What changes move you today?

It’s leaf peeping season in the Rockies; I will go eagerly back to Summit County, CO next weekend for aspens and friends–can’t wait! Hoping to get lots of photos to use here in the coming weeks. This is my 799th post–let’s see what I can capture for #800!

This made me laugh while scrolling Facebook today:

Summer to fall, youth to maturity. The Fourth Turning. Everything changes. How do we meet it all? What choices do we make?

Hubs decided this summer that we will replace the carpet in the whole house. The kids dutifully cleared their rooms before going back to school–it looks so sad, like they’ve moved out. My mental load increases the closer we get to installation, as 90% of the stuff in the rest of the place is mine and I must now clear 20 years of living off the floor and out of the closets–big lift for packrat me. I know I will be happy when it’s over and the process has already illuminated so much, for better or worse. I am who I am, have been so forever, with remarkable consistency, o.m.g. But after this project I may likely reorganize and reset, decluttered and refocused. Looking forward to it (but I’ll complain about it in the meantime). Makes me think about other things that are the same and also changing–my favorite paradox.

What have you noticed about menopause lately? I bet you hear or see something about it a lot more often now than ever. I wrote my most focused piece on it two years ago this week, which I still share with patients, but I really need to update it, as the landscape around this life transition has itself shifted significantly even since then. It’s still great that women’s health gets so much more attention and discussion now, no question. We have also swung well into pathologizing the normal in a lot of spaces, where unqualified influencers make money by sowing fear and mistrust of legitimate medical science and doctors in women of all ages. It’s all part of a larger societal transition, no? Social media has given everyone equal access to express and sell anything on various public platforms with little if any accountability. Menopause is a vastly different social experience now compared to even five years ago, let alone a generation.

Speaking of which, how is Gen X menopause different from that of our mothers? For many of us it hits when our kids are about a decade younger than we were when our moms went through it. We had much better access to birth control, and many of us delayed childbirth while getting our careers off the ground. So while our moms’ menopause happened after we were off at college or beyond, we’re going through it with teens and kids still at home–a very different, and I would argue more difficult, scenario. We are also the largest generation of working moms, primary breadwinner moms, and executive moms. We will or have hit our professional pinnacle around middle age, many in male-dominated fields, right when our adolescent kids’ brains and behavior devolve into chaos and our own bodies stage the second most significant physiologic revolution of our lifetime. Oh and don’t forget that our parents are also in their seventh or eighth decades of life, another pivotal transition that we also attend.

So to my fellow perimenopausal sisters: Holy moly, we are HEROES! Not only are we living every day in our own involuntary bodily transitions, but we’re doing it in a period of social and generational transition that is more complex than any timeframe to date. If you’re reading this and you have a woman leader anywhere in your life (and believe me, you do, even if she doesn’t have a formal title or designation), just thank her now. She’s holding all kinds of shit together and probably making it look easy.

What other monumental transitions do you observe now? What transformations? As we move from summer to fall in the Northern Hemisphere, entering the season of harvest and impending equinox, how do we feel and what do we need?

Multiple coincident and intersecting transitions can feel like a maelstrom. Can we find a quiet and stable center within it? Can we cultivate that dynamic balance that allows us to move more fluidly, with less friction and drag through it? What serves as our rudder, that which reliably stabilizes us on our life course, despite the inevitable weather changes? I know what mine are, and writing this post helps me reidentify and reinforce them.

Everything changes. Some things remain the same. May we always maintain clarity about the paradox of both, and exercise our agency to transition ever toward our most aspirational selves in each phase of life.