“How would you know?” she said. “You’re not the one going through it.”

“Of course, I don’t know what it’s like for you,” I said. “But I do know what it’s like for me.”

We were discussing hot flashes, and I was asking permission to write a column about them. We have a rule: I don’t mention her in a column unless she approves. “And I can’t be the only aging baby boomer whose wife is going through menopause,” I continued. “There are probably millions of guys just like me out there.”

She didn’t look sympathetic.

“I don’t know,” she said as she reached over to the dashboard to turn off the heat and try to take her jacket off while driving. I attempted to be helpful by pulling on her right sleeve from my position in the passenger seat. I know the hot flashes are hard for her, but they’re not exactly a picnic for me.

When we stopped, I showed her the front page of the Sunday funnies. “For Better or Worse” by Lynn Johnston showed a middle-aged woman with heat radiating from her face. Looking miserable, she flapped her clothing as she went about her day.

“See?” I said. “People do write about it.”

“That’s written by a woman.”

“Here’s her husband saying, She’s always flapping about something.’ I would be a little more sympathetic.”

“Fine. Go ahead. But I have to read it first.” Tentative permission was all I could hope for at that point.

When we’re driving together, I wear a warm jacket because I never know when the windows are going to come down around me – letting frigid air swirl around in the car. In the middle of the night, she’ll kick off the covers and groan. If I’m not holding tightly to them on my side of bed, I’ll be exposed, too, and I sleep in my boxer shorts. Sometimes she’ll open a window, or she’ll go down and try to sleep on the couch.

I can usually go back to sleep readily after waking, but she can’t.

Sometimes she needs to put on the TV and wind down that way. For one guy I know, it’s just the opposite. He’s the one who can’t get back to sleep when his wife wakes him up. “With menopause,” he says, “I’ve seen a lot of movies on HBO that I would never have seen otherwise.”

My wife has taken different herbal medications with varying degrees of success. She tried using a hormone patch – that gave her respite for a while, but then she learned from other women that such treatment only postponed the inevitable. Whenever she stopped the patches, they said, the hot flashes would return, and there were risks involved with that hormone therapy.

Sometimes, she’ll walk out onto the porch and leave the door open behind her. Cold winds blow in on me as I sit in my chair with my laptop. She’s forever turning down the heat. Then she’ll turn it back up again, then down again, and so forth. Sometimes she won’t bring a jacket or sweater along as we head out somewhere because she’s in the middle of a hot flash when we leave. Evidently they can subside as quickly as they come on and, without a jacket, she can feel uncomfortably cold as well. After giving up my own jacket to her at times, I’ve learned to bring something else along, just in case.

Friends tell me about their wives’ mood swings during menopause. But, thank goodness, those aren’t much of a problem in our situation. They were a factor during her pregnancies, however. That was a long time ago, and I didn’t have a clue then what was going on – not until the third or fourth pregnancy anyway. By then, I’d finally noticed a pattern.

It wasn’t just the difficulty of moving around in the late stages, when she had all that weight out front. Hormonal mood changes came way ahead of that, and I didn’t talk about them with other men. It just wasn’t something I did back then, and there weren’t men’s magazines at the checkout counter proclaiming every kind of male woe and what to do about it like there were for women.

In those days, feminists denied there were any such things as mood swings peculiar to women. They said such claims were rumors started by the evil white patriarchy to keep women down. Even today, should men discuss problems with women during PMS, pregnancy or menopause, they are admonished with something like: “You have no idea” or “If men were the ones who got pregnant, the human race would become extinct.”

No, we’re not the ones going through hot flashes. For us, it’s the cold shivers.

Tom McLaughlin, a teacher and columnist, lives in Lovell. His e-mail address is [email protected].