How do you make a hormone?

Don't pay her! Ha!

Sorry, very poor joke but I couldn't resist and there has to be a lighter side to the whole middle years thing than my current state of hormonal madness!

Hormones, who'd have 'em!? The damn things are the bane of my recent life. When we are teenagers and our hormones first start kicking ass and are out of kilter we are told merely that 'it will soon pass', it's 'growing up'. What anyone fails to enlighten us on is that once we hit that 'woman of a certain age' phase in life, things are only going to get a whole lot worse.

Now then you guys, I know it's not all fun and rosy for you being on the receiving end of all this nonsense, you take your fair share of the flak, let's face it, we women can be something of a confusion when we are in, shall we say, a more stable state of hormonal balance so we must be almost impossible to fathom when we lose the chemical balance plot, hell, I can't understand myself let alone expect someone else too much of the time but that said, a little more understanding and a little less derogatory comment and hilarity would be good! ;o)

For me these recent months have suddenly become pretty 'hormonally challenged', gone are the times of a few days mental and physical uproar prior to a period and then happy relief, instead they have been replaced with weeks of the damn carry on and if I'm lucky I might manage a few days break before the whole emotional and physical malarkey begins again. Gone too is any semblance of order or regularity, replaced instead with a completely haphazard timetable of symptoms that mostly just don't have the good grace to bugger off for long at all.

So, next time you guys scathingly make reference to hormones or laugh at our stupidity, you might like to consider trying to live your daily life with a permanent bad skin and hair day, pains in your joints, your abdomen and your thighs, adhoc bruises about your person where a sudden bout of hormonal clumsiness caused you to lose all sense of spatial awareness and bump into things like Mr Blobby on acid, feeling too cold one minute and too damn hot the next, the headache from hell for weeks at a time, feeling like your are about to get a bout of the flu, permanently, retention of enough water to make an adventure trek across the Sahara a distinct possibility and worst of all, fluctuating from feeling angry to weepy at a seconds notice and then back again, for absolutely no reason at all!

Ok, ok I know it sounds pretty funny and weird but the women among you will know where I'm coming from only too well and I'm sure I'm not the only one frustrated by feeling so dysfunctional and out of control. In real terms it is pretty life altering at times, there are things I really could not consider trying to do in this condition because I know I wouldn't be safe, driving for instance, with no spatial awareness takes some degree of courage or stupidity and has to be considered carefully before being undertaken!

So, this is not a 'you don't understand us' whinge, more a little plea for some understanding or sympathy when we apparently behave like we lost all sense of cognitive thought and an acceptance that the phrases along the lines of 'oh, it must be that time of the month again' or 'it's just your hormones' aren't very helpful! Oh, and our ability to think is not affected....just our reaction to that thinking....and yes, I know, what a reaction it is sometimes!

I wouldn't like to be on the receiving end of it that's for sure, but I would prefer it, I suspect, to being on the end I am! All this and for what? I didn't even get to make any use of my damnable reproductive system!

And don't please, anyone suggest HRT...I'm not allowed, my family medical history makes it not an option.

Me? Bad tempered? Perish the thought. Chocolate! where's the freakin chocolate!