Menopause is a bitch.

It’s 4 a.m. I woke up because I was thirsty and now I can’t get back to sleep.

I have always been a champion sleeper.

Not these days.

Menopause is puberty in reverse and upside down. I’m moody. I break-out. I’m hot. I’m cold. I don’t sleep well. My body is changing. I’m neurotic. (OK, I’ve mostly always been neurotic.)

Remember when you were a teenager and stayed up ‘til all hours of the night and slept all day? That wasn’t because you were special, it was a brain thing. The emerging research is all over teenagers and sleep patterns. I figure in a few years they’ll get around to menopausal women – women are always last.

I bitched and carried on for months about what I thought was the fact that no one told me about the sleep thing. Hot flashes, sure. Night sweats, yup. Mood swings, check. Irregular periods, got it. Can’t sleep?

Not a word.

Or so I thought. A friend told me that she had indeed told me, but folks don’t seem to pick up on the sleep disorder part. It could be that we’re too horrified by the hot flash thing.

I haven’t really had a hot flash yet. The night sweats just started so, more ’n’ likely, they’re on the horizon, but I can’t imagine that anything is worse than this sleep thing. Or the morning sickness part.

Oh yeah, I’m one of the small percentage of women who are “morning sick” during menopause. I retch and gag, almost as if on cue, every morning that I manage to sleep until a decent hour.

Apparently, my body will inflict suffering one way or the other.

Sleep was my first form of refuge.

Naps. I love naps.

Long, lazy, drool on the pillow naps in afternoon light.

I love crawling into bed with a good book early in the evening and reading myself to sleep. Only now, some times, I’ll finish half the novel before sleep takes me. It didn’t used to be this way.

In one of Stephen King’s novels, I think, there is a line something like “I have become an old woman who doesn’t sleep in the night.”

I have become an old woman. . . 

Who doesn’t sleep in the night.

Menopause is a bitch.