It's my Menopause Day.

I'm officially past it. Congratulate me.

I don’t remember the day I got my first ever period, but I do remember the day I pretended I had. I painted nail polish on a sanitary towel and showed it to my friend Lucy. I wanted her to think I’d got mine because she’d got hers and I was desperate not to be left out. Please don’t judge me, they hadn’t invented the internet yet and I lived most of my first decade or so in a sort of merged landscape between my overactive imagination and the wistfulness of the children’s fiction I devoured daily. I’d probably read about something similar to the nail polish trick in a Judy Blume and thought I’d try it, just to see what it was like. I took my first holy communion round about the same time for similar reasons - I wasn’t remotely religious but I just had to know how that weird looking wafer tasted. I was a good little monkey, but…curious.

Today I thought I’d write a few things down about another life milestone: menopause. Because today is, officially, ‘that day’ for me. It’s my official ‘menopause’. What should you do or say? Should you send balloons? A sympathy card? Who knows? I’ve done a lot of reading about all the various stages of women’s lives but I’ve never seen anybody write about their actual menopause day. Because, in case you didn’t know, it is an actual, one day event: the day when you haven’t had your period for precisely a year. But many people don’t even realise that. I just don’t think people talk about it. So, since you already know I’m weird because I painted a period pad with nail varnish, I thought maybe I’d step up.