Why You Should Honor Menopause with ‘Pause Day’

The best definition for perimenopause I have heard to date is “reverse puberty.”

What a perfect way to describe what it is like to live in a body that is no longer comfortable or known! And it is a good reminder that this transition is not a series of rapid changes, but a gradual movement to a new normal.

Plus, the more you look, the more you see how much puberty and menopause truly do have in common.

Similarities Between Puberty and Perimenopause

Like puberty, perimenopause is triggered by hormonal shifts within the body, often resulting in emotional volatility, mood swings, or anxiety.

Both life stages involve physical changes that can be seen or felt. It might not be acne and armpit hair in menopause; instead, it’s hot flashes and bone density loss.

Like puberty, there is no definite beginning for perimenopause. Is it the first day your period doesn’t come like clockwork? The day you can’t zip your favorite jeans? Maybe it’s your first hot flash, which you don’t yet call a hot flash, because what do you have to compare it to?

I realize how much perimenopause reminds me of puberty, too, when I have to borrow a tampon from a friend under a bathroom stall because I no longer have any idea of when, or if, my next period will even come! Twenty-two-day cycles? Sixty days? It’s nothing but a guessing game.

Plus, both life transitions come hand-in-hand with questions of identity and responsibility, resulting in a struggle to understand or accept the inevitable changes time brings.

But that is where the comparisons end.

The Uniqueness of Menopause as a Life Transition

Unlike puberty, there is a definite end to perimenopause—at least, an end to the accurate usage of the word. Perimenopause technically ends on the date on which there has been no period for a full year. That single day, one full year after your last period, is menopause. Everything before is peri. Everything after is post.

This does not mean that your symptoms will come to an end as the terminology shifts. (Sorry.) But it is a marker of sorts; a point at which we can say, This is it. This is the first day of my elder years.

So, if it’s a day that is different from any that has come before; if it is a day that births us into a whole new way of being, why not celebrate it as such?

Celebrating Menopause with “Pause Day”

Western culture does little to honor children as they move through puberty and become adults, and we do even less to honor women who are transitioning from adulthood to elderhood. Most often, menopause is experienced silently, with, if we’re lucky, the support of just a few friends or family members.

But it doesn’t have to be this way. We can start a new trend in which we mark this rite of passage the same way we would a marriage or a new job. We could call it our Pause Day.

Can you imagine how wonderful it would be to collectively celebrate a woman’s Pause Day? To honor her as she transitions into the Wise Woman, whose role now moves from one of caretaking (in any capacity) to mentoring, guidance, storytelling, and advice-giving?

During menopause, we leave behind adulthood, with its overbearing responsibilities to others; its addiction to identity and roles; its insistence that we look and remain youthful and appealing to men; and its burden that we be able to conceive children. Upon entering elderhood, we open up a deeper relationship with ourselves, and with nature, God, or simply the beauty of life. We become the Crone of the Triple Goddess archetype.

Doesn’t this transition from adulthood to elderhood deserve a glorious celebration with friends, cake, and toasts (in a nicely air-conditioned space)? Is it not as commemorative as another trip around the sun? Is it not an opportunity to make fresh vows to oneself and commit to the sacred duties of an elder?

In indigenous cultures, ritual and ceremony are indispensable in helping someone transition into a new role or stage of life. Is it possible that a simple ceremony to celebrate a woman’s Pause Day could give her the added strength and courage she needs to become a vocal, instrumental, participatory elder in a society of people relegated to quietly growing older?

Menopause as a Return to the Beauty of Childhood

If menopause is puberty in reverse, then Pause Day can also signal an undoing of so many of the habits of adulthood.

Most especially, I think of the habit of needing to be seen as intelligent. Wisdom is different from knowledge and, paradoxically, wisdom is only gained when we give up our desire to know things.

I am not yet to my Pause Day, but I am seeing this transitional time of my life as one where I seek to return to the innocence of my childhood. I am shaking off what I’ve come to decide is true, ideas that worked for me or held me up as an adult, and I am inviting in fresh curiosity and openness. I want this time of life to reawaken awe and inspiration within me, so that I, like my inner child, can be captivated for hours by the jumping of the grasshoppers as I run—okay, maybe stroll gently—through the tall grass.

Let us learn to embrace the changes within ourselves by allowing a return to home; to our innate nature, to joy, to ease. So much about adulthood makes us hard and unyielding. This time, this pause, is an opportunity to reveal our truest selves in a way that our identities in adulthood would never have allowed.

Yes, we may be losing our hair or our sex drive, and we are fanning each other down during hot flashes, as any good friend would do. Yes, it is a challenge to live inside a body we once knew well that now feels like a complete stranger. But why wouldn’t this change be uncomfortable—we are metamorphosing into a whole new kind of being!

As a culture, we must learn to honor this transition, not ignore or downplay it. And if the culture won’t lead this movement, well, then, let us women do it. It’s what we were born to do.

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