Perimenopause cost me my family, my marriage and my self-respect. From the age of 37, I started experiencing increasing PMS symptoms. Agitation, irritability, as if all my nerves were open. More and more often I lay awake nights because my head just kept spinning around, which didn't improve my mood.

How many times did I go to the GP? I was advised to go to yoga, I was given oxazepam for the heavy moments, eventually an antidepressant. That didn't prevent me from running through the house stomping and screaming the week and later even two weeks before my period. I became furious over nothing. And felt desperate.

Fire spurted from my eyes, poison from my keyboard, something that cost me several clients.

I thought I couldn't do it, motherhood. 

Strange thought. At that time I had been a mother for thirteen years, I had three children. It had always been busy, but I always managed just fine. Until then. I also thought my relationship no longer meant anything.  

And I got divorced, fled in a crush on another man. In co-parenting, I would hopefully do better as a mother. In doing so, I lost the respect of everyone around me. Myself included. I had abandoned my children. That's how it was seen.

And that's how I felt myself, for ten years. And so did the children. A traumatic experience for them, which I have felt crushingly guilty about all this time. Two years ago, I reached menopause and started taking bioidentical hormones.

The initial aggravation threw me back ten years. The agitation returned, like a caged wild animal. This was it, I thought, this is why I left home! It had been the hormones all along!

Since then, I have been on a mission. All women need to know this, and GPs and gynaecologists need to be retrained at a rapid pace. I look back with pity and compassion on the 40-year-old woman I was. I was treading water in the ocean, and I drowned.

With that, a lot of sadness is also released. For the first time, I feel that I also lost my family. Something I never wanted.