HEALTH | PSYCHOLOGY

My Magical Menopause?

How education, support, reframing, media, and research are making me excited again about growing old

How I love to watch the sun set and playing with it’s light. Photo by author.

Being free from the rollercoaster of hormonal changes that have strongly affected me since I was 11 years old is something I have looked forward to for almost four decades.

At first, simply no longer having a period was the huge sigh of relief I longed for, which also, wonderfully enough, meant that I would no longer have to worry about birth control when I had sex.

Two birds with one stone!

That was my way of thinking when I was a teenager in the 90s when most people, myself included, had never heard the word peri-menopause, and the women in my family called menopause something else: “the change.”

I’m pretty sure I heard it referred to as such on an episode of The Golden Girls, too. My mom never discussed it with me. She and her sisters talked about it in hushed tones and whispers, and no one ever seemed excited about it.

In fact, that was pretty much par for the course when it came to anything related to my menstrual cycle. I learned that there was a social etiquette and a shroud of shame surrounding my natural reproductive processes, which baffled me.