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Menopause is so hot these days.

All the cool kids are doing it, a coincidence that marks the last time I will be counted as either cool or a kid.

I suppose I'm not, technically, in menopause. I'm in the preemptive stages -- something I have learned is called "perimenopause," from the Greek word "peri," meaning "around," and "menopause," meaning "taking a pause on all men."

It's great to be in perimenopause at the same time as everyone else is talking about it -- when podcasters and TikTokers, influencers and actresses all are angling to throw their two cents in on the topic.

Look, don't get me wrong, I love being menstrual. There's not much finer than spending a sixth of every month whipsawing back and forth between angry and weepy and bloated and hungry and crampy and mean. If anything can hold a candle to it, though, it's perimenopause.

The great thing about perimenopause is that you get the best of both worlds. You're still having PMS and periods and all the other swell stuff that comes along with it, but you also get an exciting bonus of a roller coaster ride of hormones to boot.

There are the hair changes and the mood swings and the acne: You're like a teenager again, but this time with wrinkles and the sound of the Grim Reaper's foot impatiently tap, tap, tapping in your ear.

I'm not saying I'm old now, but it's tough to argue you're still in the bloom of youth when Mother Nature has looked you over and thought to herself, "Yeah, I think she's about done with that vagina anyway."

It occurs to me at this point in the column that there are some men who might like to excuse themselves to get a nice cup of coffee.

And that's fine with me, because this is about the stage in my rant when I point out that if something even remotely like perimenopause or menopause happened to men, it would be a global emergency requiring the immediate and combined investigative efforts of the entire pharmaceutical industry and the world's finest scientists. It would be a four-alarm fire. It would be Defcon 1 (or Defcon 4, whatever's worse).

I hate to be that kind of woman, the one who complains about men all the time -- I really do -- but can you imagine the reaction if almost every male of the species, upon reaching middle age, watched his testicles shrink to the size of grapes, spent each night awake staring at his snoring spouse and suffered random, frequent bouts of feeling as if he'd been doused in gasoline and had a lit cigarette thrown at his face?

If you've ever encountered a man with a bad head cold, you know about how that would go.

Please don't get me wrong. It's not men's fault that women go through menopause. It's women's fault for hiding it.

We're waking up now, though, and smelling the bioidentical hormones. We're beginning to talk about menopause -- a subject that most of us spent our entire lives hearing nothing about. In fact, I didn't even know the word "perimenopause" existed until a couple of years ago. Women are talking to each other and to their doctors, and they're not taking "oh, it's just menopause" as a final answer as often as they used to.

I'm no expert, but I haven't heard about any magic pills, a drug or therapy that solves all the problems of menopause without imparting any risk of serious side effects.

But one day, maybe there could be. If they can create an injection that solves obesity, then drug manufacturers certainly can envision the potential profits from a medication that half the world's population might take.

Either way, it'll be too late for me. I'm in the car with Thelma and Louise, heading over the cliff at Perimenopause Falls.

But it's never too late (or too early) to reduce the shame around menopause -- to let women know that just because their uterus has permanently erected a "no vacancies" sign doesn't mean their life, or their femininity, is over. Ideally, we will spend decades of our lives in this new stage, so we should probably get comfortable with it.

Maybe it'll eventually be no big deal, not embarrassing, not uncomfortable, just a thing that happens to almost everyone who shares two X chromosomes.

I mean, hey, a cool kid can dream, can't she?

To learn more about Georgia Garvey, visit GeorgiaGarvey.com.

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