Member-only story
Kintsugi
Otherwise known as menopause
I am 56 years old. I am surrounded by a fierce cohort of women just rounding the curve from middle age to menopause. I can’t track the semantics of age groups any more. I’m never sure if I’m Gen X or Gen Y. I confuse Millennials with Gen Zers. And what, honestly, is middle age? I used to think it was my late 30s and early 40s, but the other day, when I went in for a thyroid scan, the tech asked me if there was any chance I might be pregnant.
“I’m 56!” I exclaimed, naively thinking that she thought I looked young enough to be pregnant.
“The cut-off for pregnancy now is 55,” the tech told me. “So I always ask women around that age if there is any possibility.”
So maybe I am middle-aged. But it’s just semantics and I feel like I’m past middle-aged. My daughter is twenty. I’m in my 900th career, and shit is changing more significantly than it did in my 30s and 40s.
My peers agree. I can think of ten individual women in their 50s who are close to me — myself and my spouse included — who are experiencing a cracking open of sorts.
The path of the cracking shows up in different ways. One woman wants to make her car into a house and travel all over the country until she finds the perfect place to homestead.