When it is your mom, your sister or your friend

In brief

• What this helps with. Supporting your mom, sister, friend or daughter through menopause from your particular seat, whether you live nearby or far away. Everyone has someone in their life that might be living through the menopause transition.
• One thing to do. Offer one concrete thing, such as a drive, a grocery order or a standing call, and do it without a debrief.
• One thing to ask. "What has been hardest this week?"

Much of what is written about supporting a woman through menopause assumes you sleep next to her. You may not. You are her daughter or son, her sister, her friend, or her mother, and the job looks different from each seat. A few facts apply to all of you, and then the rest of this article takes each seat in turn.

What is true from every seat

The transition most often begins between 45 and 55, can start earlier, and usually runs about seven years. Hot flashes and night sweats last a median of more than seven years in the largest long-term study of the transition, and the range by background runs from under five years to more than ten. Women in late perimenopause show a measurable dip in verbal memory and processing speed, which for most women in the studies recovered after menopause. And the odds of major depression during the transition and early postmenopause are roughly two to four times higher than before it. So this is long, real, variable and measurable, and none of it is a choice. Believe her, and do not compare her to anyone, including yourself.

If she is your mom

Start with what is happening. The woman who ran your childhood is not sleeping, may be losing words, and may be more irritable or lower than you have ever seen her. When she is short with you, that sharpness is often about a bad night rather than about you, and treating it that way keeps the door open. If something is wrong between you, it can still be talked about, at a better moment. A bad night does not cancel that conversation. It only moves it.

Practical help from an adult child is worth a great deal. Drive her to the appointment and wait. Take the dog for a week. Cook on Sunday. If she asks for help setting up an app or writing down a timeline of her symptoms before an appointment, do it, and then let her decide what to do with it.

What you do not do is parent your parent. You do not lecture her about hormone therapy, take over her appointments, or decide what she should try. She has managed her own body for five decades. Offer, then leave the decision with her.

If you do not live nearby

Distance changes the tools, not the job. Agree on a check-in she can count on, such as a Sunday call or a text at the time of day that is usually hardest, and keep it. Errands can be done from another city. A grocery order that arrives on Friday, or an appointment booked in her name because she asked you to. Before a doctor's visit, offer to help her write down the questions she wants answered and the symptoms she wants to mention, so that nothing is lost in the room. And if there are several people who want to help, share the tasks between you with her consent, and not through a group chat she has not agreed to. The article on practical ways to help, without being asked, has more.

If she is your sister

You share genes, a mother and probably a rough sense of when the women in your family went through this. That is a hint, not a forecast, and her version may still look nothing like yours. Here the comparison trap is the sharpest. "Mine wasn't like that" is a sentence sisters reach for, and it can do real damage, because it comes from someone who is supposed to know.

If you went through it first, you already speak the language, and translating for the rest of the family is a real service. If you are going through it at the same time, compare notes without competing. Two women in the same transition can be each other's best evidence that none of it is imaginary.

If she is your friend

Friends provide the thing a household cannot, which is a company that asks nothing. Keep inviting her, and make the invitations easy to decline. A walk rather than a dinner party. Coffee rather than a weekend away. "No pressure, but I'll be at the park at ten" is the ideal form. If you live in another city, a standing call does the same job as the park bench, and so does a meal delivered on a bad week without a debrief. And be the friend who knows the symptoms, so that she never has to explain what a hot flash or brain fog is before she can talk about it.

Friends may also see what family does not. You may be the first to notice that she has stopped coming out, or that she laughs less, and you can say so without it sounding like a verdict. "You've gone quiet on me lately. Everything is all right?" can be easier to hear from a friend than from a husband or a daughter, and it may give her an opening.

If she is your daughter

Your menopause is not hers. Timing, symptoms and duration vary from woman to woman, and the treatment landscape has changed since you went through it, so what you were told then may not apply now. The article on myths in this library covers how.

The trap for mothers is "I didn't have it that bad." You may not have. You may have had a different version. Or you may have had no one to tell, and forgotten how bad it was because there was no point remembering. What you can offer now is belief, and practical help given as a matter of course rather than as a favor. If you live far away, the same check-ins and errands apply.

What not to do, from any seat

• Do not compare her to yourself, to your mother, or to the last woman you watched go through this.
• Do not diagnose her, manage her, or decide what she should try.
• Do not repeat what she told you to the rest of the family.
• Do not go quiet on the subject because you are unsure what to say. Ask.

Where to start this week

• Learn the vocabulary, so she never has to explain it to you first.
• Offer one concrete thing, such as a drive, a meal, a grocery order or a week of the dog, and do it without a debrief.
• If you live far away, agree one check-in she can count on, and keep it.
• Ask "What has been hardest this week?" and listen to the whole answer.
• Retire "mine wasn't like that" and every sentence like it.

Related reading

• Practical ways to help, without being asked
• Listening well when she talks about menopause
• Myths that make support worse

Sources

• National Institute on Aging. What is menopause? U.S. National Institutes of Health.
• Avis NE, Crawford SL, Greendale G, et al. Duration of menopausal vasomotor symptoms over the menopause transition. JAMA Internal Medicine. 2015;175(4):531-539. SWAN cohort, n=1,449.
• Greendale GA, Huang MH, Wight RG, et al. Effects of the menopause transition and hormone use on cognitive performance in midlife women. Neurology. 2009;72(21):1850-1857.
• Bromberger JT, Kravitz HM, Chang YF, et al. Major depression during and after the menopausal transition: Study of Women's Health Across the Nation (SWAN). Psychological Medicine. 2011;41(9):1879-1888.

Disclaimer

This article is for education and support. It is not medical advice, and it is not a substitute for care from a qualified healthcare provider. Decisions about treatment, including hormone therapy and other prescription medicines, belong to the person experiencing menopause and her clinician.