I am continuing to complete Marie’s bingo card of menopause symptoms. If any readers out there read the card below and identify with any of the categories it would be great if you could share your story.

Once upon a time sleep was something I was able to enjoy in great quantities and at will. Then I had a baby. Suddenly sleep was something I didn’t really have the luxury of enjoying at my convenience. Sleeping came at the convenience of a small human that required feeding and being attended to at all hours of the night. It was an interesting time. The baby’s room was in the front of our house. We lived in a less than affluent neighbourhood. I have memories of sitting in the rocker of my baby’s bedroom looking out the window at the comings and goings of the drug house across the street from us.
My second child was even more unsettled at night. Without exaggerating I don’t believe she slept through the night with some regularity until she was about five!. At the same time Mr Jones’ sleep apnea was becoming more and more of an issue. There is something about sitting by the bedside of a fretting child while your husband snores away in another room. Sometimes my mind is blown by the thought that he survived those days.
Somewhere in there I become more of a friend with 3am from a tossing and turning and not being able to sleep perspective. Sometimes I would wake at 3am look at the time and then go back to sleep. Other times I would wake, the poultry would complain about a predator and then sleep was a lost cause. Or I would wake, check the time and then spend the next couple of hours tossing and turning while my mind thought every thought in the universe only to fall asleep half an hour before the alarm. Those nights did not make for a very coherent Mrs Jones the next day.
Somewhere around my mid 30’s depression became more of a feature of my life. I was prescribed Pristiq by my GP. While this didn’t seem to change my sleeping habits I did notice that if I spent time staring at the ceiling thinking the thoughts in the middle of the night I felt hungover the next day. This was frustrating, to say the least. What is worse than having a hangover without the previous party? I changed medications a few years ago. My sleeping didn’t change significantly. I still slept through on a good night and had other nights that involved staring at the ceiling. What had changed was that I didn’t seem to need the sleep. If I missed an hour or so in the middle of the night I was still able to deal with the next day. In fact I began to wonder if I actually needed all that much sleep
Like many things associated with menopause I was completely ignorant that my sleep patterns could be associated with menopause. Like so many peri-menopause symptoms they could be attributed to other things, stress, brain chemical imbalance, anxiety, poor diet, too much screen time. So did the onset of peri-menopause contribute? Who really knows. I am not really sure and now I guess I will never know.
