Happy belated Menopause New Year, Breaches! October 18 is World Menopause Awareness day, and we’ve decided to start celebrating Menopause New Year on that day. We’re still making it up, so send us your ideas! This year we admired another year of growth in menopause. Laura finished a job and started a new one, teaching business classes at Shoreline Community College, guiding people as they prepare for new careers. Kate quit a 30 year teaching career and is subbing while we expand Launch Your Pause. We both have launched our kids off to college and are settling/wandering into a new era of parenting. We also are setting some intentions for this new year of Menopause. After our first menopause movie screening this past year, one thing we realized is that people in menopause need much more time and space to share their widely varying experiences, to tell our stories and share resources. So this year we’re focused on ways to bring more people together, formally through support groups and informally through community cafes, Menopause Matters gatherings. We’re committed to building engaging, accessible programming. Stay tuned! We’ve also been playing with names for this time of life, like what do you call a group of people in menopause? Katie Spataro shared a recent Radiolab story about the handful of animals who have post-reproductive lives. Without giving too much away, let’s just say that Orca whales are really living their best menopausal lives. So, Kate is working with Breaches as a collective noun for people in Menopause. It conjures a joyful image of magnificent middle-aged females leaping out of the water and splashing hard because it feels good, because they’re confident in their wisdom and strength and connections, and because it sounds close to another B-word that we like to call our friends. One of our favorite breaches, Jen, suggested “Breach New Heights”, so that’s also an intention for us in this new year or Menopause, new heights of joy and play, heights to be able to see how much we have grown and how much we know. Thank you for all of your salty, shiny brilliance and bravery this year, especially this year. Maybe we can find some inflatable orca costumes and meet up at a protest…