What Menopause Does to Women’s Brains
I’ve been keeping a Google Doc of all the words my 53-year-old brain hasn’t been able to remember. The list has grown long. It might have grown twice as long, but often I forget the word I’ve forgotten between forgetting it and rushing to the computer to write it down. Next to the missing word in question, I note the description I used instead, such as “the thing that blows” (wind) and “the kind of shirt that’s soft and plaid” (flannel). Some of these Jeopardy-ready descriptions are surprisingly––if accidentally––poetic, such as the time bugs kept smashing against my car’s windshield and I called my partner on the phone to say, “There are so many dead bugs on the … on the … on the piece of glass between me and the world.”
When I couldn’t remember grill, I called it a “cooker thing.” Reincarnation became “that word Buddhists use for the next life.” More recently, my daughter and some of her college friends saw me gussied up for a party and asked where I was going. “It’s uh, you know, a party for …” I stammered. “What is the thing when you’re trying to raise funds?”
“A fundraiser?” her friend said, laughing.
I laughed too, embarrassed by yet another brain fart. But I also worried. Are these the normal perils of a woman’s brain at the beginning of its sixth decade, or am
