They Called It the Change

+ Nobody Told Us it was a Promotion

I am 42 + I am living my life for the very first time.

No actually. My daughter is an adult, turning 20 in under 10 days + is in college. I started aerial + pottery the summer before I turned forty. Which means I have been out here hanging upside down in somebody’s fabric + playing in mud like somebody’s child. I’m back on the tennis court. Solo traveling based on my own interest. I even took a peek at my schedule this week to see where I could potentially add an adult ballet class back in the mix. I am also building a business that is all my own.

Wanna know something wild? Every time I say some version of the above out loud somebody has something odd to say.

“Enjoy it while it lasts.”

“Wait til the change hits you.”

“Girlll, wait till you hit 45.”

“Oh you are in the honeymoon, wait till life settles.”

The first time I can recall someone saying something like this to me, I was freshly a teenager, standing in line at the grocery store. The line wasn’t moving + the lady in front of me broke out in a sweat like she had just run a mile. Happened out of nowhere. She started peeling things off. Her jacket, then her hat. Tissues + paper towels began appearing out of places I didn’t know a purse had. All while she was wiping her face + neck.

I have always been very facially animated lol + I must have been staring because within an instant she was looking at me. She locked eyes with me + without hesitation she said, “Don’t worry baby. If you are blessed to live long enough, this will be you.”

I closed my mouth, ugh, it had been hanging open the whole time + averted my eyes to the floor in front of me. If I lived long enough? What the hell does that mean? How could that ever be me? Nobody explained it any further. That was the whole lesson, with a visual aid included.

Back then, that sounded like a warning. Maybe even a bit of a threat or cautionary tale for young me. Now people say the same thing + it feels more like a countdown. Still very much a cautionary tale.

Like there is some kind of clock on my joy. The sand is running out on the time where I finally feel at home + good in my own body. Like my forties are the very last good stretch before my body turns on me.

Truth Moment? I don’t receive that shit. Not one bit + I don’t want you to receive it either.

What Our Grandmothers Knew

Our grandmothers had a name for it. “The change.” The hushed conversations low in the kitchen, on the porch, while somebody’s hair was getting pressed or washed. Words were said to each other. The women who had been through it told the women who were walking into it. Almost like sharing war stories. From the hot nights, heavy bleeding to the short fuse. Somebody older had already been there + could not only validate what you were feeling but could tell you what helped them + that all of this was normal.

Those conversations happened around me. As early as I can remember, if I think back I recall bits + pieces of that knowledge. At the time as a kid in the room, I didn’t know how much these conversations were for me + I didn’t know which ones to actually tap into. My momma didn’t tell me about my period, so she definitely didn’t sit me down to talk about perimenopause or menopause. By the time I was old enough to ask my grandmother, I was between 27/28 + she was losing her memory. We never got to have that conversation before I lost her in 2014.

There were basic things that I knew + understood. Some people get hot flashes, sweaty for a moment + just as fast it can go away. Maybe there was some gray hair or being more forgetful. That was it. The kitchen + porch were talking. They were talking to little ole me. Dropping seeds I never knew I’d be reaching back for here in my early forties.

And those women that were already on the other side of “The Change.” They weren’t done. They were our everyday elders. The ones that everybody called. Our church mothers + aunties who knew which tea, which root, what to do when the baby wouldn’t latch. The midwives + doulas. In so many of our communities, the woman past her bleeding years was the one that held the knowledge. The one that kept us in the remembering.

Crone isn’t an insult. It is a title. A root of pride.

Somewhere along the way we lost a lot of things, including that conversation. The kitchens + porches got quiet. Gatherings slowed + the only message left was the one the culture sells us: after a certain age, women are supposed to fade into the background.

What the Silence Cost Us

How Long Do Hot Flashes Last?

The largest study we have on women moving through this transition is called SWAN. It followed thousands of women across the country for 17 years, almost two whole decades. They found that hot flashes + night sweats don’t last “a year or two” like so many of us have been told. For many women with frequent symptoms, the median threshold was more like over seven years.

For Black women it was the longest of any group. A median of about ten years easy. That’s a decade y’all.

Ten years of not sleeping through the night. Of soaking your sheets + feeling off in your body. Could you imagine what that sleep debt buildup could do to the body? Meanwhile, the outdated clinical guidance has been telling women to just expect six months to two years of symptoms.

So what really happens? We are told that it’s stress. Maybe your age + weight. We are talked at instead of being talked to + don’t know how to articulate what we have been experiencing. This is because nobody taught us the early signs so we never connected the dots when our cycles started shifting in our late thirties or when our sleep started falling apart + when the anxiety started to spike out of nowhere. We think that we are losing it because of age + start to white knuckle grip even harder compounding the symptoms.

Guess what? We are not losing it. We are in a transition that nobody plainly named for us.

Perimenopause can start at any point in your late thirties or forties + it can go on for years before your last period. Contrary to belief, it isn’t just one moment. The reality is it is a season. The gotcha is we can absolutely prepare for seasons.

This is the Beginning of Your Power, Not the End

I have sat in the birth rooms of more than 200 families. I have a clear understanding of what transition in a woman’s body looks like. From the outside looking in labor looks like chaos. Inside, the body is doing exactly what it was designed to do, moving from one season into the next. Not a single person calls labor the end of a woman. We tell her what it is, a new beginning.

There are so many similarities between labor + perimenopause. In many ways the perimenopause season is labor. Much slower, a lot longer + quieter, but it is your body moving you into a season where you finally stop asking permission. You are birthing someone brand new.

Talk to a woman on the other side of delivery or perimenopause + I’m certain many of them will tell you some version of the exact same thing. I legit stopped caring what people thought. Found my strength + courage to say no. And hell no I didn’t explain myself. I got my time back. I moved at my own pace.

That’s not a decline my girl. That’s the Crone getting her power back.

Life doesn’t slow down in your forties unless we let them convince us it should.

One Thing to Do This Week

Start your records today. Not when the symptoms start piling up + getting louder. Now.

Every day for the next three months, write down four things: Whether you’re bleeding, how you slept that night, what your mood was + whether you got hot at night. That’s it. Shouldn’t take longer than two minutes.

You might be asking yourself, why? Well the simple truth is when you walk into a doctor’s office with three months of your own data, you are no longer a “woman complaining about her age.” You are now a woman with dates + records. Those women get talked to, not at. Data opens the door for genuine personalized conversation about your experience.

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Then make a couple of phone calls to the women you know that are older than you. This can be your momma, auntie, church mother, or even the friend that is ten years older. Ask her all the things. What was the change like for her? What did she wish somebody had told her?

Reopen the kitchens + porches in your life.

“The Change” was never the end. It was a promotion that nobody announced. Congrats girl, you are stepping into a whole new world.

Questions I Get About the Change

XO

Denawa Deniece