I was screaming at my twelve-year-old daughter about a wet towel on the bathroom floor. Not raising my voice — screaming. My hands were shaking, my face was hot, and the words coming out of my mouth were so cruel that I watched her face crumple in real-time. Over a towel. A towel that had been on that floor dozens of times before without incident.
When I finally stopped, she didn't argue back. She just picked up the towel, walked past me with her head down, and closed her bedroom door quietly. That silence was worse than any shouting match we'd ever had. She was afraid of me.
My husband found me twenty minutes later sitting on the kitchen floor, crying into my hands. "I don't know what's wrong with me," I told him. And I didn't. I was 46, sleeping badly, having irregular periods, but I'd convinced myself those things were separate from the rage that was suddenly living in my chest like a clenched fist.
The Walking on Eggshells Phase
The towel incident wasn't isolated. Two weeks earlier, I'd snapped at my son for chewing too loudly at dinner. Before that, I'd reduced my husband to stunned silence because he'd forgotten to pick up milk. The anger felt enormous and justified in the moment — then twenty minutes later, I'd be gutted by what I'd said.
My family started moving around me differently. Carefully. My daughter began texting me questions from upstairs instead of just coming down to ask. My son started eating breakfast before I woke up. My husband developed this new habit of pausing before he spoke to me, like he was calculating risk.
I tried all the usual things. I apologised constantly, which just made everyone uncomfortable. I bought a meditation app and lasted four days. I went to my GP, who ran blood tests that came back "normal" and suggested I might be stressed. I knew I was stressed — I was stressed because I'd become someone my own children were wary of.
The Night Everything Connected
It was my husband who figured it out, sort of. We were lying in bed after another bad day — I'd cried in the car park at work for no reason I could name — and he said, very gently, "Do you think this might be... hormonal?"
I bristled immediately. But he kept going. "Your mum went through early menopause. Your periods have been all over the place. And I read something about perimenopause and mood swings that sounded exactly like—"
"I'm too young for menopause."
"Not menopause. Peri-menopause. It can start in your forties."
The next morning, I started researching. That's when I found the CHAOS guide. The name alone made me feel seen — my life was chaos. But what kept me reading was the section on emotional dysregulation. It described the rage as disproportionate, sudden, and followed by shame. It talked about the cognitive dissonance of knowing your reaction is over the top while being unable to stop it. It quoted Dr. Lisa Mosconi from Weill Cornell Medicine, who's researched how declining oestrogen affects the brain's emotional regulation centres. Someone understood this wasn't just "stress."
Tracking the Pattern
The guide suggested something I'd never considered: tracking my mood against my cycle. I'd stopped paying close attention to my periods because they'd become so irregular — sometimes 25 days apart, sometimes 45. But the guide had a simple chart system, and I started marking my worst anger days.
Within six weeks, a pattern emerged. My rage episodes were clustering in the ten days before my period arrived. Not every month, because my cycle was all over the place, but when the fury came, it was almost always in that luteal phase when progesterone should be rising but apparently wasn't.
This changed something fundamental. The anger didn't stop, but I could see it coming. I started warning my family: "I think I'm in a rough window. I'm going to be more reactive than usual." It sounds simple, but that heads-up shifted the dynamic in our house. They weren't walking on eggshells anymore — they were informed.
The Conversations We'd Stopped Having
The guide had a section on what it called "repair conversations" — specific language for talking to your family after you've lost it. Not just "I'm sorry," but "I'm sorry I screamed about the towel. That wasn't about you or the towel. My brain is struggling to regulate emotions right now because of hormonal changes, and I'm working on it."
I sat down with my daughter one Saturday morning and had the most honest conversation we'd had in months. I explained perimenopause to her in clear terms — that it wasn't an excuse, but it was an explanation. That I was working with my GP on options. That I loved her and was horrified by how I'd been treating her.
She cried. So did I. But she also asked questions. Real ones. "How long does this last?" "Are you going to be like this forever?" "Can you tell when it's about to happen?"
I didn't have all the answers, but I had more than I'd had before. I'd started working through the sections in CHAOS → on symptom management — the supplement research, the exercise timing that actually helped mood, the sleep strategies that weren't just "try lavender oil." I wasn't fixed, but I had a framework.
What's Different Now
I'm not going to pretend everything's perfect. Last week I snapped at my husband for interrupting me, and it took me two hours to calm down properly. But here's what's changed: I have language for what's happening. My family has context. And I have tools that work more often than they don't.
I take magnesium glycinate in the evenings now, which has genuinely smoothed out some of the worst mood spikes. I block out the week before my expected period for fewer commitments when I can. I exercise in the morning during that window, which the guide explained helps with cortisol regulation when oestrogen is low. I've also started HRT, which my GP was willing to prescribe once I came in with tracked symptoms instead of just "I feel awful."
My daughter leaves her towels on the floor sometimes. I pick them up or I ask her to, in a normal voice. My son chews at a volume that's probably medically concerning, and mostly I just smile about it now. My husband and I talk about hard things again without him bracing for an explosion.
I'm still perimenopausal. I still have hard days. But I'm recognisable again — to them, and to myself. That's worth everything.
— Simon