Women's Things: Writing from Mid-Life and Menopause

SARAH DALE Dear Sarah 1984, I can see you standing in your room in your student flat. You love it.

Your posters and cassette player, sharing meals and laughs with the others.

You are making lifelong friends. Yet I know that you are wholly convinced that there is something vitally wrong with you. The conviction has been developing for years and today it reaches a new inner certainty.

Well, listen. Eventually you will know it to be a lie.

You have a letter in your hand and you are sobbing. You don’t know what to do with yourself. You are in deep despair.

You already believe that the accumulating evidence shows the truth.

You have never been asked out on a date, never been asked to dance, never had sex. One drunken snog with a stranger last year and then a summer of glandular fever that you think must be connected. You are twenty, already falling miles behind your peers. You are drenched in shame about whatever it is that’s wrong with you, that means no one is attracted to you.

Toxic searing embarrassment.

In depressed desperation, you wrote to your parents last week to try to tell them how you feel. You are in the thick of yet another unrequited, obsessive crush on a boy, though you don’t tell them that. You would rather die. Instead your letter is full of flippant, jealous references to your flatmates’ adventures in love (as an aside, let me tell you that it will turn out that the boy in question is gay. Unavailable. Safety can be excruciating).

Your mother doesn’t exactly reply. She writes regularly with news of people you know and an account of her week. She worries about you, always asks you if you’re all right. You know she wants to hear you are happy, thriving. Sometimes she writes things like, Don’t worry, I felt the same at your age. She might add, it was awful but you’ve got so much more going for you.

Your father, meanwhile, writes earnestly, warming to his theme amidst pages of jokey anecdotes. Right in the centre is the killer sentence.

I sometimes wonder if we, as a family, don’t give off the right pheromones.

Bang. That’s it then. You are biologically incapable of attracting a mate.

A vision of a lonely, loveless, childless future rears, fangs bared.

It doesn’t occur to you to challenge him, to fight back. Dismiss it as the nonsense it is. Serious arguments with Dad are beyond the pale, have never happened. His vehement, sweeping statements go right in, like rusty 17