There's a format going around at the moment. If Netflix did a documentary on perimenopause. Straight-faced narrator over an ordinary kitchen, like it's wildlife footage. Somebody has started doing the kid edition. Small humans, moving carefully, reading the room before they commit to a question.

Made me laugh. Then it stopped being funny, because we've got four of our own, and our kids had been making that documentary for a while. Without a camera. Just working out, before they came down the hallway of a morning, which version of the day it was going to be. They were reading the weather, and they were better at it than I was.

Here's my bit. My way of handling it was to manage the kids away from her. Leave your mum alone. She's tired. Not now, buddy. I thought I was protecting her. What I was actually doing was teaching four kids that their mum was a hazard, something you check the conditions on before you approach. And I wasn't telling them one word about what was actually going on, so they filled the gap the way kids do.

Second story. Saw a woman post this week that she lost her job over perimenopause. Not a joke video. Her, straight into the camera, dead set serious. The line that got me wasn't the sacking. It was being made to feel less capable was worse than being let go.

Because it comes home. She walks in the door still carrying it. And I know exactly what I used to do with that. Who said that. What's his name. You don't need that place. Felt like loyalty. It was one more thing for her to manage. I'd taken the one place she could put it down and turned it into another meeting.

Two stories, same thing underneath. Out there she's being measured, by her work, by people who've decided what she is now, sometimes by her own kids without meaning to. You can't stop any of that. You can make sure there's one place she gets to walk in and just be herself.

Chapters

0:00 Intro

0:26 The Kid Edition

4:44 The Job

7:35 Outro

Grab The Weather Report if you haven't already. It's free, and it's the language for exactly this.

Drop a comment and tell me which one is your house, the hallway or the front door. I read every one.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit theperimenopausehusband.substack.com

We've had four kids stomp their way through actual puberty in this house. So when I first started noticing it in my wife, that's the file I put it in. Here we go again, I thought. Give it a year, it'll settle, same as it did with the kids.

There's a line going around online at the moment calling it Puberty Two. I get why it lands, because from the outside it does look the same. The moods. The door that closes a bit too firm. The version of her that used to laugh at everything suddenly not laughing at anything.

Here's where the joke stops being useful. With the kids I had a rough map. I didn't have any of that for her. So I did the only thing I knew how to do, which was the exact same thing that worked with the teenagers. I waited it out.

Wrong move. Waiting out a teenager works because a teenager mostly wants to be left alone. This isn't that. She didn't need me to wait in the other room until it passed. She needed me in the room.

Second story. Scrolling the other night, it felt like every second video was the same pitch. Send this to your husband. Show him this one. Here's the manual, translated into language he'll understand. First thought, honestly, a bit defensive.

Then I sat with it longer and the defensiveness didn't hold up, because that's basically the job I've been trying to do this whole time too. Difference is where it's coming from. I'm not translating from the outside. I was the bloke who didn't understand a word of it the first time my own wife said it to me at the kitchen bench.

Two stories, one trap. Waiting for someone else to explain it, or hand it to you, instead of just walking into the room yourself.

Chapters

0:00 Intro

0:23 The Second Puberty

3:08 The Husband Translator

5:07 Outro

Grab The Weather Report if you haven't already. It is free, and it is the language for exactly this.

Drop a comment and tell me which of the two sounds more like your house. I read every one.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit theperimenopausehusband.substack.com

Middle of winter. Properly cold. We're in bed, lights off, and she throws the doona off her side and takes her clothes off.

I read it completely wrong. She wasn't sending a signal. She was burning up, in a cold room, for no reason either of us understood at the time.

When you don't have the right map, you reach for the nearest one you've got. Mine was twenty years out of date and wrong for the night we were actually having.

What we changed is small, practical stuff, nothing clever. Two separate blankets instead of the one shared doona. Earplugs on my side. And a plain check-in before lights out. Are you going to run hot tonight, or normal.

Same rule as always. This works because we talk honestly the rest of the time too. Turn up with two blankets and an earplugs speech out of nowhere and it lands strange. Turn up already in the habit of asking plainly, and it's just Tuesday.

Chapters

0:00 The Moment

0:28 What Was Actually Happening

1:30 What Actually Works

2:45 The Hook

Next time, the trend everyone's calling Puberty Two, and the wave of people out there translating this whole thing for husbands.

Grab The Weather Report if you haven't already. Free, and it would have saved me a fair bit of embarrassment that night.

Drop a comment and tell me if you've had your own version of this exact night. I read every one.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit theperimenopausehusband.substack.com

She has always been a diary person. A list person. Ticks things off, gets things done. The whole time I have known her.

Then I started noticing her missing things that were ordinarily in her diary. I couldn't work it out. So one day I said, didn't you have that written down. She said yeah, it's in the diary. I said well why didn't you look at it.

She didn't have an answer for me. She just went quiet.

It kept happening. Appointments. School stuff. Friends messaging and not getting back to them. Morning teas she'd been looking forward to for weeks. Written in the diary every time, just never looked at.

Here is the bit that still gets me. This happened after the appointment I didn't go to. She had already said the word to me, at our own kitchen bench, and I had nodded and said righto and gone back to the telly. So when the diary thing started, I had the answer sitting right there. I just hadn't understood it well enough to recognise it.

The diary was never broken. What was disrupted was the habit around it. The part where she remembers there is a diary to check in the first place.

So every time I pointed out that she'd written it down, I wasn't helping her see the problem. I was handing her the evidence of her own failure and asking her to hold it. That's a Fog day, mate.

The tool is small, and it is doing, not saying. Stop pointing at the gap. Fill it quietly instead.

One thing first though. It only works if the small honest conversations are already happening. For me that started with going back to that bench conversation, months late, and saying, I didn't get it when you told me. Tell me again.

Chapters

0:00 The Moment

2:00 What Was Actually Happening

3:54 What Actually Works

5:47 The Hook

Next time, the middle of winter. She took all her clothes off in bed, and I read it completely wrong.

Grab The Weather Report if you haven't already. It is free, and it is the language I wish I'd had at that kitchen bench.

Drop a comment and tell me if this one sounds like your house. I read every one.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit theperimenopausehusband.substack.com

Six thirty this morning. Kitchen. Kettle’s on.

She walks in and doesn’t say anything. The fridge opens, closes. A cupboard, a bit too firm. The mug goes down on the bench like it weighs something.

There’s a trend going around right now. Blokes narrating their wife’s morning like it’s a nature documentary. Deep in a Storm Warning morning. Notice the deliberate movements. The male, watching from a safe distance, has still not worked out whether he is permitted to speak.

Funny the first time you think it. Less funny the tenth.

This week’s episode is three stories doing the rounds online right now. The documentary trend. The woman who had to bring her husband to the doctor just to be taken seriously. And the word menodivorce, which is in the papers again. Underneath all three is the same question. Are you in the room, or just watching from the couch.

One tool to take from it today: two minutes, most nights, before bed. Not an interview. A normal check-in. A couple of easy questions and you listen to what comes back. The words, the tone, how long the answers are. That’s you taking the reading. Storm Warning, Overcast, Fog, Clearing, Sunshine. You work it out, you log it in your head, and the reading tells you what the night needs. You do not fix it. You do not announce it.

When you’ve listened, hit reply or leave a comment and tell me three things. Which of the three stories is closest to your house right now. What you’ve tried that hasn’t worked. What’s actually worked. I read every one.

If you’re new here, the free guide is The Weather Report. It teaches the weather system in one page: theperimenopausehusband.com/free-guide

Stand beside her. Face the weather together.

The Perimenopause Husband

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit theperimenopausehusband.substack.com

I told my wife we should swap roles for a week. I meant it as a dig. She didn’t yell back. She just looked at me, and I knew straight away.

This is about the scoreboard I was keeping without realising it, and the four words that actually help, once you’ve earned the right to say them.

Grab the free Weather Report guide: [link]

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit theperimenopausehusband.substack.com

“What’s wrong?” “I don’t know.” For years I heard that as a dodge. Turns out it was the truest answer she could give me.

This one’s about the mistake of filing her as difficult instead of unwell, and the small, honest habit that actually works, once the foundation is there. It doesn’t work as a one-off line. Here’s how it’s supposed to go.

Grab the free Weather Report guide: [link]

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit theperimenopausehusband.substack.com

As young fellas, nobody told us about perimenopause. Full stop. We just took it for granted that people get a bit grumpier as they get older, and left it at that.

This is the episode that changes that. Twenty-six years married, thirty-one years together, and I’m telling you what nobody tells blokes: what perimenopause actually is, when it starts, what it looks like day to day, and the one word, safety, that everything else comes back to.

This is the front door to everything else here. Start with this one.

Grab the free Weather Report guide: [link]

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit theperimenopausehusband.substack.com