Struggling with a hormonal imbalance

It's been a good two or three months since AF last arrived and I am very much feeling the effects of my imbalanced hormones. I am anxious/irritable/suspectible to mood swings/experiencing night sweats and hot flushes and have no libido. It's like permanent PMS and it sucks! Gym work-outs are about the only thing that make these menopausal symptoms manageable.

I had a phone consult with my herbalist last week and have a new script for the next lot of herbs. I hadn't talked to her since we moved into the next step around adoption (the assessment stage) and talked with her a bit about how I don't want to be a new Mum much past the age of forty. I certainly don't want to be nursing a newborn at forty-five. My herbalist said she doesn't normally say this to her clients, but personally believed that once a woman hit menopause she really was meant to be finished with her child-raising years - be that with biological or adopted children. She didn't mean it in a bad way and I know exactly what she meant. My head space is in a different place to where it was when I first became a Mum. It isn't all about motherhood anymore for me - I have been fighting this internal change for quite some time.

I never got the concrete proof around what is happening for me but emotionally/spiritually/physically I am experiencing the "change of life" - menopause or not. My take on menopause is it's a time of starting over on many levels - a time to reflect/regroup/reclaim. The reason I've been grieving baby number two for the last couple of years so intensely is because I have known on a very deep level that my time was running out to conceive again - physically/emotionally/spiritually. I haven't read much about the emotional and spiritual side of menopause but know for me the process has been huge. Talks with my herbalist and with post-menopausal women have validated this for me. I am forty years old and I am going through a life-change that on average happens at the age of fifty-one. It's no wonder I feel worlds apart from my same-aged peers a lot of the time. The average menopausal woman has had her family and is dealing with teenagers or even grappling the empty nest syndrome. I started my family late in life (at the age of thirty-five) and didn't get to finish it because of POF/premature menopause.

We had our third marriage counselling session last week - there are two more to go (these are free sessions - normally there'd be six but our counsellor is off on extended leave soon). Things are coming out in the open more and I am getting to the bottom of what has felt wrong/missing in our marriage. I can see why I so desperately wanted another baby to come along to fill the emotional gap that lies in the root of our marriage. I didn't notice it was there so much when my daughter was a baby and then a toddler. But once past those intense first couple of years of motherhood, my discontentment started to show. Yet I wasn't fully in touch with it myself. I have had to chip away slowly but surely to see what truly lies beneath the pain of SIF.

I feel as though I am faced with making a choice. I am in no rush to make it and will trust in God's timing with it. But basically it's about choosing whether I want to stay in a marriage where there is going to be a lot of hard work to meet a very basic yet necessary need of mine - a strong emotional connection or simply moving on. If baby number two had come along I would no doubt not be looking at all this right now - maybe a little later down the track, who knows. All I know is it feels quite wrong to consider bringing another child into our family when I am feeling so unsettled and unsure about my marriage. Yet we are proceeding forward down the adoption path as this could all turn around - you never know. And we are working on our marriage - even if it means facing up to some of the unpleasant stuff.

I guess SIF has broken our marriage somewhat. Perhaps we weren't the best communicators to begin with so the tragedy that was SIF only caused us to grow apart. Why? Because we grieved differently and separately. Add a daughter with ASD to the mix and it is not hard to see why we haven't connected deeply for quite some time. Now is a time of rebuilding. The debris of the last couple of years has been exposed - it very much feels like a time of healing.

Having a hormonal imbalance only confuses me as I'm not sure what feelings are real - and what ones are exaggerated or reactionary. I'm hoping going back on the herbs will swing things back into balance again. I have read that hormonal imbalances themselves can shake a marriage and so I am careful to not blame all that is right now on SIF (though it is ironically because of SIF that I have a hormonal imbalance - or vice versa!)

I went to a Tupperware evening this week with a few MOTs present. It really is like a stake to the heart when Mums of Two start comparing their children physically or personality-wise. I can take the MOT talk more than I used to. Yet I think I will always have a twinge of sadness for what wasn't meant to be for me. There will undoubtedly always be reminders of that.

A close friend who has been struggling with IF for around four years phoned me to reveal she was twelve weeks pregnant earlier this week. I am so rapt for her as I had fears for her not ever been able to conceive. It was IVF number six at the age of forty-one that was the jackpot for her. Hearing her news just gave me goosebumps - it felt so right, so timely. Proof to me that God is the one orchestrating all of this. My answer will come. I am not so naive anymore to believe that it will come in the form of a baby either.

With all my internal changes going on, I have been trying to be really gentle with myself. For a while there I was out looking for work to improve our financial situation. Yet for now I've decided to stick with the status quo - to just relax and to just "be" a bit in my week while my daughter's at Kindy. God is figuring some big stuff out for me right now and all I can do is my bit and trust that things will unfold clearly when they are meant to.