Silent Passage

A big part of Gail Sheehy's point in writing the book was that menopause shouldn't be a silent passage, and that we should get comfortable talking about it. Just the same, I'm embarrassed to mention that the book is on my reading list.

Sheehy wrote more than ten years ago. It doesn't seem very long ago at all that my mother asked what I thought about hormone replacement therapy, and I said I thought treating menopause as a medical condition was problematic. She decided not to go on the hormones, and recent studies of large populations are finding that HRT is not such a good idea, after all.

My mom liked to joke that "they're not hot flashes, they're power surges." Those, I'm not getting. She didn't mention night sweats or mood swings or heart palpitations. Or periods worthy of Lady Macbeth. I should ask, but that might be even more embarrassing than revealing it to the Internauts.