From Puberty to Pregnancy to Menopause: The Brutal Truth They Don’t Tell You About Being a Woman

OK.  I am just going to say it.  Being born a woman is bloody awful.  Men, feel free to write your own for your sex.

First, the good years.  You are born, you become a little girl.  You are loved, you are safe.  You get to play with dolls and play.  You make friends when you go to primary school.  All is good and happy in the world.

Then.  Puberty hits.  

For some of us, it hits early.  Breasts start growing (at ten in my case).  What does that mean?  Well firstly, your childhood is over.  Each and every one of us remembers the time when grown men started looking at us and talking to us in ways that we could not understand.  For me, again, ten years old.  Because: breasts.

I still remember a family member saying "Oh you will have all the boys after you now!" I did not want that.  I was a child.  I did not understand it.

Then the hormones start.  You have no clue who you are yet, your body is changing in ways you are not ready for.  You realise that the world is not the safe place you thought it was and that you actually do need protecting.  That safe world you lived in no longer exists.

Plus of course, periods.  Every single month.  For decades.  If you are lucky, you get regular periods.  If not, you get fibroids (me again), endometriosis.  Pain, pain and more pain.  But of course you are a woman so the pain you describe to doctors and consultants is mostly ignored, until finally, years later, sometime actually listens and you get a diagnosis.

Don't want to get pregnant?  Let me introduce to IUDs!!!  Wonderful little things that apparently you do not need pain relief/anesthetic for (plot twist, you really, really do).  Getting one in remains the worse pain that I have ever felt.

Do want to get pregnant?  Get ready for nine months of throwing up, your body changing until you don't recognise it, hair falling out, gestational diabetes, pain and more pain.  Plus of course, going into labour!  Oh the joys!

But of course, even our bodies know that women are screwed so it pumps us full of hormones so we forget just how awful the whole thing was.

Then you have the mother years.  That have not changed since the beginning of bloody time.  We are expected to know all about the child and how to care for it instinctively, from birth plus do majority of childcare, household chores, cooking, laundry, usually also while working because "woman".

Then.  We reach our mid forties.  Sweet sanctuary!!  Our periods stop when we hit menopause.  Let's have a party, we are free!!!! 

But no.  That would be too easy.

Instead, we get the equivalent of the second fucking coming of puberty.  Tears, rage, tears, rage, on repeat.  Plus hot sweats and wondering who you are even are anymore.  Again.

So at this point, what do we have to look forward to next?  Death.  That's it.  Woman's life is over.

Wonderful.  Thanks almighty creator.

As you may be able to tell, I am starting the throws of menopause and I am pissed off.