If you have ovaries and a uterus, and are somewhere in your late 40s or beyond, you will have a body-informed epiphany. It might be barely noticeable. It may stop you in your tracks. You can see when it happens to and for Linda, Bridget Christie’s heroine in “The Change,” because it slaps her upside the head.
The wife and mother of two is clearing plates and trash after her 50th birthday party, planned by a husband who enjoys all the attention and didn't do any work to make it possible. She even had to bake her own cake. As she cleans house, Linda quietly taps a button on her digital watch to time each chore, recording the tally in a journal once it is completed.
Then she opens an upper cabinet and is pummeled in the noggin by an avalanche of unmatched Tupperware – someone else’s task left for her to do. But the epiphanic ding! hits her as she’s smoothing a Band-Aid onto her forehead wound, and considers the superhero that decorates it: the Incredible Hulk.
The Hulk, she writes in her goodbye note to her husband Steve (Omid Djalili), is the only menopausal role model in the history of TV and film. He reads this to his mother over the phone after Linda has roared away on her old motorcycle.
“It's not funny, Mum!” Steve said. “I can't find the towels!”
Oh, but it is funny – because it’s true. Dr. Bruce Banner is not a physician, let alone a gynecologist. Still, being that he is a man of science and completely fictional, he may be able to provide the correct and most basic medical definition of menopause, in that it is a point in time 12 months after a woman's last period.
Symptoms occurring in the years leading up to that point are referred to by the National Institute on Aging as perimenopause or menopausal transition, which typically occurs between the ages of 45 and 55.
But that doesn’t explain the purported 34 symptoms menopause is thought to encompass, the most Hulk-ish of which make you feel crazy. Maybe not the night sweats or hot flashes, but certainly the brain fog that can temporarily steal your verbal acuity and the mood swings that careen a woman from la-dee-dah to rage blackout in seconds flat, sometimes without warning or reason.
In Christie’s Linda, we have a more relatable menopausal role model than the Hulk, not to mention one that isn't a radioactive tone of chartreuse. Christie’s brain drops common descriptors ( “Can you get the cake knife thing please? It’s flat . . . it’s a triangle . . . you cut a slice of cake with it and it catches it underneath. The cake knife thing!) She flips out at her checked-out doctor, swallows too loudly and chafes at being dismissed by her family. Then she embraces another common symptom of menopause – not giving a flying bleep about any of it.
Instead of exploding at her negligent loved ones, she breaks free by taking off on her motorcycle to the Forest of Dean in Gloucestershire. The way she sees it, she’s earned her sabbatical from domestic servitude. All the scribblings in her journals, she tells Steve, are a full accounting of her invisible labor over their many years of marriage. She’s simply reclaiming some of her time. Hulk smash.
One year after its U.K. debut “The Change” has arrived stateside on Britbox, and in time to join a celebrity-endorsed effort to center menopause in conversation.
“Beverly Hills 90120” star Jennie Garth made headlines earlier this month when she candidly called menopause “a daily minefield, both physically & mentally” in an Instagram post. This accompanied a video montage of Garth vigorously strength training.
“[R]ecently it just feels like my body is fighting against me at times. I forget that there’s so much happening inside me, causing so many changes, that of course i’m not always gonna feel or be able to perform how I’d like to (or expect to),” she posted. “I have to remind myself to give myself some grace! I’m doing the best I can & that makes me feel a little better.”
In May, Halle Berry lobbied for the Advancing Menopause Care and Mid-Life Women’s Health Act, a $275 million bipartisan Senate bill aimed at increasing clinical research into menopause.
“The shame has to be taken out of menopause. We have to talk about this very normal part of our life that happens,” Berry said. “Our doctors can't even say the word to us, let alone walk us through the journey of what our menopausal years look like.”
They join Gayle King, Drew Barrymore, Michelle Obama, Naomi Watts and others in publicly discussing their menopause experiences and how little information they were given about this stage of a woman’s life and health.
This increased candor about “the change” has somewhat eased our comfort with talking about menopause. As for why it’s surging right now, we might credit a few related forces. One related to Generation X, which ushered sex positivity into the mainstream, being the main cohort slogging through it. By reputation Gen X is prone to share our displeasure about issues our predecessors silently endured, and insist something be done about it.
The other is that mitigating menopause is highly marketable. Women going through menopause in 2024 have access to a slew of products to treat it, much of it bunk, that our foremothers didn’t. The Telegraph cites a report by Grand View Research saying the global menopause supplement industry is expected to reach $22.7 billion by 2028.
Also, and this is important, there is so much for menopausal women to be enraged about, as JD Vance so generously reminds us, and a woman presidential candidate's campaign to support is constructive means of healthily expressing that anger.
Postmenopausal, have two children, have two grandchildren, no cats, one dog, but most importantly 100% pissed off. First and foremost, I'm a woman and I'm not letting this shit happen to my girls! I'm voting Harris Walz. pic.twitter.com/dUDbHDgmWz
— Knoxville Blue-- Susie G. (@EHansche1) August 15, 2024
In any case, we're lucky to have forums and figures inspiring approaches to menopause that are empowering as opposed to dire. Around the same time as her social media post, Garth devoted a full episode of her podcast “I Choose Me” to a discussion about destigmatizing menopause with Dr. Mary Claire Haver.
Meanwhile, Miranda July just released what the New York Times hails as “the First Great Perimenopause Novel” featuring a nameless, 45-year-old protagonist who, like Linda, decides it’s high time to take a leave of absence from her family. But while Linda’s adventure is chaste, even after she befriends a handsome, cave-dwelling hermit called Pig Man (Jerome Flynn) who also cuts ties with his old life, July’s woman-on-the-verge shifts to prioritizing sexual and existential pleasure.
It wasn’t very long ago that TV shows started acknowledging menopause and other aging realities for women thoughtfully, approaching it not as an ending but a transformation.
Women creators, of course, are often the ones taking up that charge, as Pamela Adlon did in “Better Things,” along with Phoebe Waller-Bridge, who wrote a bar-setting monologue in the second season of “Fleabag,” delivered by Kristin Scott Thomas. In her reckoning, menopause is an explosive release of the pain and strength women carry through our lives.
"And then, just when you feel you're making peace with it, what happens? The menopause comes, the f**king menopause comes, and it is the most wonderful f**king thing in the world,” Thomas’ character Belinda says. “And yes, your entire pelvic floor crumbles and you get f**king hot and no one cares. But then — you're free! No longer a slave, no longer a machine with parts. You're just a person, in business."
Passages like this and the rare, beautiful episodes about menopause (see: the “Better Things” episode titled “Show Me the Magic”) are encapsulated inspirations. “The Change” makes Linda’s shifting sense of who she is a starting point that radiates outward to apply to her new community, too.
Linda refuses to accept an older man’s sexual harassment, but she doesn’t ostracize him either. The same goes for the right-wing radio host in the local café railing against feminists and immigrants while working in close quarters with a Black woman who both intimidates and mesmerizes him. And the old growth forest that is enmeshed in the town’s identity is under threat.
Change, and “The Change” are about life’s inevitabilities and learning to accept that some things slip beyond our grasp.
This includes temporary losses, as in when one character admits she couldn’t remember what a toe was called (“I called it a foot finger,” she says), and more permanent ones.
In a 2021 essay, Christie wrote that the trick is to “front it out,” which is what she’s doing with her comedy. “Once we start seeing ourselves in film, TV and books,” she wrote, “the less afraid we will be and the more we will see that menopausal and postmenopausal women are actually some of the coolest, most powerful, wise and inspiring people on the planet.”
Watching Linda remember who she is helps, adding to a conversation that is getting broader, louder, and, in Christie’s interpretation, more joyful.
All episodes of “The Change” are available on BritBox.
