Calling all menopausal women...Are you prepared?

I’m reading “The Wisdom of Menopause” by Dr. Christiane Northrup, not because I’m going through menopause but because I need to learn more about what happens to our bodies (and more specifically, our skin) during that stage so I can write about it more accurately on the Striking blog and newsletter.

I was sharing with some of my friends that I was simultaneously reading books about raising teenagers and going through menopause. Then the questions came up:

“Why are you reading about menopause?”

“Are you perimenopausal?”

“Which book are you reading? Maybe I should get a copy too.”

Then the realization hit me: as a generation of women, we are unprepared for menopause. We get to see the movies about menstruation in grade school, but there’s no mandatory movie about menopause to watch in our late 30’s/early 40’s to prepare us for that next stage of life. Some of us may get some information from our mothers if we ask, but there’s no “birds and bees” type conversation like the ones we get when we’re learning about the facts of life, so it’s up to us figure out this next phase of womanhood.

We throw around words like “perimenopause” and “menopause” like we know what they mean, but really, most of us are grossly uneducated on the subject until the doctor tells us we’re right in the middle of it. Do we really know what happens? Do we care enough to research it before it happens to us or does all the book reading and information gathering start once the doctor has given us the official diagnosis?

I’ve decided to take matters into my own hands. I’ve started to ask questions of my mother and my aunt. So far, I’m not following in my mother’s footsteps: she gave birth to me at 18 and started menopause at 40. I, on the other hand, gave birth for the first time at 29 and had my third (and I think, my last) child 18 months ago at age 42. I’ve started reading about menopause and asking other women who have been through “the change” what they would recommend to read, or if they read anything at all.

What will do you to prepare?

Posted by Brigette, contributor

[Via http://strikingskincare.wordpress.com]