Menopause, Memory, Mood and Midlife Power: A Love Letter to The Change

A modern pagan fable about menopause, memory, and mothering yourself back to life.

The Change calls it “The Menopause”. Not just a reproductive transition but a neuroendocrine, emotional, and psychosocial transformation that can alter how we think, feel, and understand ourselves.

Although the average age of menopause in the U.S. is 51, the transition leading up to it—called perimenopause—can last anywhere from 4 to 10 years. When my primary care provider casually shared that little fact, I nearly fainted. “Ten years of this?” I asked. During this stretch, estrogen and progesterone levels can swing wildly, throwing off the brain’s hypothalamic-pituitary-gonadal axis and affecting everything from mood and memory to physical health.

Research published in JAMA Psychiatry (2020) and The Lancet (2019) shows that up to 40% of individuals in perimenopause experience new or worsening mental health symptoms including depression, anxiety, insomnia, and cognitive fog. These aren’t imagined. They’re real, measurable neurochemical shifts. Estrogen directly influences serotonin, dopamine, and norepinephrine pathways, the same systems targeted by many antidepressants.

But the transition isn’t only chemical. It’s existential.

The Psychosocial Impact of Menopause

As the North American Menopause Society emphasizes, menopause is a “biopsychosocial event.” It requires more than hormone management. It demands a reckoning with our roles, our desires, our grief, and our growth. It’s not a single medical event. It’s a portal. A place of shedding and sometimes, rewilding.

Despite its universality, menopause remains one of the least supported transitions in health care. A 2022 survey in The Journal of Women’s Health found that nearly 75% of people entering perimenopause felt unprepared, and more than half had never discussed it with a provider. These gaps are more severe for women of color, LGBTQ+ individuals, and those with limited access to care. The cultural script tells us to suffer silently or medicate ourselves into invisibility. There is rarely space to grieve what is lost or celebrate what might be found.

Yet when people are given language, choices, and community, something else becomes possible. Not just symptom relief, but a radical reimagining of power, presence, and pleasure in midlife.

The Change as a Mirror: Cultural Reflections on Menopause

There’s a scene in The Change that quietly shook me. Linda, fifty, furious, and finally free, stands among a circle of women gathered to celebrate a young girl’s first period. It’s a rite of passage. A ceremony of becoming. The girl receives a handmade floral crown with cascading ribbons, still learning what it means to take up space in the world.

The women don’t just witness her; they honor her. They remember their own threshold crossings, many of which went unmarked, unsupported, and uncelebrated. They offer her what they never received.

The Change treats womanhood as a continuum. A cycle. A spiral. In a culture that deems puberty awkward, menopause shameful, and aging erasure, this show offers something else entirely: reverence. It normalizes every phase of embodiment, from the first blood to the last. It reframes these transitions as sacred, not shameful. Biological, yes, but also deeply cultural, relational, and political.

The scene is both intimate and unapologetically public. It models what it could look like to mark these transitions in community. To say: You belong here. This is not the end. It is a beginning.

Personal Reflections on Body Image and Aging

And then Linda speaks. A line that landed straight in my body:

“Please don’t wait until you’re fifty to love yourself.
And you’re going to have to bump up against the fact that how you look isn’t the most important thing about you.
We’re meant to be different.”

I paused the show. Sat in the stillness. Because I had heard something like that before, not quite in those words, but close…

I heard it in a dressing room in 1992. I had just finished my first year of college. I’d gained weight. Nothing fit. I was angry at my body for changing, for betraying the curated version of myself I thought I was supposed to be. I sobbed. My mother walked in and found me crumpled on the floor. She crouched beside me and said:

“Honey, don’t do this to yourself. Don’t do this to yourself.”

She didn’t mean don’t gain weight. She meant don’t hand your worth over to it.

Later that day, we went home. She pulled out a heavy art book: Titian. Together, we flipped through images of curvy, luminous women. Women reclining. Women gazing back. Women whose bodies told stories of softness and strength. Skin and shadow rendered with reverence.

We looked at Venus of Urbino (1538), Danaë, Venus and the Musician, Jupiter and Antiope. These women weren’t trying to shrink. They were drenched in color and light. They were made to be seen.

In Titian’s hands, the female body wasn’t shameful. It was divine.

And my mother, who carried her own body-shame and her own wisdom, said:
“How you look is not all you are. And even if it were, look at the beauty of these women here.”

Grief, Becoming, and Midlife Identity

I wish I could talk to her now. Because I’m in The Change. The unraveling. The rising. The shedding of roles that once made sense. Wife. Daughter. Mother of small children. And now, someone else.

That’s the power of midlife transformation. It doesn’t pretend this transition is glamorous. It’s muddy. It’s funny. It’s raw. It’s full of rage and beauty and awkward, gorgeous discomfort. There’s no glow-up. Only recognition. Real radiance.

Intergenerational Wisdom in the Menopause Transition

A few weeks ago, my daughter and I were talking about bodies, dating, and all the strange rules women are still handed. I won’t share all the details. But at one point, she looked at me and said:

“You know, I think all this dating stuff is weird. And it doesn’t make sense, because I know my body is the least interesting thing about me.”

There it was. A line in the forest. A new story taking root.

She didn’t learn that from the world. Maybe she learned it from me.

In the times I chose silence over self-criticism. In the meals we ate without commentary. In the days I named hunger, or strength, or rest as valid. That knowing is now part of her. Just as shame and self-denial were once part of us.

And that, too, is a change.

Redefining Power During Menopause

The Change, as a show and a stage of life, isn’t just about hot flashes and hormone charts. Yes, there are night sweats. Yes, there is brain fog. Yes, there are aching joints that make you question whether you’re aging or unraveling. The grief that comes with your last period is real. These are not metaphors. They are realities.

But they’re not the whole story. This transition is also about power rediscovered. A time to rewrite our origin stories. The sacred rage of becoming who we were always meant to be with dirt under our nails, grief in our bloodstream, and no need for permission.

Bridget Christie’s Vision of Midlife Liberation

Bridget Christie, who created the show and plays Linda, doesn’t give us a tidy blueprint. She rides into the forest on a motorcycle and burns the old scripts down. What rises in the ashes is strange. It’s necessary. And it is hilarious. There’s a strap-on eel. A cheese elf. Someone named Pig Man. Two sisters who speak in riddles like sacred oracles.

This isn’t just entertainment.
It’s invocation.

In my imagination, I sit with Linda in the woods.

She offers me a cup of something steaming. We talk about what’s been taken and what’s being returned.

“I think a lot of women feel like something’s been taken from them. What if now something’s being given back?”
“May all our transitions be joyful.”

One of mine is.
It is watching the young grow into themselves with a confidence that took us decades to find.
It is hearing a daughter say, “My body is the least interesting thing about me,” and knowing she believes it.

That is joy.
That is revolution.
That is The Change.

Talking to Kids about Menopause and Puberty Transitions

Before you talk with kids, start with yourself. You don’t need to know everything. But grounding yourself in your own understanding of the menstrual and menopausal transitions is a gift to them and to you.

What can you do as a parent to prepare your children for the idea that bodies have seasons, journeys, and unfolding?

Your experience matters. Your comfort matters. Your language shapes how kids think about their own bodies for a lifetime.

Support the Idea That Transitions Are Normal

Body Awareness for All Ages

• Ages 2–5: “Bodies have cycles, like the moon. Sometimes I bleed a little from my vagina. That’s called a period. It means my body is working well.”
• Ages 6–9: “Menopause is when bleeding stops later in life. It just means the body is changing again. My body is going through a change right now, so I need some quiet time. I’m learning how to be kind to myself in a new way.”
• Ages 10–13: “Hormones can make feelings bigger. Sometimes I cry because I’m tired or angry and that’s valid. I’m going through menopause like you’re going through puberty. Menopause doesn’t mean something’s wrong; it means I’m entering a new phase.”
• Ages 14–18: “Menopause is a beginning—not just an end. All ends mark a new beginning. Fear of body change is normal. But that’s why we build community so we can ask questions from those who have been through it.”

By talking about menopause transition, you nurture body literacy, empathy, and resilience in children.

In Closing: Embodied Empathy

Talking about the body isn’t a one-time conversation. It’s a family culture. It’s about empathy.

And it’s not just about anatomy. It’s about empathy.

So, use your own life as a story.
Let transitions be visible.
Make curiosity the norm.

Guided Meditation: Becoming Again

Let your body settle. Let the ground hold you… This is the place of change.

“May all my transitions be joyful.”
“May what was lost give root to what is now growing.”
“May I remember who I am.”