Suzanne Harrington: I'm middle-aged, menopausal, hanging out with five-year- olds —how did this happen?

It’s Easter Monday and the Lord may have risen, but right now the idea of lying down in a nice dark cave with a big stone blocking the entrance sounds like heaven. After an Easter of small kids, egg hunts, and gambolling lambs, you might be quite desperate for a bit of sensory deprivation. The deep silence of an empty room. Neurofen for the chocolate hangover.

You may have sensibly thought your days of small kids, egg hunts and gambolling lambs were well and truly over, given how your own kids are now car-driving and pint-drinking (not at the same time) but if you are daft enough to partner up with someone whose fecundity is not dictated by their ovarian shelf life – that is, a man – then it’s perfectly possible to find yourself, middle-aged and menopausal, hanging out with five-year-olds.

Obviously, you go into Mary Poppins mode. The tricks of the parenting trade form deep grooves in the neural pathways, like an instruction manual once read and never forgotten – and broadly speaking you probably quite like kids, which helps, although at this stage you definitely favour dogs – but by the time you’re fifty-something, your oestrogen has left the building. Slammed the door behind itself. Put the keys back through the letter box, before running down the street never to be seen again. You might half-heartedly slap some hormone gel from the doctor onto the collapsing-souffle of your thighs, to prevent actual beard growth, but the reality is that you and your oestrogen have parted company. Forever.

Oestrogen is the stuff that makes you appear nice to other humans. The mysterious component that makes you say insane things like, darling let’s have a baby, or offer to make everyone a sandwich, or spend three hours tidying someone else’s disgusting bedroom. It is the care-bear of the endocrine system. It’s fertility, wanting everything to seed, to grow, to be nurtured.

And when it goes, leaving you feeling a bit sweaty and mad, you find yourself transitioning irrevocably into zero-fucks mode. This translates into telling people to make their own sandwich and tidy their own room, and anyone who wants to have a baby will have to do with someone else who is definitely not you.

And while there’s no link between the words oestrogen and Easter –although in this era of fake news you could always pretend, because it definitely sounds like there should be – the word Easter does come from Eostre, a pagan goddess of springtime. Hence the Easter bunnies, Easter eggs and other symbols of fertility that are connected to oestrogen, biologically if not etymologically.

You might be reminded of this as you watch your partner’s small children ripping through the undergrowth, like the Drug Squad after a tip-off of a possible cocaine seizure, in search of Lindt bunnies. Adorable. But not as adorable as that feeling you’ll get when you block the entrance to your cave when they leave, and sink into glorious, barren solitude.