If there’s one thing I’ve learned living with a menopausal wife, it’s this: when the hormones change, the laws of domestic physics go with them.
Drawers stay open. Cupboards never quite close. Clothes migrate from hanger to floor like they’ve got somewhere better to be.
And, somehow, everything important — glasses, purse, phone — becomes invisible to the very person who owns them.
Before menopause, my wife was a model of order.
She had systems for everything — a place for the keys, a place for the post, and an uncanny ability to locate anything within seconds. She could tell you where a single safety pin was last seen in 2012.
Then, one day, it all started to unravel.
It began with the kitchen cupboards. I’d walk in to make a cup of tea and find doors hanging open like mouths mid-sentence.
At first, I thought nothing of it. Maybe she was in a rush. Maybe she’d forgotten to close one while cooking. But then another day came, and another, and soon our kitchen looked like a scene from a low-budget horror film — every door ajar, drawers half-open, as if the cupboards themselves were whispering secrets.
I tried the diplomatic approach.
“Darling,” I said one morning, gently closing a cupboard, “you’ve left this open again.”
She blinked, genuinely puzzled. “Have I?”
“Yes,” I said, pointing to the scene of the crime.
“Oh,” she shrugged, “I must have forgotten.”
And that was the start of a new domestic era. The Age of the Open Door.
At first, I found it mildly amusing. Then, I’ll admit, it started to drive me a bit mad. I’d close one, turn around, and another would be open. It was like living in a game of whack-a-mole. Except the moles were cupboard doors, and the only prize was mild exasperation.
But as time went on, I realised something deeper was happening. This wasn’t forgetfulness in the ordinary sense. This was menopause brain fog — that strange, invisible mist that settles over the mind and makes simple things vanish from thought mid-action. It wasn’t that she couldn’t see the cupboards; it was that her brain had moved on to the next thought before the last one had finished loading.
She’d be halfway through making a cup of tea, open the cupboard for a mug, then see the post on the counter, remember a bill she hadn’t paid, then wander off to find her phone to check the app — leaving the cupboard door swinging in the breeze behind her.
At first, I used to follow her around the house closing things. Doors. Drawers. Wardrobes. Bathroom cabinets. It became my cardio workout. But eventually, I stopped seeing it as chaos and started seeing it as a kind of living map — a breadcrumb trail of her day.
The open drawer in the bedroom? That’s where she started getting dressed before realising she’d left her phone downstairs.
The half-open wardrobe? That’s where she changed tops after deciding she didn’t like the first one.
Each open door told a story — not of carelessness, but of distraction, of trying to keep up with a brain that now runs like a browser with fifty tabs open and the soundtrack of life playing too loud.
Then there’s the daily chorus of “Where’s my…?”
It’s become the soundtrack of our mornings.
“Where’s my purse?”
“Have you seen my glasses?”
“Where’s my phone?”
And occasionally, “Where’s that thing I just had in my hand?”
I’ve learned to stay calm, even when it’s the fifth time she’s asked.
“Have you checked your bag?” I’ll say gently.
“Yes!”
“Your coat pocket?”
“Of course!”
“Your car?”
“Already looked!”
Cue me walking into the hall, picking up her bag, and finding the purse sitting right on top.
The look she gives me in those moments is half gratitude, half fury. Because deep down, she knows it’s there — she just can’t see it.
That’s the strangest thing about menopause brain fog. It’s not that objects disappear. It’s that they become temporarily invisible, like the world’s cruellest magic trick.
I’ve learned to handle it delicately.
You can’t say, “They’re right there in front of you!” because that never ends well.
You say instead, “Let’s retrace your steps.”
It makes her feel included rather than accused.
And you must say it with love — because one day, it’ll be you wandering the house muttering about lost car keys that are actually in your pocket.
But here’s the thing: these moments, as frustrating as they can be, have also made me see my wife differently. There’s a vulnerability in forgetfulness, a kind of fragility that demands patience rather than correction. She’s fighting a battle she can’t see — her own body rewriting its rules — and I’m just trying to keep up.
Sometimes she laughs at herself.
“I swear I’m losing my mind,” she’ll say, shaking her head.
“No,” I tell her. “It’s just gone on holiday without you for a bit.”
Other times, she’ll get teary. “I used to be so organised. What’s happening to me?”
And that’s when humour gives way to tenderness. I remind her that this isn’t her fault — it’s a phase, not a failure. The woman who could once multitask like a CEO still exists; she’s just temporarily interrupted by biology.
Clothes on the floor used to annoy me. Now, they make me smile. They’re proof that she’s still living, still trying, still pushing through the fog one drawer at a time.
And when she finally sits down after a day of misplacing half her belongings, she laughs and says, “I don’t know what’s wrong with me lately.”
And I’ll say, “Nothing’s wrong. The cupboards just miss you.”
I hand it to her gently. “You might need this.”
She stares at it, blinks, then bursts out laughing.
“I swear, it’s like it was invisible!”
“Maybe it was,” I say. “Until you looked with the right eyes.”
That night, as we left the house, I closed the bedroom door behind us — leaving the drawers open and the clothes on the floor.
Because sometimes, love isn’t about tidying up the mess.
It’s about understanding where it came from.
Living with a menopausal partner means learning a new kind of patience. You stop expecting perfection, and you start celebrating the small victories — the mornings she finds her glasses without help, the evenings you make it through dinner without a misplaced phone or missing wallet incident.
You learn to laugh more, sigh less, and accept that for a while, life will feel a bit like living in a sitcom written by someone who keeps forgetting the plot.
But within that chaos is beauty.
Because menopause isn’t the end of something — it’s the evolution of someone you love.
She’s the same woman, just re-wiring, adjusting, adapting.
And if that means closing the same cupboard door for the tenth time in a day, so be it.
You’ll close it gladly, because you understand now what she’s up against.
And one day — when the fog lifts, when the hormones settle — she’ll look back and laugh.
She’ll thank you for being patient, for helping her find her purse and her phone and her sanity.
And maybe she’ll even say, “You know, you never complained once.”
(You did, but quietly. To yourself. While picking socks off the floor.)
And that’s marriage in the menopause years — a blend of humour, patience, and small acts of love disguised as tidying up.
So now, when I walk into the kitchen and see every cupboard open, I just smile and think,
“Well, at least I know she’s been here.”
Then I close them all, one by one —
because that’s what love looks like when the brain fog rolls in.
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