The Meno Club Facebook ad: “Menopause was just the beginning”

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I made it through menopause. The hot flashes at 3 AM. The night sweats that soaked through two sets of sheets. The insomnia. The mood swings that made my husband think I was going through a second puberty at 51. I survived all of it. And then something else crept in. Something I was nowhere near prepared for. And the night my niece posted a photo from my daughter's baby shower to the family group chat, it all came crashing down on me. I'm going to tell you why. Because this is the part of menopause nobody is talking about out loud, and I almost let it cost me things I can't get back. I'm Linda. 54. Married 28 years to a man who still brings me coffee in the morning, even when I've been awful to him the night before. Two grown kids. A career I built from nothing. I am not a woman who falls apart easily. But somewhere in the middle of all that, a new thing settled in. Quietly. The kind of thing you don't say out loud, even to yourself. The kind of thing I couldn't bring myself to type into a Google search bar. I'm not going to tell you what it is yet. Not because I'm being dramatic. Because if I tell you now, you'll nod and skim and miss the part that actually matters. The part that cost me three years and over two thousand dollars before I finally got it right. Bear with me. For three years I built my whole morning around hiding it. I started getting up forty minutes before my husband. I kept the bathroom door locked until I was done in there. There was a product I ordered that arrived in a plain black bag, and I used it every single morning before anyone was awake to see me. When my daughter visited, I made sure she never stood behind me. When my husband wrapped his arms around me at the sink, I'd go stiff. Not because I didn't want him to. Because his chin landed right on the top of my head, and I couldn't stop thinking about what he could see from up there. Eventually I went to my doctor. I brought photos on my phone. I'd been collecting them like evidence. She looked at the photos. She looked at me. And she said it like she was reading it off a chart. "Linda, that's normal for your age." Normal. That word sat in my chest for a week. Because normal means there's nothing to be done. Go home, get used to it, get used to the smaller, quieter version of yourself everyone apparently expects now. She offered me a foam I'd have to rub in for the rest of my life, where the day you stop is the day you lose everything you got back. And she told me to give it time. I sat in that parking lot for fifteen minutes, trying not to cry where the receptionist could see me. And I thought about my mother. How she just let herself fade in her fifties. How nobody fought it. How she kept saying "you can't fight nature" while she got quieter and grayer and smaller every year, until I barely recognized her in her own kitchen. That was the road I was on. Accept the word "normal," and in ten years I'd be her. When did I become her. I drove home and went back to my hiding. The locked door. The forty early minutes. The black bag. Then came the baby shower. Forty people in my sister's backyard. I was at the dessert table cutting cake. My niece was up on the deck above me with her phone. I didn't even know she'd taken it. She put it in the family group chat that night. I opened it while we were loading the dishwasher. And there it was. The top of my own head, from the exact angle I'd spent three years making sure no one would ever see. I'm not going to describe what was in that photo. I think you already know. I'll just tell you I put the phone face down on the counter, walked to the bathroom, and sat on the edge of the tub. Right beside me in that picture was my daughter. Pregnant. Glowing. And me. Looking like my mother. That night I called Karen. Karen's an OB-GYN. She's also been my friend for twenty-two years, since our kids were in kindergarten together. The kind of friend you tell the things you won't say out loud to anyone else. I told her everything. The photo. The three years of hiding. The forty minutes. The black bag. The doctor who called it normal. She was quiet for a second. Then she said, "Linda. That is not normal aging. And the fact that she used that word makes me angry. What you've got has a specific cause, and it is treatable." I just stared at the wall. "You've really never heard of DHT?" I had not heard of DHT. She explained it the way only a friend who's also a doctor can. Fast. No lecture. A little furious that nobody had told me already. My whole adult life, she said, my estrogen had been quietly doing two jobs I never knew about. It kept a hormone called DHT down low. And it shielded my hair follicles from whatever DHT slipped through. Then menopause took my estrogen. And both of those protections walked out the door with it. So now the DHT was running loose. Hitting the follicles over and over, shrinking them smaller and smaller, until they stop growing hair at all. Karen watched me work out what she was saying before I'd said the word. What I'd been losing was my hair. Fistfuls of it in the drain. A ponytail that had gone from a rope to a pencil. A part that got a little wider every month. A scalp I could see in the mirror from clear across the bathroom. “Your follicles aren't dead, Linda. They're being starved. And let me guess what you've been buying. Biotin. Collagen. An eighty-dollar bottle of Nutrafol. Rosemary oil off Amazon. That root spray in the black bag." I'd bought every single one. By my honest count I was over two thousand dollars deep on the wrong problem. "None of those touch DHT," she said. "That's the whole reason none of them worked. You're not feeding a hungry plant, Linda. You're trying to stop something from poisoning it. There are two natural compounds that actually do that, and both of them have been studied. One blocks the enzyme that makes the DHT in the first place. The other stops it locking onto the follicle. You want both. Most products only have one, which is why most women keep losing hair on them." She pulled out her phone and showed me a brand she'd been quietly telling her menopausal patients about for over a year. Bloom & Bond. Pumpkin seed oil and saw palmetto. Both, in one capsule. Not HRT. Nothing that touches your hormones the way the drugs I was terrified of do. No prescription. No lifetime trap where stopping it undoes everything. No shedding phase first. "And the pumpkin seed oil does one more thing for menopause," she said. "But I'll let you find that one out for yourself." I ordered it from the couch before I went to bed. The first couple of weeks I felt nothing, and I quietly assumed it was headed for the graveyard of half-used bottles under my sink. Then one morning I realized I hadn't cleaned my hairbrush in days. I sat down on the bed. If you've been where I was, you know exactly why. A while after that, my husband ran his hand across the back of my head. That thing he used to do all the time and had slowly stopped doing. I didn't go stiff. I didn't pull away. There was nothing up there to hide anymore. And that's when the other thing happened. The thing Karen wouldn't tell me. I'd stopped waking up at 3 AM soaked through. I was sleeping again. The flashes that had started creeping back at the edges had gone quiet. I looked it up, exactly like she knew I would. The pumpkin seed oil isn't only blocking the DHT. The phytoestrogens in it do a little of what my own estrogen used to do. My hair was the reason I bought it. The sleep coming back was the part nobody warned me about, for once in a good way. I called Karen. She laughed and said, "Yeah. I was waiting for that call." The baby hairs came a few months in. A soft fuzzy fringe along my part and around my temples, sticking straight up, refusing to lie flat. Ridiculous. Annoying. The most beautiful thing I'd seen on my own head in three years. A while later, my hairdresser, who'd been very carefully saying nothing the whole time, picked up my ponytail, weighed it in her hand the way they do, and said, "Whatever you're doing. Don't stop." I'm still menopausal. I'm still 54. But I've got, by Karen's estimate and my hairdresser's stunned one, somewhere between thirty and forty percent of my thickness back. And it's still coming in. Here's what I keep thinking about. I lost three years to that one word. Three years of locked doors and black bags and forty stolen minutes before sunrise. Three years of family photos I'm standing at the edge of, or not in at all. And the whole time, the fix was a capsule my own doctor never even mentioned, because it wasn't in her script. If you keep waiting, that's what waiting costs. It just keeps going. The drain, the part, the photos you can't look at. And a little more of the woman you used to be, gone. So picture the other version instead. Three months from now, you run your fingers through your hair and almost nothing comes away. Your husband rests his hand on top of your head and you don't freeze, because there's nothing up there you're afraid he'll find. A photo gets taken from some terrible angle and you don't go cold opening it. The next baby shower, you're right in the middle of it with your hair down, not hanging back angling yourself out of the frame. And the woman in the mirror is finally one you recognize again. That's not a fantasy. That's what happens when you stop treating fifteen wrong problems and start treating the real one. It was never normal. That word was the lie. The thing my doctor handed me to make peace with was a hormone nobody bothered to name, running loose because the estrogen that kept it in line for forty years packed up and left. You don't have to accept the smaller version of yourself. You don't have to become your mother. You just have to treat the actual problem. The brand Karen showed me is called Bloom & Bond. Pumpkin seed oil and saw palmetto. They back it with a 90-day guarantee, so the only thing you're risking is the price of finding out. bloomandbonds.com/products/new-pumpkin-seed-oil-softgels I wish someone had told me three years and two thousand dollars ago.

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Menopause was just the beginning

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