I Swear My Brain Used to Work: When Perimenopause Makes You Question Yourself
The stories in this post are based on experiences women have shared with me in my work. Identifying details have been changed to protect confidentiality.
A woman recently started a therapy session by telling me that the day before had been the “tip of my life right now.” She meant pinnacle, but honestly, by the time she got to the end of the story, “tip of my life” seemed pretty fitting too.
She was already running late. Normally, she’s pretty good at the backwards math required of moms. If you have to be somewhere at 3:15, you need to leave by 2:45, which means you need to pick up a child by 2:30, which means that whatever you were doing before that actually needed to end at 2:15.
You know the drill. We all do it.
Except this time, the math wasn’t mathing.
She had somewhere she needed to get her child, and they were already cutting it close. This was one of those appointments where being late really wasn’t an option, so she was doing all of the mental calculations while racing around and trying to figure out if they could still make it.
They could. But barely.
She pulled up, parked her car, and went to grab her wallet. Lo and behold, it wasn’t there.
She checked all of the usual places it might be. Then she checked again. Nada. It wasn’t there.
She searched her purse. She rummaged around in all of the weird little places things disappear into in the car. Still nothing.
She realized that she didn’t really need her wallet, just her driver’s license. And where does her driver’s license live? Her wallet, of course.
Because apparently running late for an appointment that was already going to be difficult to make wasn’t enough for one afternoon. Now she had another problem to solve before they could even leave.
Somehow, she got lucky. The problem worked itself out, and they actually managed to get where they needed to go. But the wallet was still missing.
By the time she got home later that day, finding it had become the mission. All hands on deck.
She searched the car again. She dumped her purse on the counter. And still no wallet.
She did, however, find a pickle.
A pickle that, based on her best guess, had been living in her purse for at least two weeks.
I had to interrupt her and stop for a second. I had questions. So many questions.
How does one unknowingly carry a pickle around for two weeks? Where did the pickle originally come from? Was it wrapped? Was it loose? Was it not all mushy and gross? Didn’t it stink?
Some questions were answered. Others may remain a mystery forever.
It is henceforth known simply as the purse pickle.
And at some point during this conversation, we realized that if anything deserved to be called a pinnacle of the day, surely it had to be the purse pickle.
When the funny story stops being quite so funny
By this point, she was done. She decided she needed what she called a “hard reset,” which meant a bath and bed.
And then, while she was in the bathtub, someone walked in holding her wallet.
The wallet that she couldn’t find anywhere.
The wallet that was sitting exactly where it was supposed to be.
The place she had searched no less than four times.
And she sobbed for ten minutes.
Which sounds like a pretty dramatic response to finding a wallet until you realize that she really wasn’t crying about the wallet at all.
She was crying because this funny, ridiculous story about running late, losing something that wasn’t actually lost, and finding a two-week-old pickle she didn’t even know she’d been carrying around felt like one more piece of evidence that her brain wasn’t working the way it used to.
She told me she had never felt so “stupid.”
The story was funny. But what she was saying about herself because of it wasn’t funny at all.
She didn’t trust her brain anymore.
She talked about forgetting things, dropping the ball and struggling to come up with information she knew she knew. She worried about the times she hadn’t responded to her child the way she wished she had.
It was becoming very easy to take all of those individual moments and turn them into one much bigger conclusion:
I’m failing at everything.
I swear my brain used to work
I’ve heard versions of this from other women, too.
Another woman told me about making banana pudding for Father’s Day. Not a new recipe. Not an elaborate dessert she’d decided to attempt after watching six hours of The Great British Baking Show. Banana pudding. Something she’d made a million times.
Except this time, she’d forgotten an ingredient and bought the wrong version of another.
Back to the store.
She came home, started again and when she turned on the mixer she somehow managed to send a significant portion of the liquid flying across the kitchen.
It was on the counter. The floor. The wall. It was even on the upper cabinets.
I’m still not entirely clear on the physics required to get banana pudding ingredients onto upper cabinetry, but here we are.
She cleaned everything up and headed back to the store. Again.
Because the banana pudding had been promised, and at this point that dang banana pudding was getting made.
It’s funny now.
It wasn’t particularly funny while she was standing in the middle of the kitchen, sticky with pudding guts all over her, wondering why something she had done countless times suddenly felt so difficult.
That’s what I hear from women and what I think gets dismissed when we reduce the experience to “brain fog.”
It’s not always the forgotten ingredient or the lost word that is so upsetting.
It’s the thought that comes right behind it.
What’s wrong with me? I used to be able to do this.
When you stop trusting your own brain
Difficulty with concentration, memory, and word retrieval are commonly reported during perimenopause. Women describe losing their train of thought halfway through a sentence, walking into a room and having absolutely no idea why they’re there, or being unable to come up with a word they know they know.
They put something somewhere so they “won’t forget it” and then can’t find it again.
They read the same thing three times and still aren’t sure what it said.
They search the place where their wallet is sitting four times and somehow don’t see it.
For someone who has spent years being capable, organized, and dependable, these aren’t necessarily experienced as random annoying moments. When they happen often enough, they can start to mess with how you see yourself.
You start wondering why you’re forgetting so much. Why things that used to be automatic suddenly require so much effort. Whether you’re dropping more balls than you realize.
Eventually, “I forgot something” can start feeling a whole lot more like “I can’t keep anything straight anymore.”
And that is a much scarier thought.
Reverse puberty meets actual puberty
There’s another layer to this when you’re parenting at the same time.
One of the women from earlier described perimenopause as “reverse puberty.”
At the same time, her child is going through actual puberty.
Frankly, this seems like a questionable design choice or a really cruel joke.
Her child is dealing with big emotions, relationships, growing up and all of the fun that comes with adolescence. Meanwhile, Mom is trying to help with all of that while sometimes feeling like her own emotions and brain have become significantly less predictable.
And she is still expecting herself to be a grown-up who gets it right.
She should remember the appointment. She should be patient. She should know what to say when her child is upset. She should be organized. She should be able to handle all of this because she has handled all of this before.
She should definitely know why there’s a pickle in her purse.
So when she forgets something or doesn’t handle a parenting moment the way she wishes she had, it can become more than one imperfect moment.
It becomes evidence.
Maybe I’m not doing a good job anymore.
Maybe I’m failing my child.
Maybe I’m failing all of it.
Your brain may be changing. That doesn’t mean you’ve become incompetent.
There are very real changes that can happen during perimenopause, and I’m not interested in pretending they disappear if we just think differently about them.
Sometimes you really did forget the thing. Sometimes you can’t find the word. Sometimes you need more reminders than you used to, or you have to write down something you never would have needed to write down before.
That’s super frustrating, especially when being capable and dependable has been part of how you’ve understood yourself for a very long time.
But forgetting something doesn’t mean you can’t keep anything straight. Struggling through one afternoon doesn’t mean you suddenly became incapable. And not responding perfectly when your child is struggling doesn’t mean you are failing as a mother.
The woman with the purse pickle told me she wanted to stop feeling like she was drowning and messing everything up.
That’s a pretty different problem from needing to get better at keeping track of her wallet.
Maybe part of adjusting to this stage is figuring out what actually needs support and what doesn’t need to become evidence against you. Set the reminder. Write the thing down. Put systems in place when they’re helpful.
But maybe don’t use the forgotten ingredient, the banana pudding disaster, or the wallet you somehow looked directly at four times to decide how competent you are as a person.
Your brain might not feel quite like the brain you’re used to right now.
That can be frustrating. It can be scary. Sometimes it can make you cry in the bathtub.
And sometimes, thankfully, it can give you a purse pickle.
Because if we’re going to go through reverse puberty, I think we should at least get to laugh through some of it.
Therapy for Perimenopause and Menopause
If perimenopause has left you feeling more anxious, overwhelmed, irritable, forgetful, or simply less like yourself, therapy can be a place to figure out what’s changing without assuming every hard day means you’re falling apart.
I work with women navigating the emotional and psychological side of perimenopause and menopause, including anxiety, overwhelm, changes in confidence, relationship stress, parenting, and the very strange experience of adjusting to a brain that doesn’t always seem to cooperate.
