Let me be clear: I hate working out. My idea of a luxurious morning is the smell of coffee and a slow first sip while I read something that makes me think. I prefer to work out my brain at that hour, not my body. But, well. It is what it is.

Tuesdays and Thursdays we train with a man who has somehow convinced a whole crew of other beautiful lunatics to lift weights at 5 a.m. I am a morning person to my core. But heavy iron is a beast when your body hasn’t yet found its way to awake.

So why do I do it? It started as a bribe. For Father’s Day, all the man asked was that I work out with him for one week. One week was enough to build the habit, and the habit carried me into the next week, and the one after that.

And then there is the part my vanity didn’t see coming. It turns out the unsexy iron is doing more for me than any mirror ever could: telling my bones to hold their ground at exactly the age a woman can quietly lose a fifth of her bone density, and rebuilding the muscle that estrogen keeps trying to take back. So when I tell you to pick up something heavy, alongside whatever your doctor says, it isn’t about a smaller dress. It’s about a longer, stronger life.

But the truest reason I drag myself there before dawn is the buddy system, and the women I walk alongside. I cannot ask them to show up for themselves if I won’t show up for me. Holding myself accountable by helping someone else is the only motivation that has ever stuck.

So there I was this morning, mid-lift, catching my reflection. A little smug, a little proud. And somewhere between admiring my own ass and counting reps, I saw it. The meno-pooch.

The old tricks have stopped working. An indulgent vacation used to cost me a week. Now two good dinners and I’m back on the treadmill, trying to outrun my sins.

Here is the part nobody hands you a pamphlet for, so let me be the one. This isn’t willpower. It’s chemistry. As estrogen falls, your body quietly moves its fat from your hips to your middle, and the soft fat under the skin begins turning into the deep kind that wraps your organs. The estrogen that ran the show for thirty years simply clocks out, and your body decides the belly is the new storage unit. So please don’t shame yourself. Your body is changing, not failing. And if you’re feeling some kind of way about the softening, go watch the Middle Eastern belly dancers move their bellies with nothing but pride, and borrow some of it.

Though if I’m honest — and honest is the whole point of this space — my meno-pooch was reading less belly-dancer and more faintly preggo. Which sent me straight to my app, to see exactly how late “late” had gotten for Aunt Flo to show up to the party.

Two months. After a real pregnancy scare just a few months back. The longest she has ever been gone. And for the first time, I stood there wondering: is she ever coming back?

So there I am, squatting and jumping with fifteen pounds in each hand, counting, trying to ignore that my legs are filing for divorce. And what surfaces is every single time I begged this period to leave.

Oh, how we fool ourselves.

Your cycle is the little devil on your shoulder for your whole life. There were the years I prayed, please G-d, not pregnant. Then the years I flipped and begged, please G-d, let the stick show two lines. Then the years I just complained, about her crashing my good vacations with cramps and moods.

And now she is actually leaving, and I am sadder than I expected to be. Because it isn’t only the period going. It’s the end of an era. I am officially on the other side of young. The freakouts are over.

There is good ahead. I know that. But tonight I am nostalgic for the college girl terrified of getting pregnant, and for the woman who couldn’t, and for what it finally meant to see that baby bump: how, for the first time in my life, I felt beautiful because I felt powerful. My superpower was making humans. How could I ever resent the body that made the great loves of my life?

And now I watch my daughters do all the complaining. The cramps, the moods, the cycles. And I want to take their faces in my hands and tell them: oh, loves. Enjoy this. Enjoy the changes, the cycles that remind you you’re alive and female and powerful. Don’t shame the mood swings. Enjoy the whole ride, the highs and the lows, the rages and the tenderness, the enormous range one body can hold.

Because one day she packs up and leaves. And you’ll be surprised, my darlings, by how much you miss her.

Sources & further reading

On lifting heavy for bone and muscle in menopause: Mayo Clinic, “Perimenopause, menopause and… weightlifting?” (newsnetwork.mayoclinic.org), and the systematic review in the Journal of Clinical Medicine, “The Efficacy of Strength Exercises for Reducing the Symptoms of Menopause,” 2023 (mdpi.com).

On the meno-belly and the estrogen-driven fat shift: Dr. Mary Claire Haver, “The Science Behind the Menopause Belly” (thepauselife.com), and University Hospitals, “The Connection Between Menopause & Belly Fat” (uhhospitals.org).

None of this is medical advice — it’s why-this-is-happening context. Take the tests, talk to your doctor.

We tell ourselves it’s admirable — the drive, the provision, the relentlessness. And it is, until the day burnout’s Grim Reaper finally shows up with his staff to collect the tax. Because nobody outruns him forever. Sooner or later the bill for all that go-go-go comes due — and it is usually the heart of the family, not the head of it, who ends up nursing the man through the reckoning.

I’ve watched it up close. My husband sold his dental practice — the thing he had built and bled for — and then promptly freaked out and bought it back. Two years of roller-coaster I white-knuckled right beside him: the screaming, the highs, the gut-dropping lows, the 3 a.m. what have we done. We came out the other side stronger, I’ll give it that. But he learned the hard way what I had been trying to tell him all along: money can only do so much. A big payout means Jack if you have no idea where you’re going and you feel lost in your own life. He wasn’t having a financial crisis. He was having his own Bermuda Triangle of Over-Achievement — he just had a dental practice where I have an empty nest.

But here’s what I never saw coming: the very same notice gets served on us. We just don’t recognize it, because ours doesn’t arrive on company letterhead.

The kids leaving the nest is an early retirement. One we never asked for. One we are nowhere near prepared for. One day you are the CEO, COO, CFO, head chef, and emotional director of a loud, bustling enterprise — and the next, the enterprise quietly… downsizes. Your biggest client just left for college. Your department of one is being restructured by time itself.

And here is the cruel comedy of the mom gig: the pay was always terrible and the awards were essentially nonexistent — but G-d, it never once lacked for purpose. That’s the part nobody warns you about. It was never the workload that defined you. It was the purpose. And purpose does not downsize gracefully.

So what do you do with an early retirement you didn’t choose?

Here’s what I’m learning. There’s a difference between being put out to pasture and being handed an open field. The men in our lives reach for early retirement and discover, three weeks into the golf and the silence, that they were never built to stop — they were built to be aimed at something that matters. Hot mama, we are exactly the same.

The empty nest is not the end of your usefulness. It is the first time in twenty-five years the calendar has enough white space to ask a dangerous, delicious question: what would you build, if the building were finally yours?

So no — I’m not retiring. And neither are you. We’re just, at long last, going to work for ourselves.

This is our time.

She is the one everyone calls when it falls apart. She runs the household and the budget and the calendar and the school fundraiser and, somehow, the emotional weather of three other people — and she makes it look so effortless that no one, not her partner, not her kids, not even her own mother, ever thinks to ask if she’s okay. She’ll apologize for being four minutes late. She would never, in a thousand years, apologize for the load she carries, because she doesn’t even see it as a load. It’s just… her.

You know this woman. You may be reading this as her.

There’s a name for her, and the day I learned it, something in my chest unclenched. The psychologist Dr. Harriet Braiker named her the Type E woman — the one who is Everything to Everyone (except herself).

Here’s the part nobody tells you, and it’s the part that matters most.

Being Type E is not a flaw. It is not weakness, it is not “having no boundaries,” it is not something broken in you that needs fixing. It is, in fact, the exact quality that made everything around you work. The family that runs like a top? You. The business that didn’t fold? You. The friends who always have somewhere soft to land? You. You are the secret sauce — and you’ve been the secret sauce for so long that you’ve made an Olympic event look like a Tuesday.

But there is a difference between being needed and being known. And so many of us have built an entire identity on being needed. Being needed is a hell of a drug. I’ve chased that high myself — I know exactly what it feels like to be indispensable, and exactly how it can quietly stand in for being whole.

Because here’s what happens to the Type E woman at this particular crossroads — the empty nest, the body recalibrating, the new quiet. The very thing that made her indispensable starts to feel like a cage. If you are everything to everyone, what happens when everyone needs you a little less? Who is the woman underneath the function?

That question is not a crisis. I know it can feel like one. It’s an invitation — the first one in years that’s addressed to you.

Naming the pattern is the first crack of light, because you cannot rewire what you cannot see. And now you see it: you were never disorganized, or dramatic, or too much, or not enough. You were Type E — running a setting the whole world rewarded you for, right up until it started costing you yourself.

We are going to talk about how you change that setting. Not by becoming less. By finally aiming all that formidable wiring at the one person who has never once made your list.

You.

Being the put-together one is not what it’s cracked up to be.

Sure, nobody is lining up to be the always-falling-apart one. But is there not some happy medium — some version of a woman who has it mostly handled and is also, occasionally, allowed to come undone? The truth is: no. Well — yes. But for an over-achiever, an over-functioner, “not having it together” is simply not on the menu. There is too much at risk.

How many times have I longed for a breakdown while riding the very edge of one — like a long, tunneled wave, not knowing whether I’d ride it all the way out to freedom or get pummeled into the sand by the demands of family and work? More than I’ll admit here.

So one year, I tried something. For my New Year’s resolution, I named it my Year of Selfishness. The whole point was to take the stigma out of tending to myself. Because my problem has never been not knowing what I need — I know exactly what I need. My problem is the execution. As I’m fond of saying: it’s all about the integration, baby.

Three weeks in, my husband — who is a genuine gem, and I say that without a drop of sarcasm, because his heart is pure — turned to me and said, “Sorry, love. This can’t be your year.”

His own crisis had arrived. He was discovering that the early retirement he’d reached for wasn’t actually what he wanted, and the whole family needed shepherding through it. And just like that — poof — the Year of Selfishness was canceled, and replaced with the far more familiar work of holding everyone else together.

Here is the part I have to be honest about.

There was no argument. No contemplation. He said it almost as an apology — and I had already abandoned the notion before the words left his mouth. He needed me. The girls needed me. Nick can be the rock, the steady, reliable thing that keeps us all standing. But I am the heart of the family.

And if we are really being honest? What would I even have done with that year?

Do I know who I am, what I actually want, if it isn’t to make other people happy? What I know for sure is that I feel most valuable when I am taking care of someone. And as formidable as that job is — as much real purpose as it carries — it also keeps me safely, endlessly busy. Too busy to tackle the terrifying business of myself. Too busy to find the courage those scary, “if I knew I could not fail” desires would demand of me.

Because life is mostly failure, isn’t it? The highs are only high because the wins come rarely — or because they take a long-ass time to form, and then transform.

So now what?

We are all at the dealer’s table, stacking up our chips for the next gamble. And for most of my life, standing just behind the player as the cheerleader, the hype-girl, felt easier than stepping up and placing my own bet.

But here’s the plot twist I never saw coming.

My Year of Selfishness wasn’t canceled. It was only rescheduled — for now. It turns out it arrived with the empty nest. The very season that felt like an early retirement I never asked for is the thing that finally cleared the room. And in this new space, this unfamiliar quiet, I am doing the bravest thing I’ve done in years: transforming my work — my life — into something that actually fits the woman I want to be. Built from my truest, most authentic, most strategic self, in that rare place where passion and exploration finally converge.

The hype-girl is stepping out from behind the player. She’s pulling out a chair. And for the first time, she’s placing her own bet.

This is our time.

I walk into the kitchen and find my senior slumped over her laptop in a posture that says she has been completely defeated by all of it. And in this rare, unguarded moment, she turns to me and asks if I’ll help her with her college essay.

Now. Every piece of advice I have ever offered this child on this subject has fallen on deaf ears. Let me correct that — she hears it just enough to butcher the idea, roll her eyes, and make it abundantly clear that I know nothing. Somehow every teenager who has ever lived assumes they personally invented this stage of life. And hey, I get it — I didn’t grow up in the age of AI. But I do have a master’s degree to prove I’ve got something rattling around up in the noggin.

But who am I? A mom. Her mom.

Anyway. She asked. And anything that child wants, I am a thirsty woman in the desert — I will take the single drop of water, lick it off the ground, and be grateful for it. So off I go, abandoning my own to-do list to score points with the kid. I read it. I gave my advice. And thirty minutes later, here I am, back in exile, tending to my own things again.

But this is how it goes.

And truth be told, I have nothing to complain about. My kids are near-angels — over-achievers who don’t drink, don’t get into trouble. But as I tell my girlfriends: even angels, if they happen to be teenagers, can break your heart. One eye-roll. That’s all it takes.

This morning I woke up to find the dog had fished a tampon wrapper out of the trash. Not mine — my youngest’s. And I stood there thinking what a cruel joke of life it is, that just as their fertile lives begin, mine ends. Just as they are spreading their wings, I am suddenly more mama-tired than I have ever been in my life.

That is the job, though, isn’t it? We raise them precisely so they can fly. But the heartache is real — and coupled with menopause, some days it just feels like I’ve been left behind. A used, barren carcass.

I talk to my friends and we all land in the same place: there are three storms, and they are all making landfall at once. The empty nest. The hot flashes. And the existential one nobody puts on the calendar — is this it?

We are the generation of women who were told we could have it all if we just worked hard enough. Time and wisdom have since taught me what they actually meant: you can have it all, as soon as you give all of yourself away. So we did. We had the babies, and those babies became an extension of us — the purpose, pointing forward. And now? Now what else is there?

Some of us are lucky enough to have partners we genuinely love — which means that, without the kids as distraction, these are supposedly our honeymoon years. But nobody tells you how to recalibrate.

I remember being a new mother, everyone repeating that same little joke — ha, they don’t come with a manual. So we stacked the parenting books, joined the Facebook groups for mom hacks, and figured it out. And here we are, years later, standing at the very same crossroads — just at a different juncture. And it is lonely.

Somehow we are all here — all of us, the everything-for-everyone women — and not one of us has found the path back into herself. Into her own desires. And that fire, that sexpot we used to be, is dimming. We can feel it going. We blame the hormones, the stress, the never-ending list. But secretly? Secretly we are afraid of the real question: that the most rewarding years of our lives may have already left us.

I don’t have a bow to tie on that one yet. But I know I’m not asking it into the dark alone — and neither are you. So let’s ask it out loud, together. That’s exactly what these letters are for.

Let me introduce myself. I’m Solange Jazayeri — mother, lover, friend, hype-girl, cheerleader, bottom-of-the-shared-bottle counselor. You get it. I’m here for you. I’m just wired that way. And if you’re reading this, chances are you are too.

I’ve always had a philosophy that makes me genuinely — almost greedily — interested in whoever walks into my sphere of focus: what is this person here to teach me, and what does this interaction say about my own growth? You’ve probably heard the cliché by now, that we’re all reflections of one another. I believe it. But walking through that looking glass, here’s what I truly believe: we were never meant to know ourselves on our own.

Before there were mirrors, there were lakes and ponds and windows — glimpses of who we are. But mostly, there were people. Mothers, fathers, siblings, friends, lovers, strangers — all of them here to help us dissect our own inner thoughts and struggles. What we agree with and what we reject in others is what shapes our inner voice. It’s what drives our philosophies, our inner worlds. Who we are, and who we want to become.

So here’s one tried-and-true philosophy of my life: I am rich because of the friendships I keep.

I’m enormously blessed to be surrounded by a tribe of women who are complete power-bitch badasses. They are unapologetic in the way they love and protect their people. Oh, they’ll apologize for being late, for disappointing someone, for falling short of some task — all the stupid little things we as women are primed to say sorry for, the things that would never cost a man a second thought. But these women never, ever apologize for loving hard and protecting their own.

I attract warriors and survivors. I know this about myself — I’m a magnet for them, because I stand in awe of every single one I meet. My friends are gloriously diverse, but here’s what most of them share: they were the firstborn, or the one who took up the role of holding the family together. More often than not they’re self-made, relentless over-achievers. They are what Dr. Harriet Braiker named Type E women — women who are everything to everyone (except themselves). And that very quality is what made the families they manage into winners. She is the secret sauce of her family’s success. She’s been doing it so long she makes it look easy.

These are the put-together women who secretly feel like they’re just managing a chaotic mess with lipstick on.

And here’s where we all are now, ladies. We are breaking at the seams. We’ve been performing the same sold-out show for twenty-five years — the career, the kids, the calendar, the keeping-everyone-alive — and the house is still packed. But somewhere in the second act, we forgot it was supposed to be a role, not the whole woman. Then menopause turned the house lights up, and we got a good look at ourselves. And we are exhausted.

But something has shifted. We are done apologizing for the stupid stuff. We have no more f*cks to give. We know now that we are warriors more than worriers — life has taught us we’ll get it done, and it will all be okay in the end. But at the cost of what?

That’s the question we’re finally asking now that the curtain is moving. As our kids fly the nest, we find ourselves somewhere new — a reinvention, a revelation. Do we keep performing the same show on autopilot? Or do we slow our roll and actually listen to what’s around us — the birds, the goodness, the sheer weight of all we’ve already built? Can we write a second act we actually want to be in — one we live not only for everyone else, but for ourselves?

That’s what this book is. That’s what these letters are for.

Stay with me, hot mama. This is OUR time.

xo, Solange