Menopause then what?
Second Spring: The Missing Story Between Menopause and Old Age.
Up until a year ago, I had never heard the term Second Spring. I knew menopause, of course and its symptoms: hot flushes, night sweats, brain fog and invisibility. I also know the language of endings, the language of the descent journey. That’s not to say that the process was made any easier by understanding, more that I had lived through peri-menopause, and then menopause and knew what that process had been for me. I had also made the decision to fully embrace the descent and to not take HRT. (A personal decision that was made based on a much longer story, about my journey of initiation through the body, that is too long to share here, but that I might share in another post).
What I had no concept of was what came next. Was it menopause, and then what you disappeared and finally died?
I had never heard anyone describe this next stage of life as a spring. And spring is not decline; it is the time after winter and a time of beginnings.
Spring is a beginning.
I learned that the phrase comes from Traditional Chinese Medicine, where the years after menopause are sometimes described as a Second Spring. Not a return to youth, but a different kind of flowering. A time when the energy once directed towards reproduction can be released into creativity, leadership, wisdom, and service.
When I first encountered the idea, something in me recognised it, as if a small fountain inside me were bubbling up again. Something very spring-like was arising. Instead of my constant preoccupation with death, which had sat with me throughout the menopause years (including one real dance with it), I was beginning to feel a stirring of new life.
Of course I didn’t suddenly feel younger; and it’s not about that. I love being a wannabe crone, and I do still need reading glasses, and my hips ache like crazy if I overdo it, but there is also truth to the fact that life has become easier. I feel more stable, more aligned and a lot more balanced, less reactive. Even though the outer circumstances of my life are still as full-on as ever and, actually, in 2024, with the move back from Australia - very stressful.
Second Spring gave me a term for something I had been sensing inwardly, and I began to wonder whether we are telling the full story about this stage of life.
Even now, much of the conversation around menopause remains focused on the descent part of the journey. It’s like we have forgotten that there is a transition from menopause into something different. It's a transition, albeit sometimes a long one, but still a transition, not a destination.
If menopause is not the end of the story, then what comes after? Where are the stories for what comes next? Maybe it’s the absence of the story that is part of the challenge. Because I don’t accept that it’s menopause and then death, with nothing of meaning in between.
Where are the stories that help us understand this season not as an ending, but as a becoming? When we don’t have a map, it can be easy to assume we have arrived, and, of course, without naming it, we struggle to recognise what is happening within us.
I think that, as a Second Spring woman (I hesitate, at this stage, to call myself an elder), we need to speak openly about this phase of life so that others are not left trying to navigate it alone.
When I speak to women in my circles in their fifties, sixties, and seventies, I hear something I perhaps didn’t expect: instead of the constant preoccupation with youth, there is a growing sense of clarity and a desire for truth-telling. But also and this is the part that is so important a real desire to continue to contribute meaningfully.
The energy that was once directed towards proving, striving and caring for others in particular ways begins to reorganise itself. It begins to ask “What am I here to give?”
And perhaps this is where the language of Second Spring becomes so useful. Because spring is not simply a season of growth, it is a season of emergence.
Things that have been hidden underground begin to show themselves. The bulbs do not become something new. They become more fully what they already are. And I wonder if that is what I am witnessing in the women around me. Not reinvention or a desperate attempt to reclaim youth. Not even a final push to prove themselves. Rather, a shedding of expectations and a willingness to drop the performance and begin genuinely inhabiting their own lives.
Our culture is obsessed with personal growth, and we are encouraged to optimise, heal, reinvent, and become the best version of ourselves. And whilst there is value in that, I find myself wondering whether the invitation of the Second Spring might be something different.
What if this season of life is not asking us to become more optimised but instead asking us to become more generative? Not in the biological sense but in the ecological sense. So the question changes from “What can I achieve?” to “What can I help to grow?” I don’t think it's any coincidence that many women of this age become gardeners.
I don’t yet have answers to these questions, but I do think that asking them matters. Because if menopause is a threshold and not a destination, then perhaps the task before us is not simply to survive the crossing, but also to discover what waits on the other side.