Mental toll of menopause : Another bestseller
This is a follow-up sequel to the international bestseller of motherhood-and- career, “I Don’t Know How She Does it,” for the modern woman anywhere.
In its opening page we see Kate Reddy, a city fund manager and mother of two juggling with supermarket mince pies in her kitchen attempting to distress the pies with a rolling pin to make them look like homemade pies for school Christmas Party. According to Kate “home is where the good mother is, baking for her children.”
However, this time, Kate’s juggling teenagers, ageing parents and getting back into the workplace, although you will be laughing and thinking that it is not just me. Kate is also awaiting desperately for her 50th birthday, which in her mind equals invisibility, with hormones that have her in shackles, teenage children who need her there but won’t talk to her and her ailing parent who are not coping with life. Kate is like bone in the sandwich that she isn’t even allowed to eat because of the calories. The book’s cover given a fair warning of the explicit contents in the book, including teenage kids, ageing parents and marriage in meltdown.
Kate now has to do everything in the house including ferrying the kids around, produce food on the table, and look after not only her aging in-laws but also her own mother. Her husband is going through a middle-class life crisis, after he lost his job at the ethical architecture firm. He now decides to retrain as a counsellor. While her husband is trying to find himself Kate is effectively like a single parent, trying to protect her kids as they navigate the social media minefield.
She’s back at work after a big break at home, and finding a few tricks to get by in her new workplace, her old client and flame Jack reappears.
How Hard Can it Be? Is a story of a woman turning fifty, and about finding who you are and what you need to feel alive when you’ve got used to being your own last priority.
Pearson highlights the lack of value an status that society places on the onerous job of stay at home mother, Kate however, drafts a CV from her recent experiences out of the workplace, “ fighting tooth and bail to ffet non-existent care package from local authority”. After massaging her age to 42 instead of 49, she lands a very junior job at her old firm, in the very same department where she was once a fund manager. Kate’s story highlights the mental toll of menopause.
Pearson’s explanation of old people is rather funny “ I mean, what are your supposed to do ? It is like I’m a Stone Age person living with Bill Gates,” when her daughter Emily has used her credit card to purchase and download called “How to Use Proxy to Bypass Parental Control filter”.
How Hard can it Be? By Allison Pearson, Borough Press, £14.99, 480 pages.