Evelyn stared into the empty ice cream carton and wondered where the smiling girl in the school pictures had gone.

I am not going to give you disclaimers about what you can expect to find in my story. I went through menopause recently and find I don't much care about anyone's sensibilities anymore. I am called BadSquirrel for a reason. Considering how incredibly rude and grouchy I have become, I expect all of you to be extremely grateful to the QMBG (Queen Mother Bitch Goddess for those of you who haven't kept up) for all of the good warm fuzzy bits of my story. If you like it, it's because she went through it and took out all the really disturbing parts and made me behave.

Our mothers were largely silent about what happened to them as they passed through this midlife change. But a new generation of women has already started to break the wall of silence.

I call the Change of Life 'Orchids' because menopause is such an ugly word. It's got men in it for goddsakes.

You can do this (this thing, where your body will cease to produce hormones and your skin, hair, muscles and bones... Basically every part of you will notice, go into withdrawals, and stage a coup). Be prepared for this mentally, and you'll own this 'thing.

When I was suddenly thrust into what everyone calls menopause (Orchids) earlier than my body planned, I decided someone needed to take charge on so many levels. It was time to not only change the vernacular, but to speak up and say 'Hey! This isn't an old lady's disease! We aren't old! We are strong and dammit, we are beautiful and sexy too!

Sorrow is not itself evidence of maladjustment but of the adjustment process itself.

[Hot flashes] are the prime cause of sleep disruption in women over age fifty, Suzanne Woodward of Wayne State University School of Medicine reports. Her studies show that hot flashes in sleep occur about once an hour. Most prompt an arousal of three minutes or longer. Independently of their hot flashes, women who have them still awaken briefly every eight minutes on average. The sleep process dramatically blunts memory for awakenings, Woodward said, and in the morning women seldom realize how poorly they slept. Instead, they often focus on the daytime consequences of poor sleep, which include fatigue, lethargy, mood swings, depression, and irritability. Many women and their doctors, Woodward said, dismiss such symptoms as 'just menopause.' This is a mistake, she suggested, because treatment can reduce or eliminate hot flashes, aid sleep, relieve other symptoms, and improve a woman's quality of life. Treatment also helps keep frequent awakenings from becoming a bad habit that continues after hot flashes subside.

Retirement is the menopause of an employee’s mind and hands.

A woman must wait for her ovaries to die before she can get her rightful personality back. Post-menstrual is the same as pre-menstrual; I am once again what I was before the age of twelve: a female human being who knows that a month has thirty day, not twenty-five, and who can spend every one of them free of the shackles of that defect of body and mind known as femininity.