Reflection Paper 7 One thing that caught my attention in the Sarrel reading on aging was the section on menopause. My siblings, my dad and I would sometimes joke around with my mom about menopause. We thought that it was something she felt bad about so we didn’t really say a lot about it. We didn’t want her to feel pressured or that she hasn’t made anything out of her life. We were all shocked to find out that menopause was something she was embracing. She used it as a time to look back and reflect on her life and her accomplishments. She also saw the experience as a freeing one and used it to experiment and try out different things that she had not yet done. Before that I was always under the assumption that woman hated the idea and the process of menopause. I thought all women saw it as a part of their lives that was ending. To me it seemed that menopause was a symbol of old age and once you experienced it, you were officially an elderly person. After hearing my mother’s experience I thought she was an outlier. I thought she was one of the few women who found anything positive out of menopause. However, after reading the Sarrel’s section, I realized that menopause is not a dreadful experience for all women. Many women, like my mother, use menopause as a motivational time in their lives. Others use it as a reflective period so they can move on and accomplish things they haven’t done before. The Sarrel reading helped me realize that my mother is indeed not an alien, but rather one of many women who embrace menopause and see it as a positive