The Wild Year When Perimenopause Came For My Grandma, & Puberty Came For Me

My Nana became my best friend when I was 13 and she was 54. After 13 years of loving each other and living together most of my life, we shifted that year. My mom was on her own when I was growing up, and so she and my brothers and I lived with my grandparents for all the obvious reasons. Finances, child care, use of my grandpa’s car when he said it was OK. I never thought much about our lives when I was a child because honestly, what child thinks about their life? I just ate breakfast with everyone, watched TV at night with everyone, and shared a bathroom with my mom and my Nana and my aunt when we got ready to go places. It was just our life. Then puberty hit me. Then perimenopause hit my Nana. And then we became soul mates.

We didn’t put this together at the time, of course. My grandmother, young and sort of hip with her red ankle boots and kicky short perm, was busy all the time then. She worked part-time in an office; she had friends who came to the house for bridge parties and baby showers, funeral sandwiches and movie nights. She was a bustler then, always making plans or talking on the phone with one of her daughters, the phone cord stretched taut as she bent to take a casserole out of the oven or grab her cigarettes from her purse in the hallway.

She was busy all the time and then suddenly, she just wasn’t busy ever. Suddenly, she seemed to wilt. She was saying no to friends more than she was saying yes. No one talked about it, but I could see it. This was right around the same time that I grew my new and intrusive breasts — so quickly that the pain would wake me from a dead sleep. I woke up all the time in the middle of the night in a panic, my heart racing. I couldn’t seem to sleep ever and neither could she, something we discovered when we met in the kitchen one night. Her in a nightgown, me in my long T-shirt. Ravenous for something, but neither of us could figure out what. Chocolate cake? Leftover macaroni and cheese? “It’s like we’re pregnant together,” she said after making us both cinnamon toast and tea. And so began our time as twin forces to be reckoned with.

Every day, we sought each other out after school and work. We had very little interest in the other people in the house — my brothers, my grandfather, men in general — because they didn’t understand the thing we understood without saying a word. Our bodies were foreign to us. We hurt. We were weepy and hungry. We were angry at everyone but each other.

The two of us started our rituals then. We napped in her room together sometimes on long Saturdays when everyone else was so busy, reading our romance novels side-by-side and eating the good chocolates she kept hidden under her bed. She left me the caramels. She bought us cooling face masks to help soothe our burning skin, both of us always so hot and irritated. We watched soap operas and ate butterscotch ripple ice cream as we peeled the masks off our faces, fresh and dewy and satisfied.

I told her about my school-age drama, and she listened to every word. She was invested in all of it, mad at Natasha for telling Cameron I liked him, and then forgave her along with me when it turned out he liked me too. She told me about her adult drama, and I was so flattered, so honored to hear about this woman’s love affair and that woman’s shopping addiction. A soap opera on our boring little street.

We lost ourselves in the most dramatic of all made-for-TV miniseries, The Thornbirds and Danielle Steele’s Zoya. We talked idly of going to Paris together someday, just the two of us. Because who else would we want to go?

I see it now. We were at either end of our period journey. Mine started just as hers, it seemed, was coming to an end. The sanitary napkin supply rerouted to my shelf in the bathroom. We talked about that time in our lives years later when I was pregnant for the first time. I was over for an afternoon of baking her annual holiday raisin bread, the two of us drinking tea and dancing to holiday hits and barring my grandfather from entering our domain. We climbed the stairs to her room together, ready to nap. “Oh, I sure remember this,” she reminded me. She told me that was one of the hardest times of her life: that year when we both felt betrayed by our bodies, a little bit ill all the time.

Confused. Hungry, annoyed, flushed, weepy. But at least not alone.

“You made it better,” she told me. “You were a great little pal.”

Jen McGuire is a contributing writer for Romper and Scary Mommy. She lives in Canada with four boys and teaches life writing workshops where someone cries in every class. When she is not traveling as often as possible, she’s trying to organize pie parties and outdoor karaoke with her neighbors. She will sing Cher’s “If I Could Turn Back Time” at least once, but she’s open to requests.