Now, let me start with saying I never want to be fourteen again. As many sleepless nights as I have filled with hot flashes and hormonal headaches, nothing will make fourteen sound like a place I want to be.

I am currently the observer of my own fourteen year old daughter’s world and I am consistently struck by what a cold, confusing, heartbreakingly vulnerable place it can be. I watch from the sidelines as another sleepover occurs without an invite but with a barrage of late night snapchat “streaks” that remind my daughter she didn’t make the cut. I sit in the stands and watch the clique rearrange the team so that at each social pause they can create a nice tight circle that excludes the others and lends perfectly to whispered comments and shared secrets. Schoolhouse Rock told me that three was a magic number, but now I know it’s deadly when coupled with fourteen. Three is often two and one extra, just in case, and they know who they are.

I remember fourteen with no fondness myself. Awkward, both socially and physically, I struggled to find my place in the Lord of the Flies-like set up of my own mid-size public middle-school. Grasping on to a few friends who seemed almost as traumatized as I was, I tried the best I could to figure out who I was within a frightening sea of conformity and judgement. We all did whatever we could to blend in and survive. I wish we had evolved since then.

Now, I feel for my Gen Z daughter. No sleepover goes unrecorded and unreported. No hangout is complete without a filter and a caption. No picture on Instagram is without unsolicited comments or critique.

With the magic of childhood dying down, Santa is no longer eagerly tracked on the computer Christmas Eve and Fairy Tales are only found in books, fourteen brings a new belief: the narrative of who we are within our peer group is accurate and definitive. The belief that we are not good enough, wealthy enough, smart enough or pretty enough sinks in and we add it to our list. Painful comparison forces a new hierarchy, one that becomes well known and used into adulthood. We begin to figure out who we are by what others say about us. And in this day and age of social media, they say a lot.

Now, almost 50, with fourteen long behind me, I am amazed at how still fresh are the wounds. Sitting with my daughter, I feel her pain. I feel my pain. I want to hold her and protect her. The fourteen year old in me knows what she is feeling. And while I am on the other side of life, I realize I am just now, at almost 50, starting to untangle my own web of opinions, beliefs and narratives that my own fourteen year old self absorbed.

I try the empowerment speech with her: “Be true to yourself,” “Don’t let it bother you,” “It will all get better.” They fall on deaf fourteen year old ears. She can only see that she is not in the pictures and she feels left out and abandoned by those that, right now, are her world. Truth is, I still haven’t figured it all out – I am not even close. I still don’t know who I am, when I am not invited to a meeting I think I should have been, it still bothers me and I wonder if they “like me” and I know from experience that sometimes it gets better and sometimes it gets really, really worse. I want to take away her fourteen year old pain, I want to absorb it and deal with it for her and hand it back neatly folded. But I can’t.

The mom in me wants to run to the other moms and ask why – why do we let this happen when we know how we all felt going through it? I want to get angry and be protective and find someone or something to blame. But I don’t. What I do know is that is not how life works and this will solve nothing. Inclusion and diversity and flattening the pyramid is hard work and even the adults haven’t figured it out yet. So I sit with my fourteen year old and try to let my own fourteen year old be there too. I don’t promise her it will get better, I don’t try to fix it. I just love her and accept her for who she is, right this moment. In the end, isn’t that what we are all looking for?

Hot flashes. WTH? I am getting AARP material in the mail like my high school senior gets marketing from colleges, but where is the brochure that says “welcome to being a woman in midlife, here are a few things you can expect…” We need a “what to expect” book for perimenopause. What to expect when your perimenopausal. Now that’s one worth an Audible credit.

No one tells you what to expect in midlife. This may be partly due to a culture that just doesn’t value middle aged women and still treats menopause and everything related to it as something that should trigger shame and embarrassment (and therefore should be discussed in huddled whispers only with other middle-aged women) and partly because the experience of midlife is so personal and unique.

What even is a hot flash/hot flush (the fancy phrase is vasomotor symptoms)? Generally experienced in the years leading up to menopause, a hot flash is defined as a sudden feeling of heat or warmth not caused by weather. In other words, you feel like it is Georgia in August when you are in your Iowa kitchen in November. But even that definition is limiting.

Statistics tell us that 75-85% of women will experience the during the years leading up to menopause and a lucky few can go on to have them for years (and years) after that. But one no one tells you is that each body will experience them differently. The cliché of the woman wanting to rip off her clothes and jump in a snow pile is only ONE way a woman might experience them. I have spoken with women who experience them as more like a high fever, as a wave of nausea accompanied by heat, profusely sweating or just a blinding headache. And night sweats? Just a hot flash at night. And the really, really fun thing is you have no control over when, where and how often they occur.

Science still has yet to figure out why they happen. The current reigning theory is that when estrogen levels fluctuate, your hippocampus (the gland that regulates your temperature) tells your body you are too hot. This triggers your body to try to cool you off via sweating, elevating your heart rate and giving you a “flush” – an opening of the surface blood vessels in an attempt to cool you off. Average time (everything is an average because we vary so greatly) is 4 minutes, with a span of 30 seconds to 10 minutes. And in one study the average amount of hot flashes experienced in a day was 17. The average time this perimenopausal indicator lasts is two years. A study published this year even linked hot flash frequency with earlier experience of abuse and neglect! And Hot flashes and menopausal symptoms in general are very real and can be debilitating for some women.

The first thing to do is trust the experiences you are having within your body. Tuning into your perimenopausal indicators is the first step in befriending your midlife self and finding ways for better self-care and compassion. I have heard nightmare stories about unsupportive general practitioners and OB-GYNs who have put doubt into women about their own experience, inner wisdom and sanity. While a blood test might tell you perimenopause is indeed the culprit, it might not. Trust YOUR experiences.

Do your own research. A quick google search for hot flash treatment yielded 27 MILLION results. You will find herbs, pharmaceuticals, teas, hypnosis, breath work and several other types of interventions available. Talk to other women, talk to your ob-gyn, but do your homework. Don’t do something just because it worked on your friend Bev. Research first and tune in to your own body for guidance. Chart your hot flashes. Are they so bothersome you need relief? If yes, ok, note this and research options. If no, then ok, note that as well and maybe devise strategies to cope with this new reality. Seek out what will fit you and your lifestyle and help you be your best self now. Embracing this time in life as one of self- discovery and developing patience with the process can help you navigate the low moments (and there will be low moments).

Love yourself through this. This is a tough one for me. I want to crawl out of my skin when I feel a flush and then I get angry when another is right behind it, leaving me feeling out of control and helpless. I sometimes feel that my body is betraying me and there is nothing I can do about it. I then have to talk myself down and realize that I need to tune in, not turn off in order to navigate this all with sanity.

My strategy is to eat as well as I can, try to reduce stress (again, a tough one in midlife), continue to exercise regularly and try to stay present with myself and compassionate with my body when I have them. Nighttime can be awful as it is a series of sleepless hours tossing and turning with covers on, covers off, but I stay in bed and try to find ways to relax and fall back to sleep. I also try not to get in that space of feeling like I am totally alone in this.

This is why I am committed to talking about my experience and trying to get others to talk about theirs so we can support an empower each other. To me, this is true freedom in midlife. I will not suffer in silence and I don’t want anyone else to as well. We need to accept this time in life with wisdom, compassion and love, not with a sense that we are old mares ready for pasture. We need to resist the cultural expectation to be embarrassed by the physical indications that our hormones are doing just what they are supposed to and embrace the end of our reproductive years as a natural stage in life, not one to be loathed, embarrassed by or feared. Are they “power surges”? Perhaps. Are they enjoyable? No. Are they part of the reality of the midlife transition? For many of us, yes. Are you alone in your experience? Abso-freaking-lutely not.

Stay strong. Stay centered. Stay healthy.