For all you youngsters, spring chickens, wet-around-the-ears babies ... you know, you girls in your forties, here's a report about change.

It's about THE Change, and change in general, and points out that the really big changes don't happen at THE Change, but before, during that wonderful period of periods known as "perimenopause".

... the rockiest time isn't age 12, with the flood of hormones associated with the beginning of menstruation, or age 51, the average age of menopause ... It's those years before a woman enters menopause.

"The biggest time for changes for women in terms of behavior and symptoms is in the perimenopause, when estrogen and progesterone fluctuate the most in the female brain," says Brizendine, founder of the Women's Mood and Hormone Clinic at the University of California, San Francisco. "This is when the dialogue between the brain and ovaries begins to run out of fuel, and that may change our reality as we are going through our cycle."

I LOVE the idea of a dialog between the brain and the ovaries and may soon have to do a whole post on this alone ... or a book, maybe.

Oh! Oh! I've got one ...

Q: What do the ovaries say to the brain?

A: We've been asking for a Midol for an hour now, can't uterus?

Sorry about that ...

Change our reality? Yep. Who we are, how we relate to the world ... and it to us ... alters throughout life, but never as dramatically as when our bodies take step off the hormone cliff and begin the drop into oldladyness.

We blame it on menopause, something we're accustomed to viewing as a process, but which is in fact a one time, 24-hour happening. Defined as the single day twelve months after a woman's last menstrual period, it's really nothing but a hot flash in the pan.

Continued ...