You, Menopause and Mom
The Conversation Legacy We Are Missing Around Midlife
If you’re new here, hello, and if you’ve been fanning yourself with us for a while, you know that we are all about translating lifestyle research into weekly evidence-based insights to empower a thriving menopause journey.
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Today we’re exploring something deeply personal and quietly universal.
You…menopause…and your mom.
Or your daughter.
Or the maternal figures in your life…or the lives you touch.
Because midlife isn’t just an individual experience.
It’s relational.
Generational.
Inherited.
Observed.
Modeled.
Sometimes spoken.
Often silently absorbed.
And honestly? This month feels deeply personal because it sits where my own experience intersects with things I care deeply about: menopause education, community, storytelling, and helping women feel supported in their best selves, especially in midlife.
In fact, this month’s theme emerged from a conversation after one of my Menopause 101: Puberty the Remix! presentations.
We had been talking about menopause as a natural life progression, and one that reshapes identity, relationships, emotions, and how we experience ourselves in the world.
And afterward, someone suggested:
“You should do a mother-daughter follow-up session.”
At first, it sounded like just a lovely programming idea.
But the more I sat with it, the more profound I felt it could be.
Because I realized:
So many of us know remarkably little about the menopause experiences of the women who came before us.
Because the conversation likely never happened.
And that realization sent me searching for research around intergenerational menopause communication, storytelling, and shared experience. Which led me to this fascinating study on menopause legacies and the recording and sharing of menopause experiences across generations.
One thing this research makes incredibly clear:
Menopause is not just about what happens in the body.
It’s about how the experience of menopause becomes meaningful through family, community, culture, and story. We make meaning of and through menopause socially, emotionally, and existentially.
Which means this newsletter isn’t simply about “having the menopause talk.”
It’s about conversations that reclaim:
context
preparation
intergenerational wisdom
identity
and a more positive, healthy mindset around menopause and midlife
Because for too many women, the usual silence around menopause has created (and continues to create) uncertainty, confusion, disconnection, and often the feeling that it all came “out of nowhere.”
Kicking off with this week and Mother’s Day, we’re beginning to explore what can happen when we change that.
And honestly?
This evolving conversation is also shaping the next chapter of Changing with the Change, my menopause mindset and empowerment coaching community.
Because the more we explore the research, the clearer it becomes.
We don’t just need more menopause information.
We need more spaces to process, discuss, normalize, and collectively make meaning of this phase of life together.
Which is exactly what we hope to build with you starting with those closest to you this month:
Not just another menopause discussion.
A more connected, intergenerational, community-supported menopause culture.
One conversation at a time.
Together, throughout May, we’ll explore how we can begin to dissolve silence and shame through storytelling and shared experience and how conversation itself can positively shape the experience of midlife.
Because conversations around menopause matter far more than I think we realize.
In this edition, we’re exploring:
Going beyond being medicalized and managed to possibility and humanity
How getting practical means getting personal
Your challenge to invite or share wisdom in conversation
How mother-daughter converstions can begin reshaping menopause culture and creating a new cultural legacy
Holistic and Human vs Medicalized and “Managed”
Too often, menopause gets reduced to:
hormone levels and hot flashes
“symptoms,” treatment decisions and things to “fix”
But this study pushes back against that heavily medicalized view and reminds us that menopause is also:
mental and emotional
identity and sense-making
mindsets and inherited beliefs
relationships and community
society and culture
legacy, history and future
Or, in HOT FLASH! The Newsletter language:
Menopause is a holistic human experience.
This month’s research highlights concerns I have been vocal about, namely that the modern conversations around menopause too often medicalize it as “hormonal deficiency” or a “diagnosis,” focusing on decline and intervention in ways that only increase stigma and apprehension around this natural life stage.
And honestly? Many women feel that.
And that pressure to:
stay youthful
stay sexually unchanged
stay endlessly productive
stay unaffected
can make reaching menopause age feel less like a natural life stage…
and more like a test you’re somehow failing.
But this research (and Changing with the Change) offers a different possibility:
What if menopause isn’t something to “overcome” or “manage”…
but something we learn to understand (and maybe even celebrate?) with and through each other?
Getting Practical and Personal in Community
This research isn’t just asking us to learn more about menopause. It’s inviting us to rethink how we relate to it together.
And honestly? That’s why community-centered coaching spaces like Changing with the Change have felt so critical to me during menopause.
Because there is something profoundly healing about witnessing how each of us navigate this transition differently with: honesty, humor, creativity, resilience, and humanity.
And in this season of Changing with the Change, we especially welcome women joining together: mothers and daughters, aunties and nieces, chosen family, close friends across generations.
Because:
You were never supposed to figure this out entirely alone
Humans make meaning socially. Looking to other women for perspective is far from weakness, it’s wisdom.Your menopause experience has always existed within a larger story
Whether you realize it or not, family narratives, cultural messaging, and observed experiences shape how this phase feels.Silence shapes experience too
What wasn’t said can impact us just as deeply as what was.Your experience deserves more than a medical lens alone
Menopause is physical, yes but also emotional, psychological, social, existential and deeply human.You get to become part of the new legacy
Even if no one prepared you or you don’t feel prepared, you can be a part of ensuring more of us feel informed, connected, and supported.
(From Your Changing with the Change Coach)
This week, we’re practicing intergenerational curiosity.
Choose your direction:
INVITE WISDOM: Ask your mother, aunt, mentor, older friend, or another trusted woman:
“What was this phase like for you?”
“What do you wish someone had told you?”
“What surprised you most?”
“What do you understand now that you didn’t then?”
OR
SHARE WISDOM: Share something about your own experience with a daughter, younger friend, mentee, niece, colleague, or another woman coming behind you…
…even if she didn’t ask.
Maybe it sounds like:
“No one told me this part.”
“I wish I had known this earlier.”
“There are beautiful parts too.”
If this edition sparked something in you, consider joining Changing with the Change together with your mom, your daughter, a maternal figure, or another important woman in your life (or email me to share a private session or group).
Because this isn’t only about personal support. It’s about contributing to a larger shift toward openness, preparation, toward intergenerational understanding, and toward a future where menopause is no longer navigated in silence.
Every shared conversation can create a new cultural legacy.
And honestly?
That may be one of the most meaningful things we can leave behind.
Filling the Gap and the Missing Layer
This month’s research explains: we don’t just want menopause “tips.”
We want perspective.
And that may just be the missing layer in modern menopause conversations.
Because the real opportunity isn’t just improving menopause education.
It’s creating an entirely new menopause culture.
One where:
women are prepared instead of blindsided,
conversations happen earlier,
support feels relational instead of isolating,
and menopause wisdom becomes something intentionally shared, not accidentally discovered.
That’s legacy work. And that’s an exciting prospect to me.
Because every conversation we start now…
every story we share…
every moment of honesty…
…helps create a future where women enter midlife:
more informed
more prepared
more connected
more supported
and fully empowered
And throughout the rest of May, we’re going to keep building on this together.
Because this month is not just about discussing menopause.:
It’s about helping create the menopause conversations many of us never had.
And something larger…
…the intentional redesign of how menopause is understood, shared, supported, and passed forward.
In the next few weeks, we’ll continue exploring:
how inherited stories shape expectations,
how silence impacts experience,
how community changes meaning,
and how we create healthier narratives around midlife, aging, identity, and intimacy together.
And if you’re looking for a place to more actively contribute to that shift, Changing with the Change was built as a community-centered space for exactly this kind of exploration.
This month, we especially invite mothers, daughters, and maternal figures to participate together.
Because changing with the change becomes even more powerful when it transforms not just individual experiences but all of us, as we share our stories in conversation and community.
And that?
That’s a legacy worth contributing to.
Drop us a line if you start one of these conversations or begin creating your own menopause legacy. Your stories fuel the HOT FLASH! The Newsletter community and help close the research-practice gap.