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Kintsugi

Otherwise known as menopause

Laura DeMaisBerg
Crow’s Feet: Life As We Age
4 min readDec 18, 2024

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Author Photo Joan Englemeyer Art

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.

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Crow’s Feet: Life As We Age
Crow’s Feet: Life As We Age

Published in Crow’s Feet: Life As We Age

“The longer I live, the more beautiful life becomes.” (Frank Lloyd Wright) Non-fiction pieces, personal essays and occasional poems that explore how we feel about how we age and offer tips for getting the most out of life.

Laura DeMaisBerg
Laura DeMaisBerg

Written by Laura DeMaisBerg

I write about seemingly mundane experiences that are relatable because we are human. Subscribe on Substack to get my stories directly: lauramc.sub-stack.com

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