“Perimenopause got a rebrand and it’s amazing AF.”
-@radiant.rewind, Tik Tok user
They said it like a joke,
but my body heard it as a prophecy.
Cougar Puberty: the awkward reawakening.
The skin I thought I’d finished growing into grows restless again—
starts slipping, shedding, sprouting stray bristles like antennae
for a world gone meaner and more fluorescent.
We are the unmothered mothers, night-sweating in silence,
learning again to pack an emergency pad just in case
the moon has one last trick left.
We wake at 3 a.m. to move the couch, weep, stretch, snack,
and Google symptoms we already know are just us now.
We keep fans in every room. We curse cardigans.
We say things like this season of life and gag a little.
We become deeply invested in magnesium.
We leave the thermostat at 65 and still sleep with one leg
out.
They call us cougars as if hunger were shameful.
As if wanting after 40 were something to be pitied,
or punished, or sold back to us in pink bottles marked
Balance.
But here we are: hormonal, holy, half-feral with desire for something
we don’t have a word for. Not youth. Not sex.
Maybe: to be alive, and still ours.
Sisters of the vanishing waistline, of the rogue bleed,
of the silent gynecologist nod that says normal but means—
welcome to the club we do not name. We didn’t choose
the hush—
but we can choose what to do with it. Let’s meet at dusk, burn our
shapewear
and powdered peptides, pass flasks of electrolytes, laugh until
something leaks,
and scream like wild things, a puma pacing behind every
breastbone.
