At 35 – I was pregnant.
I was also the Sales Director of a major book publisher, leading a team while trying to calibrate my relentless vomiting with negotiating orders for the second last Harry Potter book – to that point, the biggest publishing event in history.
At 39 – I found myself in the same position.
Excusing myself from planning meetings for the publication of the final Harry Potter book to heave into a toilet bowl before returning with a “right, where were we everyone?” I barely functioned each day of the working week before collapsing each weekend.
Weeks 6 – 16 of both my pregnancies genuinely felt like a daily battle for survival.
At 40 – When my second daughter was 6 months old, I was asked to join Simon & Schuster as their sales & marketing director.
Three months later life was feeling vaguely stable, or as stable as life in a demanding new job with a baby and a four year old feels.
But just as the demands of the job started to rev up, both our daughters were hospitalised in the same week with pneumonia. Our older daughter had already been through emergency departments a number of times with severe asthma, so we were old hands at the hospital drill.
I say it casually now but it was really tough at the time. Most of all for our daughter.
Until this point, my husband and I had juggled, ducked and weaved, believing that there was no way we could afford for one of us to stop working.
But this took things to another level. We knew we didn’t have a choice as we couldn’t manage the extra needs of our two girls and two jobs. I earned more and my job was only getting bigger, so my husband quit the next day.
At 42 – I was appointed Managing Director of Simon & Schuster Australia. There is no question that my husband being at home with our girls gave me room to breathe at work, and the rest of the family room to breathe – literally – at home.
At 44 – We were starting to find an even keel. Or as even keeled as life can be with a big job and small children. Even with a stay at home parent in the mix.
And then I started feeling a bit anxious. Uncharacteristically anxious.
- Was it the blindsiding death of my friend from cancer?
- Was it my mother’s death almost a year to the day later?
- Was it my brothers’ diagnosis with a life threatening genetic disorder, the day of my mother’s funeral?
- Was it my subsequent diagnosis a few months afterwards?
- Was this just life, in midlife?
Or did it have something to do with the multiple pads, tampons and spare pair of underpants that I had started packing in my bag every day as my periods had become so unpredictable.
I distinctly remember walking into the office one day and feeling a sudden uncontrollable rush of blood – no, not to my face.
I felt ashamed, thrown back to my teenage years at school where I sometimes bled so violently blood leaked onto my chair and I had to wrap my jumper around my waist before leaving the classroom (something my daughters repeated years later).
At 45 – I Emceed a major book launch for Ian Thorpe’s autobiography, even though I’d recently had a major cycling accident, smashing one elbow and breaking the wrist on the other arm.
But my boss was in town and the show went on.
Somehow I did that event. I was even a bit dazzling, despite the fact I couldn’t hold a microphone.
After the surge of adrenaline, and the speeches, ended, I whispered to my colleague and friend “Oh shit, I’ve just got my period and I don’t know if I can put in a tampon. She waited outside the door of the cubicle whispering encouragement, bearing witness. This is what women do for each other. No one else was any the wiser.
Instead of taking time to fully recover from that accident, I threw myself into more responsibilities, more commitments, more mothering, just more. I didn’t think there was a choice.
At 46 – when I got in the car one day to go to work I couldn’t make myself start the engine. The car’s or my own. Instead I started crying, walked back into the house, downstairs to my bedroom, sat on the bed and sobbed.
At 47 – I quit my big job.
I’d relished the challenge of turning the business around through building a culture of trust and possibility, but had completed the cycle. I knew I had taken the business as far as I could while holding true to my values. It was time.
I was feeling a familiar thirst for change but this was bigger. I was done and something was telling me there was more, I was more, I could do more.
And life felt short.
So I left to explore that instinct and bootstrapped a publishing startup.
At 48 – The day that I launched my business, my brother died. The months after that are a bit of a blur.
At 49 – I parted ways with my business partner to incorporate the business so I could seek investment. The day that was finalised, a tumour was discovered on the pancreas of our close friend’s daughter.
In the same week I raised the capital, I was offered the role of Publishing Director at another publishing company.
Realising I needed to prioritise my health and my family, I made the difficult decision to take the job.
Another crossroad.
Starting the new role, ever the optimist, I felt the familiar surge of excitement for the challenge but this time it was accompanied by a strange sensation of feeling exposed and unsure of myself.
Like I was in quicksand.
- Had I made the wrong decision?
- Was I feeling a sense of failure?
- Was I overwhelmed by everything that had happened?
- Was it just life in midlife, again?
But it was more than that.
I felt foggy. I felt disembodied. I felt exhausted. I felt hot.
My face would flush for no reason. I couldn’t drink alcohol anymore. I was blurry around the edges, my characteristic sharp mind and memory dulled.
I didn’t feel like me.
During this time my period stopped, and started, and stopped, and started.
And stopped.
Through all of these years, I not only showed up, I excelled. In the jobs, with the teams, for my family. But it took an enormous amount of energy and willpower. All the more draining because I felt like I had to push through all these experiences.
At 50 – I remember driving home one day and experiencing a visceral surge of rage.
That white hot moment of clarity reminded me that I wasn’t the problem and I shouldn’t feel embarrassed or downplay any of it. It was exactly the same epiphany I’d had many years before when I returned to work after having my girls; that being a working parent wasn’t something to apologise for.
It was the same WTF why don’t we talk about this realisation I had when I was pregnant.
When I had a newborn
When I juggled parenthood
When my husband and I spent those long nights and days in hospital with our children.
Through all of this, life went on, work continued. I pushed through.
But as vulnerable as it might make me feel, I knew I had a responsibility as someone in a position of relative power to build awareness and advocate for structural change.
Just as I did all those years before for parental leave, because it wasn’t going to be done for me, and for those other women around me and behind me.
My first boyfriend used to call my period my “yucky things.”
My mother referred to it as “the curse.”
According to a survey in 2022 by girls equality charity, Plan Australia, “one fifth (19%) of boys in Australia think periods should be kept secret”.
Plan International Australia CEO Susanne Legena concludes that “Girls are missing school, being bullied and dealing with distress – all because we are not talking enough about periods, particularly with boys.”
These are the girls who become women in the workforce, and these are the boys who become their colleagues and possibly their partners.
Menstruation, motherhood and menopause shouldn’t be something that girls, women or people who menstruate feel ashamed of.
Menstruation enables procreation. That is something we do together.
So why are women’s hormones secret women’s business?
Having a period is not a disease. Being menopausal isn’t contagious, though I’m sure most of us would prefer not to have to endure menstruation or menopause.
From furtively sharing tampons, discreetly breast feeding our babies, managing caring responsibilities on the down-low or shuffling closer to the air conditioning, we have been conditioned to feel like it’s up to us to manage our bodies, our bodily functions in the private sphere, keep ourselves “tidy” and avoid making anyone else feel uncomfortable.
And there is a lingering sense that we should feel grateful for the opportunity to be female and to work, which perpetuates the gender norm that being female is still somehow an inherent imposition on the workplace.
It’s time for that to stop.
In fact it is well overdue, and there’s a very compelling economic incentive to drive this change.
A recent report released by Deloitte Access Economics in partnership with Australians Investing in Women, asserts that more flexible ideas around gender could lead to an additional $128 billion each year for Australia’s economy and 461,000 additional full time employees.
Commenting on the report Julie Reilly OAM CEO, Australians Investing In Women observes that “Rigid gender norms that reinforce women’s and men’s traditional roles at home and options for work act as a major barrier to achieving social, economic, and political equality. They come at a significant cost to all Australians.”
However, alarmingly, “Despite years of investment into gender equity, Australian progress has stagnated and fallen behind other countries. Women still earn 86 cents for every dollar earnt by a man, spend 1.8 hours more on domestic labour per week, and make up 6% of CEO positions on ASX200 companies”.
Many of these statistics are way too familiar but the one that shocked me most was that “30% of Australian men think gender inequality doesn’t really exist”.
As Sruthi Srikanthan notes in her introduction to the report, “The driver of gender inequity lies in the beliefs that we as a society hold about women and men – our gender norms. Our norms become our expectations. Our expectations become our behaviour. Our behaviour becomes our reality – our rules, our institutions, our incentives, our workplaces, our homes and our relationships.”
At 52 – A bulging disc in my back literally brought me to my knees. I would do Zoom meetings while kneeling as it hurt too much to sit down.
At 53 – I had the worst week of my life when I was hospitalised myself and underwent major abdominal surgery while at the same time my daughter was in the ward upstairs with asthma.
And despite these major health issues I still couldn’t press pause.
If we don’t talk about this stuff, nothing will ever change.
But that doesn’t mean it’s easy to consciously push back at the dominant paradigm and resist the temptation to apologise, minimise or hide our experience. It’s hard enough to live through it without having to shoulder the burden of having to educate everyone else about it.
Think for a moment how it feels when…
Just as our children are starting to become a little more independent.
Just when it looks like we are going to get the opportunity to enjoy our own hard won independence.
The ground shifts.
Our bodies become unfamiliar and we are thrown back into the same feelings we experienced through puberty, in reverse.
Our sense of worth, that let’s face it, is still measured in society by how we look and our fertility, is torpedoed. And this coincides with the extra responsibilities that we carry at this stage of life, sandwiched between aging parents, teenagers and work. Forget the buzzwords of self-care or self-actualisation, we are spending all our energy on-self flagellation and self-preservation.
At the same time, a knock on effect is that many of our marriages falter because something fundamental is happening to us that we don’t fully understand ourselves, let alone be able to articulate to our partners.
This article from Women’s Agenda based on the findings of a survey conducted by the Family Law Menopause Project and Newson Health Research and Education explores this issue.
In her Fast Company article The unspoken reason women leave the workforce, CEO of Biote Terry Webber references the recent survey conducted by Biote to demonstrate why destigmatising menopause is so important.
“4 out of every 10 women experienced menopause symptoms that interfered with their work performance or productivity on a weekly basis. Seventeen percent have quit a job or considered quitting due to menopause symptoms”.
Tellingly, “Over 87% of respondents had not spoken to an employer or manager at work about their menopause symptoms, citing reasons that suggest feelings of shame and fear of discrimination or being seen as weak and making excuses.”
As women, we’ve been conditioned to look after others and not make a fuss. That extends to staying quiet about menopause to avoid the perception that it will affect our ability to do our jobs effectively and to make it more palatable for everyone else, including our workplaces, colleagues, friends and families.
When announcing the NSW’s government’s commitment to $40 million funding for menopause support in its 2022-23 budget, NSW Minister for Women, Bronnie Taylor said that “Women often experience very difficult symptoms of perimenopause and menopause in silence…I want them to know that they no longer need to keep calm and carry on, together we can smash the taboo!”
I love this sentiment and the fact that the NSW government is stepping up, but that still doesn’t mean it’s easy for us to start talking.
A lot of women don’t want to discuss menopause, especially in the workplace, precisely because of those entrenched gender norms. They don’t want anything to undermine being valued and taken seriously at work.
I suspect there will be women who feel uncomfortable with me writing this article.
Which is precisely why we HAVE to speak up.
The good news is that as a wave of women who have spent their adult life in the workforce are hitting perimenopause and menopause and having their own WTF epiphanies, we are starting to talk. Notable people adding their voice to the mix include Mia Freedman, Alison Daddo and Shelly Horton. Thanks to all of you.
Our own experience led Corinne Roberts and me to publish books to open up healthy conversations about menopause and midlife, like The M Word by Dr Ginni Mansberg and Great Sex Starts at 50 by Tracey Cox and because these were products Murdoch Books was publishing, selling and marketing, it meant we talked about the issues in our business, with our customers and media partners and through our social media.
What Dr Ginni taught me about menopause was life-changing and I have shared her book with every person of a certain age I know. Now you can access this information for the workplace with the Don’t Sweat It online program that Dr Ginni launched with Shelly Horton recently.
Naomi Watts’ new business I Am Stripes upends the traditional view of menopause and specifically targets perimenopausal and menopausal customers with its beauty products and supplements. It’s encouraging seeing brands like this emerge, though we need to be mindful that this stage of life doesn’t become commodified in the way that “feminine hygiene” did in the 80’s and 90’s. Just since I’ve been working on this article, my social media feeds have been carpet bombed with ads for menpausal weight loss. We also need to guard against pressure on women to do a “better job” of it. Just like motherhood, menopause is definitely not a competition.
Women talk to each other about the challenges we face if encouraged and given the tools, but if we are only talking amongst ourselves we’re still not shifting the dial on gender norms. For real, systemic change these conversations need to include everyone to smash the traditional taboos around women’s hormones.
Inclusion means opening the circle and empathy necessitates walking in someone else’s shoes. Unfortunately if you’ve never had to deal with a period. Never had to deal with your body’s natural bloody biological functions; or never really had to think too hard about what that feels like, it’s difficult to empathise.
That’s why I talked openly at work and why I’m sharing my story now.
Here’s the quick recap;
I have contributed an enormous amount to the workforce and to the economy over more than thirty years of work.
During that time, I have menstruated, I have had two children, I have been living through menopause for the last 10 years, and I have weathered sickness and grief. This body of lived experience (pun intended) is an integral part of what makes me very good at work.
But my story is just one person’s, one woman’s.
If you are a woman, please give yourself permission to talk openly about life, work, menstruation, menopause and the messy in between. Let’s challenge the temptation to remain silent, resist those residual feelings of embarrassment and somehow never being enough. Let’s say stuff it, to keeping ourselves nice.
For men reading this, it may be your partner, your sister, your mother, your daughter, your friend or your colleagues dealing with a myriad of challenges that come with being born a woman. Maybe your relationship is struggling, maybe you’re losing highly valuable people on your team.
Make it a priority to educate yourself, if you haven’t already. Download the articles, absorb the reports, study the stats, read the books, talk to your partner. Ask her how she is really feeling. Get comfortable with the idea of talking about it.
This is all part of our collective human experience. It’s up to all of us to do the work, and the world will be a better (and as the economists have clearly shown us) more prosperous place if we share the load.