My cycle was late.

I used three different apps to track my cycle. Last month, each of them predicted a different start day for my cycle, and despite the three different dates, my cycle was still late. However, for the first time in my entire life, I was not worried about the absence of my monthly visitor. In fact, I was kinda hoping that my body was beginning the process to revoke permanent access to Aunt Flow. Yet as the week went on and my symptoms increased, a reality that I had not anticipated found its way to me and humbled me into submission.

My childbearing window had closed.

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I remember when I was a child, I wanted to be a mother so badly. As someone who felt as though her parents did not love her, I truly believed that becoming a mother would allow me to birth someone who would love me forever. In hindsight (and through my adult eyes), I see just how flawed that logic is. Maybe all parents have children because some of them believe that the tiny human they create will love them forever. In reality, we are all flawed humans, and oftentimes parents do things that cause their children to walk away from them. So, having kids does not create eternal love. However, I did not know that as a child… back then, I just wanted to be loved.

Unironically, when I got older, I gravitated towards positions that filled a void within me. I leaned heavily into service positions, nonprofit organizations, and roles that allowed me to listen and extend compassion. Despite how different each job was, they all had one thing in common- the customer/consumer/client came first. Every job that I have ever had in my 22.5 years of employment centered around the idea of me meeting someone where they were, and then providing care/service that would allow them to leave better and more fulfilled than they were before they met me. No, I wasn’t a mother, but I mattered, and so did my work. Even now, as an educator, I have honestly shared that the favorite part of my job is not the teaching, per se, but the mentoring of students that pulls me back every day. I may not be a mother, but I mentor, and I love that for me. I finally had gotten to a point where I realized the error of my thinking with motherhood- realizing that if I only wanted a child so that I could be loved, it was selfish and would end badly- and made the very grown-up decision to NOT have children. I found myself very content and happy with easily being able to move about in the world without having to concern myself with the well-being of another. I found joy in not being responsible for the rearing and livelihood of another. I found peace in who I was, and that motherhood did not need to be the “thing” that defined me. No, I was not a mother, but I was (and still am) motivated.

So, why was a part of me disappointed to learn of my perimenopausal status? What happened to the peace that I had found?

I think you can love the way your life is going… and simultaneously think about the way things could have been.

Funny thing is, in all of my “thinking,” I see happy moments, but no peace… and definitely no joy.

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But I think what happened last month was that the new year began, and my body very definitively stated that it was ready for change. In an equally dramatic and poetic way, my body used January of my 40th year to declare, “THIS YEAR WILL NOT BE AS YEARS PAST; SOMETHING NEW HAS BEGUN!” It’s as though my body wanted it to be known from the opening gate that, however I thought this year would flow, it wouldn’t really go that way. Instead, within the first 10 days of this new year, my body had climbed its Mount Everest and was raising its white flag of surrender. By no means was it quitting, but it had also reached its peak and declared that it no longer had anything to prove to anyone… not even me.

In the extra days that it took my cycle to make its monthly appearance, I reflected on who I would be when it finally stopped appearing. Never would there be a beaming baby boy, bouncing on my legs with bubbles of spit, smiling back at me as he donned a cute little onesie that read, “Mommy’s handsome prince” with the cutest little crown on it. Never would my dream of rubbing my swollen belly while my husband massaged my swollen feet exit my head and enter our reality. Never would I receive a macaroni noodle picture frame from an adorable little kindergartener that I would have to keep for the rest of my life. As I waited for the flood of Flow, those “nevers” flooded my mind. Considering that perimenopause lasts for years and I had been experiencing symptoms for some time, I probably should have had those thoughts long ago, but for some reason, they ambushed me last month.

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Who would I be in the days and the months after Aunt Flow’s revocation of access to me and my body? I didn’t know, but I was soon about to find out…