According to my local Walgreens, October was Menopause Awareness Month, and I have no reason to doubt them. It’s as good a month as any, and you don’t want something like that sneaking up on you, although in my experience that’s exactly what it does, almost by definition. Am I in it yet? Is it over? Are we on fire? Could you all BE any more irritating?

Menopause, defined as the cessation of menstruation, has actually been going on a long time without even a special month for it. But according to Walgreens, over 66% of women are unprepared for their menopause journey.

Everything is a journey these days. I mean, cargo pants are part of someone’s fashion journey. People have facial-cleanser journeys, stone-cold sober. There are cancer journeys. Don’t sign up.

I’m not sure mine was a journey so much as a flat-tire-on-a-rutted-road adventure wherein you lose half the cargo at the second pothole, but still.

Yes, my middle-aged darlings, okay, we’ll say you’re on a journey. It gives you the illusion that you’re going somewhere instead of, say, starting out in diapers and ending up in diapers. I’m not sure how prepared a woman needs to be. Nobody’s exactly springing anything on her. Women have been hosting this particular hormonal circus for a million years. Should she, to prepare, begin reading up at age 33, and then start stocking a contingency closet? Begin a spreadsheet, preferably unstained, to track periods and dietary intake? Acquire a white noise machine, a plan to cut down on alcohol intake, a stout stock of alcohol in case the first plan isn’t helpful, practice mindfulness? Stock a go-bag with exercises, probiotics, Vitamin D, vaginal estrogen, Clonidine, black cohosh, and a short baseball bat and pepper spray for correcting annoying people?

God knows you don’t want to be caught unawares by menopause. Menstruation, of course, is something one is famously caught unawares by, so you would think one could manage, but I guess modern women want to feel like they have a handle on the situation, so that they don’t immediately call 9-1-1 at a particularly irksome symptom, unless it results in homicide.

It would probably be more helpful to think of this not as a journey but a road trip!! Not your current model road trip, conducted in comfort with redundant safety features and money right in your phone. No. The old-fashioned road trip with a car that a hundred percent is going to break down and a folded paper map and no cash machine and no cell phone. Just you and a pup tent and some doobies and a cooler of Annie’s Green Springs and a thumb and the inevitable, life-affirming kindness of strangers. Your own stress level is marinated in poor-quality pot and your loved ones’ stress level on your behalf is at a minimum, due to their complete and blessed inability to monitor your location.

At many points in your Menopause Road Trip you will be stranded on the side of the woods in a state of hygienic anarchy, but you will be less jacked-up about it because you have been given no information with which you can compare your own experience. You’re just going to blunder through with a diet from the Esso station snack rack and some fellow travelers who still have a sense of humor, and at some point, as God intended for the fortunate, you will have had a final period and you will see that as the good news it is and revel in the erosion of your youthful beauty, and count the number of shits you will fail to give about it. You will revel, I say.