Hi friends,

{ words below are mostly penned by the wondrous wordsmith Lindsay Johnstone ! }We wanted to get this out to you ASAP so you can dig in over the weekend. This is the second part of our chat inspired by All Fours by Miranda July, which far more famous women than us implore you to read :

We talk about leaning in to the messiness of midlife; fear of what’s going on inside our bodies; our relationship to our sexual bodies and how midlife offers us an opportunity to (re)discover who we are and what we like. This post from Celeste Davis was mentioned more than once in the chat:

We dig into what it feels like to emerge from the oestrogen fug - what Dr. Susan Hardwick Smith calls the veil of oestrogen - and recognise that the mothering / caring part of us is evolving.

What can we / do we expect from grandmothers, too? The chat was on fire over maternal burnout and whether it breeds future generations of grandmothers who will be less available when there are (more) small people to take care of.

We talk about the conflicting information we’ve been told about testing for perimenopause and HRT and the complex landscape of women’s health generally, which can make it so hard to know what treatments to try to manage symptoms… Do we need to become our own doctor, too, as well as Jill-of-all-other-trades? One recommendation if you’re interested in going down a specific medical peri rabbit hole is The Menopause Brain by Dr. Louise Mosconi. And if you’re looking for a Substack to follow, Dr. Jen Gunter writes The Vagenda. Over on Instagram, check out The Menopause Sisters,Dr. Mary Clare Havers and Dr. Stacy Sims.

Lindsay’s hugely popular most about losing her orgasm has a wealth of advice in the comments:

And I share some thought about taking HRT in this post :

as well as some thought on returning to my body after my hysterectomy here:

Oh, also. We’re all moving to the Vale of Oestrogen which we have decided is a bucolic resort somewhere on the beautiful south-east coast of Wales.

If you’d like to continue the conversation, jump in to the comments, or head to this thread:

This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit laylaomara.substack.com/subscribe