Meet Jess: Perimenopause Rage and the Anger Nobody Warned Her About
Jess had always considered herself a fairly patient person. Not endlessly patient, obviously; she was a registered nurse and a single mother, not a saint, and there were limits to the amount of human nonsense she could absorb before privately thinking something uncharitable. But kindness came naturally to her. She had spent most of her adult life looking after people when they were frightened, ill, confused or having some of the worst days of their lives, and nursing had taught her that people rarely needed judgement when they were struggling. They needed somebody to remain calm while everything around them felt anything but.
Motherhood had tested that philosophy rather more thoroughly. Jess had her daughter at 38 and stepped back from full-time nursing afterwards, eventually settling into part-time work at a doctor's surgery where the hours fitted reasonably well around school and the general administrative circus of raising a child. There was no father in the picture, but she wasn't doing everything without support; her parents were brilliant, her daughter adored them and Jess knew how lucky she was to have people she could ring when work ran late, school closed for reasons known only to schools, or she simply needed an afternoon in which nobody asked her for a snack. The three of them had built a good little system around her daughter and, for the most part, it worked.
Jess often described the last ten years as plodding along, which sounded considerably more miserable than she meant it. She liked plodding. Plodding meant the mortgage was being paid, her student debt was finally behind her, there was food in the fridge, friends to meet at the weekend and enough left over occasionally for something that wasn't strictly necessary. The cost of living had made everything tighter and a trip to the supermarket could now produce the sort of financial reckoning previously reserved for replacing the boiler, but they were surviving. More importantly, Jess genuinely liked the life she'd made. She liked her job, loved being a mum, had good friends, great parents, a home that was hers and a cat who had never contributed a penny towards the mortgage but nevertheless behaved as though the entire property had been purchased for his convenience.
There was, as far as Jess could tell, no enormous hidden unhappiness waiting to be discovered. She wasn't secretly desperate to leave her job, she wasn't dealing with a difficult ex, her daughter was doing well and she wasn't lying awake at night wondering how she was going to keep a roof over their heads. Parenting alone could be bloody hard and some weeks stretched her more than others, but if you'd asked Jess whether she was happy, she would have said yes without having to think particularly hard about it, which was why she couldn't understand why she had recently become so spectacularly fucking angry.
It had started gradually enough that she couldn't have said exactly when it began. There wasn't a morning when Jess woke up, stretched, looked at the ceiling and thought, Ah, excellent, apparently I hate everyone now. Instead there were little incidents that seemed perfectly justifiable on their own, except there were more of them than there used to be and her reaction to each one appeared to have been designed for an offence approximately twelve times more serious. The strange part wasn't even the anger itself, because Jess had been angry plenty of times in 46 years and considered it a perfectly legitimate human emotion; it was the speed at which it arrived. There seemed to be almost no distance anymore between something irritating happening and her entire body responding as though somebody had fired a starting pistol.
Driving to work became one of the first places she really noticed it. Jess had never been particularly sentimental about other motorists because nobody who has spent any meaningful amount of time on British roads believes humanity is operating at its intellectual peak on a roundabout, but she'd always been fairly measured. Somebody pulled out, she'd mutter idiot, brake and carry on with her day. Lately, however, a minor piece of questionable driving could produce a response so immediate and elaborate that Jess occasionally impressed herself with the vocabulary available to her before nine in the morning.
One Tuesday she was driving to the surgery with coffee in the cup holder and the radio on when a man pulled out in front of her at a roundabout. She braked, he carried on, nobody crashed and the entire event lasted perhaps three seconds, which should have been the end of it. Instead, Jess found herself following him down the road delivering a furious monologue about his eyesight, intelligence, parentage and apparent belief that indicators were an optional extra. By the time he turned off a mile later she had mentally revoked his driving licence, confiscated his vehicle and developed several proposals for improving the national testing system. Then she stopped at the next set of lights, took a sip of coffee and realised she felt completely fine again.
That was becoming the pattern. The anger didn't linger for hours or send her into a bad mood for the rest of the day; it arrived enormous and fully formed, tore through her and then buggered off, leaving Jess standing amongst the emotional wreckage wondering why she'd just reacted to a Ford Focus as though it had broken into her house. She initially blamed the driver, which seemed reasonable, until the list of people apparently responsible for her fury began expanding to include drivers who went too slowly, drivers who went too quickly, people who didn't indicate, people who indicated too late and, on one particularly bad morning, a perfectly innocent woman who had indicated correctly but had somehow managed to do it in a way Jess found irritating.
Then there was the school email. It arrived one afternoon while Jess was making dinner and, even after rereading it later, she couldn't identify anything objectively wrong with it. Nobody was criticising her daughter, asking for money they hadn't already warned parents about or announcing that tomorrow was inexplicably World Book Day and everybody needed to produce a Victorian chimney sweep costume before breakfast. It was just one of those relentlessly cheerful school emails that turned a simple request into several paragraphs of collaborative enthusiasm. Jess read one particular sentence twice and felt annoyance rise through her body with such force that she put the wooden spoon down and said, “Oh, just fuck off.”
Her daughter, who was sitting at the table, looked up and asked what was wrong, at which point Jess discovered how difficult it was to explain that nothing was actually wrong except for the wording. She handed over the basic facts of the email, her daughter quite reasonably failed to identify the outrage and Jess found herself trying to explain that it wasn't what they'd said, it was the irritating way they'd said it, which sounded increasingly ridiculous the longer she spoke. She started typing a reply anyway, read it back and deleted it. The second version was marginally less hostile but still carried the unmistakable energy of a woman preparing to go to war over a sentence containing the phrase we kindly ask, so that went too. Eventually she put the phone down and decided that responding to school emails should probably now operate under the same basic principle as driving: not while under the influence. Exactly what she was under the influence of remained unclear.
Even inanimate objects had started taking their chances. One evening she caught her little toe on the doorframe while carrying a basket of washing upstairs and, before the pain had properly reached her brain, she had already sworn at the doorframe, kicked the washing basket and sent half its contents across the hallway. Kicking the basket hurt her other foot, which naturally improved matters enormously, and by the time her daughter called down to ask whether she was okay, Jess was standing amongst several pairs of pants and a fitted sheet feeling genuine fury towards a piece of architecture that had neither moved nor expressed any previous hostility towards her. She gathered up the washing, muttering as she went, and couldn't help noticing that the doorframe had been in exactly the same place for the six years she'd owned the house. It was difficult to build a convincing case against it.
Saturday was the day that really unsettled her, precisely because it had been such a good one. She and her daughter had met friends at the park, taken a picnic and spent most of the afternoon outside while the children ran around and the adults talked. Nobody was rushing, nobody argued, the weather behaved itself and Jess came home with that pleasant tiredness that follows a day when you've actually enjoyed your life rather than merely completed everything required of it. They ate dinner, her daughter had a bath and later Jess climbed onto the bed beside her to read, still carrying the warm, settled feeling of a Saturday that had gone unusually well.
Halfway through the story the cat wandered in and jumped onto the bed. He climbed over Jess, settled himself with the absolute entitlement of an animal who had never paid for anything in his life and, while turning around, dug his claws into her thigh. It hurt, obviously, but what happened inside Jess was so wildly disproportionate to the injury that even now she couldn't quite explain it. For perhaps a second, maybe two, she experienced an enormous flash of rage and an almost cartoonish urge to pick up this animal she absolutely adored and launch him straight through the fucking window. Not move him off the bed or swear because he'd hurt her; her brain apparently skipped all available intermediate options and went directly to cat, window, flight.
She didn't throw him, of course. Jess was still Jess underneath whatever the hell had just happened, and the rational part of her arrived quickly enough to remove him from her leg and put him rather firmly on the other side of the bed. But she shouted, her daughter jumped and the cat stared at her with the deeply offended expression of an animal who had just stabbed somebody and couldn't believe the resulting atmosphere. Jess immediately heard herself explaining, “His claws really hurt me,” with the slightly defensive tone of somebody presenting mitigating circumstances to a jury, while her daughter looked from Jess to the cat and accepted the explanation with considerably less interest than Jess felt it deserved.
She finished the story, kissed her daughter goodnight and went downstairs feeling horrible. By the time she'd made a cup of tea the anger had completely disappeared, which somehow made the whole thing stranger. Twenty minutes earlier she'd briefly considered giving the cat an unscheduled flying lesson and now she was rummaging through a cupboard wondering whether they'd eaten all the biscuits. When the cat eventually wandered into the living room, apparently having decided to forgive her, Jess called him over. He jumped onto the sofa, curled himself against her stomach and began purring while she stroked his head and quietly apologised for wanting to throw him through a window. He responded to this confession by stretching one paw across her leg and falling asleep, presumably satisfied that the household had returned to its proper order and his staff had regained control of themselves.
Jess stayed there for a while, curled around him, and started thinking about the last few months properly. There were the drivers and the school email, the doorframe and the things she dropped in the kitchen, the cupboard door left open and the washing that wouldn't fit into the drawer. There were people walking slowly in front of her when she was in a hurry, noises that seemed inexplicably louder than they used to and perfectly reasonable questions asked at precisely the wrong moment. None of these things were extraordinary, yet they could produce a surge of anger that felt enormous while it was happening and ridiculous almost immediately afterwards. She could be herself at 7.03 and She-Hulk at 7.04, only to find herself making a cup of tea at 7.10 wondering what all the fuss had been about.
So she did what Jess tended to do when something didn't make sense and started running through the possibilities. Stress was the obvious one. She was a single parent, worked, had a mortgage and lived in a country where buying olive oil now occasionally required a small discussion with yourself about priorities, but when she actually looked at her life, things were okay. Her parents were brilliant, her daughter was happy, work was steady, her student debt was finally gone and although money needed watching, they were managing. She'd spent the afternoon sitting in the sunshine with friends eating a picnic, for God's sake. If there was a major life crisis hiding somewhere, it was doing an exceptionally good job of keeping itself hidden.
Burnout didn't feel quite right either. She was tired sometimes, certainly, but she wasn't flattened by work or dragging herself through every day. Depression didn't fit how she felt. She wasn't unhappy. Anxiety? Maybe, but she wasn't sitting there worrying about everything that might go wrong; she was sitting there wondering why things that went slightly wrong suddenly made her want to destroy household objects.
She took another sip of wine and looked down at the cat.
“I'm 46.”
The cat continued washing his foot.
Jess knew about perimenopause. Of course she did. She was an RN working in a doctor's surgery, and she'd had plenty of conversations around menopause over the years. Periods changing, hot flushes, night sweats, sleep problems — those were familiar territory. She hadn't somehow reached 46 believing menopause arrived overnight on your fiftieth birthday with a complimentary handheld fan.
But rage?
That wasn't the bit people talked about.
Jess certainly wasn't calling it perimenopause rage. Until that evening, she wouldn't have known there was a name for the sudden anger and irritability she was experiencing at all.
Certainly not like this. Not the three-second transformation from perfectly normal woman to somebody capable of developing a personal vendetta against a doorframe. Not reading a harmless school email and feeling your entire body react to the phrase we kindly ask. Not driving to work and discovering that a man in a Ford Focus has apparently become everything wrong with humanity. Not having a fabulous Saturday with your daughter and friends, feeling happy and content, and then several hours later briefly considering whether the family cat might be aerodynamic.
Jess reached for her phone.
This time she wasn't looking for something wrong with her life. She was curious about something changing in her.
And there it was.
Women talking about perimenopause anger and rage. Irritability. Sudden flashes of fury that seemed to arrive from nowhere. Women describing mood changes during perimenopause that sounded remarkably like the last few months of Jess's life. Women describing reactions that felt too big for what had actually happened, then wondering afterwards where the hell they'd come from. Women describing mood changes during perimenopause that sounded remarkably like the last few months of Jess's life. It wasn't every woman and it wasn't proof that every time Jess wanted to swear at somebody she could simply point at her ovaries and close the case, but it was enough to make her sit back against the sofa and look at the last few months differently.
The road rage. The school email. The doorframe. The speed of it all. Three seconds from fine to fucking furious, followed sometimes minutes later by being completely herself again.
Jess looked down at the cat, now asleep across her lap without a care in the world.
“Oh,” she said.
Because perhaps she hadn't suddenly become an angry woman at all. Perhaps she'd been looking for an explanation in her job, her finances, single motherhood and every other part of a life she actually liked, when the thing that had changed wasn't necessarily her life.
It might be her hormones.
Not broken. Not suddenly horrible. Not secretly unhappy.
Just changing.
Jess had successfully guided one member of the household through the terrible twos already. Apparently, at 46, it was her turn.
At least this time she could pour her own wine.
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