THE GRIEF NOBODY WARNED YOU ABOUT
- May 18
- 9 min read
We talk about hot flashes. We talk about HRT. But oh god nobody and I mean nobody talks about the grief.
Nobody warned me that menopause would feel like grief.
Not a single bloody person.
They told me about the hot flashes. They mentioned the night sweats in a vague, breezy, it 's-a-bit-uncomfortable kind of way (A BIT FUCKING UNCOMFORTABLE). Someone said something about mood changes and I nodded and thought yes, fine, mood changes, I've been managing things my entire adult life, I can absolutely handle a few mood changes, how hard can it be.
How hard can it be.
I want to go back and hug that woman. She had absolutely no idea what was coming.
Nobody said: you are going to grieve. Properly. Messily. Ugly-cry-in-the-car-on-a-Tuesday-afternoon grief. Without a clear reason and without a socially acceptable timeline for getting over it and without anyone around you quite understanding what the hell is happening.
Nobody said: you are going to mourn a woman who is still alive.
That woman is you. The version of you that existed before all of this started. And she deserves a proper goodbye — which nobody gives her, because nobody tells you she's leaving until she's already gone and you're standing in the middle of your own life wondering who on earth the woman in the mirror is and why she's so furious all the time.
I'm Missy Moo. I'm 55 and I have ADHD. A husband called Nick who is a genuine, verifiable, canonised saint, a stepdaughter called Grace who is 19 and magnificently, effortlessly herself, and a cockerpoo called Presley who has absolutely no idea about any of this and is just grateful for his walks and his dinner and honestly I envy him deeply.
I built Moolife because I was tired of going through the enormous, terrifying, grief-soaked chaos of midlife entirely alone while performing fine on the outside. Because I was googling menopause symptoms at midnight and crying in the car and wondering why my own life felt like it belonged to someone else — and finding absolutely nothing honest to read about why that was happening.
This is that honest thing.
The one I needed at 48 and couldn't find anywhere.
Buckle up.
The grief has layers. And they all arrive at once. Which is really fucking rude.
Because of course it's not just one thing. That would be too straightforward. That would be something you could actually wrap your head around and process in an orderly fashion.
Menopause grief is not orderly. It is several enormous things colliding with each other simultaneously while your hormones are in freefall and your sleep is broken and your brain keeps losing words and your body is doing things you didn't consent to and your tolerance for all of it is absolutely, completely gone.
Here's what's actually in there. All of it arriving together. All of it needing to be named.
The grief of the body.
Not just the symptoms — though the symptoms are real and they are not nothing, and anyone who tells you to just eat more leafy greens and do some yoga can absolutely fuck right off.
The deeper grief. The body you lived in before this — the one that felt like yours, that operated in ways you roughly understood, that you had some kind of working relationship with even when that relationship was complicated — that body is changing. Fundamentally. Irreversibly. Without asking your permission.
And there is grief in that. Even when you know it's normal. Even when you know it's just biology doing what biology does. The familiarity is going. The predictability is going. You are in a body that is doing things you don't recognise and feeling things you don't have words for and that is frightening and disorientating and yes, it is grief, and you are allowed to call it that.
The grief of the identity.
This one crept up on me and then hit me like a freight train.
The roles that had defined me — reliable one, capable one, always-fine one, holds-everything-together one — started to feel, slowly and then all at once, like costumes. Like I'd been wearing them for so long I'd forgotten there was a person underneath them. Like the woman who wore them was leaving and I had absolutely no idea who was going to replace her.
Nick watched this happen from across our kitchen table over a period of approximately two years. He was patient in a way that should be documented and studied. He handed me cups of tea. He didn't say I told you so. He said, one evening, very quietly, "I think you've forgotten who you are."
He was right. I had forgotten. Or rather — the person I'd been was in the process of leaving and the person I was becoming hadn't fully arrived yet. And the in-between space is one of the most frightening places I have ever lived.
The grief of fertility ending.
I need to handle this one carefully because it lands differently for every woman and I don't want to tell you how to feel about your own body and your own life.
But here's what I know.
Whether you wanted more children, no more children, never wanted children, had children, didn't have children, were done, weren't sure, thought you were done — the biological ending of that possibility is significant. The door closing. The finality of it. The permanence.
I would have had children. I know that now in a way I didn't know it then. I had it in me — the love, the instinct, the capacity — and I didn't trust myself enough, wasn't grounded enough in my own worth, to go toward it with the confidence it deserved.
And then Grace arrived. Not from my body. From something better — from choice, from love, from the specific miracle of a family that finds you rather than one you're born into. She is nineteen and she is magnificent and she is mine in every way that matters and I am so completely, stupidly, overwhelmingly glad she exists.
But the grief of the road not taken is still real. Both things are true simultaneously and I have learned, slowly and expensively, that that's allowed.
The grief of the former self. This one is the one nobody talks about.
She had her problems, your former self. She was exhausted, probably. Overextended. Performing fine in ways that were quietly costing her everything. She had patterns she was still repeating and truths she hadn't said out loud and coping strategies that sort of worked until they really didn't.
But she was yours. She was familiar. You knew how she moved through the world.
And then she started to leave.
The things that used to work stopped working. The tolerance evaporated. The ability to smile through the things that weren't right, to push through, to manage — it just went. Like someone turned a dial.
And in her place was someone louder. More honest. Less willing to perform. More furious. More tired. Less available for other people's comfort. Less interested in being palatable.
I remember the specific terror of not recognising myself. Of looking at my own reactions and thoughts and responses and thinking — who is this woman and what has she done with the person I used to be.
She hadn't gone anywhere. She was becoming. But nobody told me that's what the terror was.
Nobody said: the woman you're losing is making way for the woman you're supposed to be. Nobody said that. And I could have done with someone saying that at about 2am on a Wednesday in 2019 when I was lying awake wondering if I was simply falling apart.
What nobody tells you about this kind of grief.
It doesn't have a shape that people recognise.
Normal grief — the kind with a clear object, a person or a place or a thing — has social scaffolding around it. People know what to do. They show up. They use the right words. They give you time.
Menopause grief has none of that.
Because from the outside, nothing has happened. You are still here. Still functioning. Still showing up for your life in all the practical ways your life demands. Nobody is bringing you casseroles. Nobody is asking how you're holding up.
Because to the outside world, there is nothing to hold up from.
But something enormous is happening inside you.
And because it's invisible, most women go through it entirely unacknowledged. They don't name it grief because nobody has told them it is. They feel the loss and the disorientation and the profound sadness and they call it depression or stress or just being difficult or losing the plot — and they try to manage it with tools designed for entirely different problems.
I want to say this as clearly as I possibly can.
You are not losing the plot.
You are grieving.
Those are completely different things and they require completely different responses and you deserve to know which one you're dealing with.
The grief of the life you didn't live.
This one sneaks in through the back door when you're not looking.
In midlife, for the first time really, you start to feel the weight of the paths not taken alongside the paths you walked.
The things you wanted and didn't go toward. The dreams you set aside so gradually you barely noticed until one day you looked for them and couldn't find them.
I was supposed to be an artist. I know this. I have always known this. I am wildly, irreversibly, fundamentally creative and I was put in boxes my entire young life that had absolutely no room for that — moved out of mainstream education without anyone asking me what I needed, put in a school that cared about academic results I was never going to produce, told in a hundred small and large ways that the kind of intelligence I had wasn't the kind that counted.
I believed them.
For years, I believed them.
And that is its own grief. The grief of the girl who was told she wasn't measuring up when actually the measure was catastrophically wrong. The grief of the years spent carrying a verdict that was never true.
I'm not carrying it anymore.
But naming it — actually naming it as grief instead of just vague sadness or lingering bitterness — was part of how I put it down.
How to actually move through this.
I'm not a therapist. I want to be clear about that. Yes I am a menopause coach. But REALLY what I am is a woman who has been in the middle of this grief and come out the other side, and these are the things that actually helped.
Name it. Out loud. To yourself, to someone you trust, in a journal, here in the comments if you want — say the words. I am grieving. This is grief. Not depression. Not losing my mind. Grief. Naming it changes everything because you cannot process a thing you haven't identified.
Don't try to manage it on a schedule. Midlife grief is slow and layered and non-linear and it will come back when you think you're through it. A song. A smell. A Tuesday morning that feels like who you used to be. That's not regression. That's just grief being grief.
Don't do it alone. Please. The isolation of this specific grief is what makes it so heavy. Find the people who understand it — who have the vocabulary for it, who won't rush you past it or try to silver-lining it or suggest you try yoga. Find your Moos. That's what we're here for.
Let the rage be part of it. Because the grief and the fury are often the same thing in different clothes and the anger is legitimate and it deserves space alongside the sadness. Be angry about the lack of warning. Be angry about the lack of support. Be angry about the years of performing fine and the cost of it. That anger is useful. Let it be there.
And trust — even when it feels completely impossible to trust — that what's coming is worth it.
I know. I know how that sounds. But I am on the other side of it. And the woman I am now — the one writing this, the one who built Moolife and runs the Reckoning Room and says the things that need saying and refuses to suffer politely — she is worth every single thing the grief cost to get here.
The former self deserved a goodbye.
The emerging self deserves a welcome.
Give her one.
One last thing.
If you are in the middle of this right now — in the thick of the grief, in the terrifying in-between, in the not-knowing-who-you're-becoming while the person you were is clearly leaving — I need you to hear this.
You are not broken.
You are not depressed, necessarily, though it can look that way from the outside and sometimes from the inside too.
You are not losing your mind.
You are not being dramatic or difficult or too much or any of the other things women get told when they are having a response that is entirely proportionate to what is actually happening to them.
You are grieving. Properly. In response to something real and enormous and significant that absolutely deserves to be grieved.
And you are not alone in it.
Come and find us at moolife.me. We are here. We understand. And we have been waiting for exactly you.
Women who refuse to suffer politely live here.
Love from Missy Moo x
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