The Change

For generations, women have called menopause the change.

There may be more wisdom in those two words than we realise.

Because this passage rarely confines itself to hormones. It can touch sleep, energy, sexuality, relationships, work, confidence and our sense of who we are.

For some women the physical transition is relatively gentle. For others it is profoundly disruptive and requires proper care and treatment.

But the hormonal story is only part of it.

A woman reaching menopause is also meeting everything she has been taught about what it means to grow older in a female body.

Youth has been prized. Fertility has carried enormous cultural meaning. Women have been taught, subtly and not so subtly, to remain desirable, productive, useful and accommodating.

And then the tide begins to turn.

This can feel like loss.

But what if everything that is leaving was not meant to be carried forever?

Across the world, vast numbers of women are somewhere inside this passage at the same time. Yet menopause has so often been experienced privately, as though each woman were undergoing an individual disruption rather than entering one of the great recurring transitions of female life.

There is another story available to us.

One in which the years beyond reproduction are not an afterthought.

The fertility of the womb may end, but other forms of fertility remain. Creativity. Knowledge. Leadership. Discernment. The capacity to hold complexity. The authority that comes from having lived.

None of this asks us to romanticise difficult symptoms or turn suffering into spiritual growth.

The loss can be real.

So can the liberation.

An ending can be an ending without being the end.