When Naomi Watts was 36 years old, wanting to start a family but not getting pregnant, she “was shocked” when her doctor told her that she was close to menopause.
“I really had to focus on getting pregnant. I needed to be a mother or I was going to be some kind of failure of a woman,” she said while speaking on a women’s health panel at Hello Sunshine’s Shine Away, connected by AT&T, event in Los Angeles on Sunday. “Which is ridiculous and absurd. There are plenty of ways to be a parent if you want to be, but I just went into a spiral of shame and fear.”
Watts said she had a “lightbulb go off” at the time. She remembered that her own mother had gone into menopause early and had her last period at 45 years old.
“I didn’t know any detail around it,” Watts said, “that [my mom] had a multitude of symptoms, that she was suffering in any way. It was just something that was not spoken about in detail.”
She continued: “I said to my mom on the phone, ‘Why didn’t you tell me more?’ And she said, ‘Well, these are the things I didn’t tell you because my mother never told me.’ And I was like, ‘But that is just making no sense.’ We’re half the population. Why is this a secret? Who signed this code of silence and agreed that we should all just be hush-hush?”
Naomi Watts shown before images for the Shine Away event.
Naomi Watts got candid about menopause at Hello Sunshine’s second annual Shine Away experiential event, connected by AT&T, at Nya Studios in Los Angeles. (Emma McIntyre/Getty Images for Hello Sunshine)
Menopause, according to the Mayo Clinic, is when periods “stop for good” for a full 12 months. While this can happen during a person’s 40s or 50s, the average age is 51 in the U.S. Common symptoms include hot flashes, sleep disruption and vaginal dryness — the result of hormone fluctuation, which can start in perimenopause, the time leading up to menopause.
What was especially frustrating for Watts was that she had tried to freeze her eggs at 33, three years before wanting to start a family, to ensure that she would be ready once she could take a break from work.