The Fuss About Menopause
This article first appeared in the Minden Times and Haliburton Echo in September 2026.
This fuss about menopause, what’s it all about?
At one level, it’s very likely relentless capitalism making money by medicalizing how the body works.
But at another level, I wonder if it is a nefarious scheme by women to Take Back Their Lives.
I used to make myself unpopular with my peers and younger women by extolling the virtues of menopause. By deftly manipulating the numbers, I could explain how menopause means you are regaining control over one-third of your life. Not just two-thirds of life down, one-third to go (which is also maybe true, but probably closer to half down, half to go). No, I totted up the days in a month in which women have their period, worry about having it, worry about not having it, get ready for it, recover from it. It’s about ten days or one-third of a month.
But I also used to preach, crone-like, that it was a once-in-lifetime opportunity (a bit of exaggeration there, but not a lot) for women to claim their lives for themselves. In the little crack in time when kids were launched, vacations were longer, bank accounts were recovering and the body was still largely functioning as it should, women could make the jump to the next square on the chess board, the one they wanted to occupy for the next play.
But they had to move quickly and decisively. Because it was a change in identity – from mother/domestic manager/significant earner to something else: maybe woman/artist/traveller/part-time earner. But equivalent to changing from a pawn to a bishop, a knight to maybe the queen.
Because if they didn’t do it quickly and decisively, the game would pin them down. Caring for husbands or grandchildren or aging parents would take over where childcare left off, work would consume them or sideline them, the financial needs of others would tether them.
So, back to menopause, I wonder if the current hoo-hah about menopause is maybe women’s way of buying the time to prepare for the leap.
Because, look, the current profile -- a no-man’s-land (pun intended) war zone of half-crazed women bearing hand-held fans – what better way to discourage a queue of people waiting to be cared for than presenting as an unpredictable, potentially homicidal, harridan?
Being scary is an effective way of creating space.
And I am worried that the net is tightening around middle-aged women. No adequate preparation has been made for the aging of the demography, so the download is on. It falls primarily to women, as care work always has.
The care of children outside the home, never adequate, has worsened. Day care costs as much as university tuition, domestic work remains unpaid and stuffed in whatever cracks of the day are available, unsupervised play is criminalized, organized play requires chauffeurs and mobile meals, it all costs money that requires two significant earners per household, there is no guarantee that children will ever be independent and every possibility that they will continue to be costly.
A woman’s work is never done.
Too true. Unless we quit.
Which we have, to some extent. We’re having few or no children. We limit our in-home and out-of-home work as needs be to keep chugging along – no PTA, no home-made cookies, sliding personal work into paid hours. We pretend to lean in without giving it heart or maybe we feather-bed (an old term for slowing the pace on line-work).
But what if we just boldly chose what we want to do, on our own terms? Make a big noticeable leap instead of quietly inching our way to where we want to be? Move from one square to the other?
Actually, that kind of bold move is not unknown, not even that unusual, in women’s lives. We quit work to have babies. We move to accommodate our husband’s work. We renegotiate our hours to accommodate child care and then elder care and in between community work. If all else fails, we get ill.
What’s different is that we’re doing this for our own selfish reasons. Because if we don’t claim self-hood at the crack in time that is menopause, when is the next opportunity?
I say menopause is a jolly good time – bid farewell to the life of the womb and embrace the life of the spirit. Go a little crazy to make the space you need to prep for the move and then Just Do It. The world will just have to figure out to fill whatever gaps are left, and it’s about time that was other than women’s work.
