I am a nearly middle-aged woman (provided I live to 100 - ). I manage a bar in Brooklyn, teach yoga, play the bass, write and perform with the best group of women in New York, love my animals (a cat, two dogs and a fish) and Buddhist philosophy and I'm the mother of two incredible, beautiful, grown children who, in the past year, have moved into their own places and left me to ponder my self and my life.

Let me begin here - four years ago...

I had my last real period on March 18th, 2003. Yep. My mom said she went through "The Change" at 42. Her period "just stopped". No symptoms. Not a one, according to her. I guess all those years when she would come home from work and retreat immediately into her bedroom with a pack of Benson & Hedges 100's and a cup of coffee and sit, in a cloud of smoke, watching reruns of "Little House On The Prairie" don't count. My two kids and my nephews used to refer to her, at the time, as Grambo. No symptoms.

I remember distinctly the last time I bled. I actually knew that it was the last time. I don't know how, but I did. I remember looking down at the piddly little offering my body forced onto the pad thinking, "this is it". Oddly enough, I still have the diary I kept in the 8th grade and one of the 5 or 6 entries is titled "This Girl Is A Woman Now." I got my period on March 18th, 1971. Exactly, exactly, exactly 32 years later, to the day, it stopped. I wonder how many women that happens to but they just don't have the information recorded to remind them.

I was, if they were all telling the truth, the last of all my girlfriends to get my period. I was an athlete so, in retrospect, it seems to make sense. However, I was incredibly envious of my friends and their "cramps" and "pads" and "sore boobs". I faked having my period for about a year or so. If my friends had payed closer attention, they might have realized that I bled 19 days a month and had cramps all the time. I just wanted to belong.

So, four years ago I started having hot flashes. Nice ones. Ones that gave me a healthy looking flush every half hour or so. My skin looked all glow-y and Doris Day-ish. Over the past few years they've morphed back and forth from Doris Day flashes to the Satchmo kind...hanky and all. My sister gets them so bad that she carries around sheets of Bounty in her bag. She works with small children in a local school and recently, mid-flash, one of her kids said, "Miss Lori, what's wrong with your face?" My sister said she humored the kid with a piece of candy but what she wanted to say was, "Nothing asshole, what's wrong with yours?"