miscarriage because I needed to be angry at someone and God wasn’t answering.
He’d seen Mr Y show up after Maya’s birth, straight from a flight, dressed for some inexplicable reason in a three-piece white linen suit, sporting a fedora, and clutching a bottle of Scotch as if I had just had a baby in colonial times and he would have to rush off for sundowners and cigars on the terrace of the Shepherd Hotel immediately afterwards.
Me: OK, fine, fine. I’m here because... perimenopause.
Dr G: OK then, symptoms?
I shrug and, for some reason, start to feel my eyes prickling with hot tears. Why the fuck am I about to cry?
Dr G: Fine, let’s take it one by one. How’s your sex drive? Low?
Me: Well actually, quite the opposite.
I don’t tell him that’s part of the problem. That I don’t know what to do with it. Well, I do, but they’re all things that will just land me in hell, not the literal one of religious texts but the one where you can’t live with yourself because you’ve fucked (up). So if he could just help me settle the fuck down, that would be great.
Dr G: Ah, OK. How’s your skin? Does it feel drier?
Me: Actually, no. Not at all.
I don’t know how to tell him that it feels like my skin is cracking open and poison is seeping out. Maybe he has something for that? I’d like to fill the crevices with better judgement. And maybe a little fucking perspective. And then seal the cracks with gold, because I earned them, and I want them to show, but I also want them to be beautiful. Like kintsugi.
Dr G: Hot flashes? Foggy brain? Weight gain?
And the list goes on.
Me: Nope. No. Not at all. No to all of the above.
I want to say, listen Dr G, I’m the strongest and healthiest and, weirdly enough, potentially the hottest I’ve ever been. I long ago learned that I must never get my hair highlighted blonde and that I really need not tie a sweater around my waist because my ass looks great in the right pair of jeans. My tattoos make me look cooler than I am, my words make me sound smarter than I feel, and on the days when I feel good I can make the whole fucking world bend to my will. This could potentially be my sexy superhero era if only I didn’t feel like a stranger in my own life. Most mornings I’m gripped by something murky and maddening and manic. A melancholy that threatens to consume me if I don’t begrudgingly go through the motions of my routine because I don’t know who I’d be if I didn’t just keep going.
Instead I say,
“Night sweats and heart palpitations. I think I may have had a hot flash in the airport on the way back from Cannes Lions and, I don’t know Dr G, I just feel... not right.”
I feel like I’m loosing my fucking mind.
There’s no point telling him my body knows something my head is refusing to accept. That my desires are only deemed dangerous because they’re dragging me down a road that benefits no one but me and therefore bodes badly for everyone but me. And when you’re a wife, and a mother, and a CEO leading a charge of 160 people, when you’re at the head of a family business where everyone’s business is your business and everyone’s wellbeing dependent on them finding you well, all roads must lead to the greater good…
even if it’s not for your own good.
************
*I’m booked in for all the required hormonal bloodwork on the 28th so we can find out if it is indeed biology, or just a girl with agency intentionally wanting to blow up her whole life.
I have promised my mother that I will not end the world in the meantime.