Duty to Pause

Description

What happens when the people responsible for protecting families fail to understand the person holding that family together?

She opened her home and her heart to three siblings who needed safety, stability and love. Being a foster carer was never simply a job. It was a commitment to children whose lives had already been shaped by adversity.

Then came menopause.

Brain fog, exhaustion, disrupted sleep, emotional changes and a growing sense of losing herself began to affect everyday life. But rather than recognising the possibility of menopause-related difficulties, professionals responsible for supporting her and the children began interpreting her struggles through a very different lens.

Questions became concerns. Concerns became judgements. And judgements had consequences.

Duty to Pause: The Cost of Not Understanding Menopause is an illustrated memoir that moves between warmth, humour, love and profound injustice. It tells the story of a woman trying desperately to hold her family together while navigating menopause, professional scrutiny and a system that did not always stop to ask what was really happening.

Through deeply personal experiences, this book explores:

• The often invisible and misunderstood effects of menopause.

• The pressures and emotional demands of foster caring.

• How assumptions can become accepted interpretations without sufficient understanding.

• The impact of professional decisions on carers, children and family relationships.

• Why compassion, curiosity and menopause-informed practice matter in every profession carrying a duty of care.

This is not a medical textbook or a conventional menopause self-help guide. It is a lived experience, told through words and illustrations, that asks readers to reconsider how easily someone can be misunderstood.

For women who have felt dismissed, carers who have struggled to be heard, and professionals whose decisions affect other people’s lives, this book offers a powerful invitation to think differently.

Before making a judgement, pause. Before reaching a conclusion, ask. Before changing someone’s life, understand.

Because sometimes the greatest harm begins not with what we know, but with what we fail to understand.