Much like everyone does, let’s talk about menopausal whales.
Fun fact: orcas, those gorgeous black-and-white queens of the ocean, go through menopause. They stop reproducing in midlife, and then — brace yourself — they just… keep living. For decades.
Apparently this has baffled scientists. They’ve been scratching their heads saying, “Why on earth would a creature live so long after she stops reproducing?”
To which I say: Gentlemen, welcome to our lady club.
Because they’ve been equally confused about us. Human women. Once we stop making babies, it’s like science collectively shrugs and says, “Huh. Wonder what she’s still doing here.” Endless books and info and resources for young fertility, but virtually zero research into women’s health after menopause. Until very recently, the assumption seemed to be that our bodies had completed their “purpose.” The rest was just bonus footage.
The Grandmother Effect (AKA: We’re Not Done Yet)
Here’s what’s actually happening in the ocean: post-reproductive female orcas become the backbone of their pods. They’re the matriarchs, the keepers of knowledge, the wise women of the sea. Marine biologists call it the grandmother effect. Older females lead the pod to food in lean years. They remember where the salmon used to run. They protect their grown sons from fights. They stabilize the entire family system.
Sound familiar?
We could’ve told them this without a grant proposal. The same thing happens in human families, neighborhoods, churches, schools, and companies every day. The women who are “done having babies” are usually the ones holding the whole thing together.
I’m flirting with the bottom edge of the grandmother effect. I’m new here. My elders are still the most salient voices in my head, but I’m on the on-ramp of perimenopause. I’m realizing that we are simply dropping the “re-” of productivity; we may not be reproducing but we are damn well producing. The accrued value of this stage is, frankly, obvious, but one powerful quality I am noticing is clarity. God, life felt like a murky choose-your-own-adventure quagmire with hidden trap doors when I was younger. Everything felt dire. And super-consequential. And thus confusing. I wasted years in self-doubt and second-guessing.
I see this with my young adult kids. I remember feeling as twisty and unsure as they often do. They feel “behind” and it is all I can do to convince them they are right on time. Their anxiety makes small things too big and big things too complicated. They stare down adulthood and see only black-and-white decisions that will either advance or ruin them. I remember this confusing pressure.
But here at 51, I can look at them with perfect clarity and see their paths full of possibility. I see plenty of lefts and rights and loops, and none of them are ruinous. It feels so obvious to me that they can zig or zag, and so much life awaits either direction. I share none of their panic, and they share very little of my confidence. This isn’t because they are malformed; they are just young. I was exactly like them, and my mom stepped in with steady leadership for me too (and still offers it to my kids)(and my friends) (we say WWJD – what would Jana do – to each other all the time).
Getting older means we’ve lived. We’ve failed, restarted, reinvented, suffered, gained, loved and lost. There is no way to know this but to live it. Therefore, there is no way to get here but to live longer. And then, here in the second half, we have earned the clarity to lead well. We anchor our families and communities with lived wisdom. We lend it freely to our young beloveds who are still building their lives while it all feels a bit like a nosedive. We can say with confidence:
This gets better.
Either option has merits.
You are right on time.
Stay in your integrity.
Choose what you will be proud of in five years.
This feels like you.
Get back up. You aren’t ruined.
Enjoy this leg of your race.
You are doing a beautiful job.
We couldn’t mentor this well until now. Earlier iterations of us still smacked of our own anxiety. We didn’t know what we didn’t know yet. So are we reproductive? No. Productive? Hell yes.
Evolution’s Little Plot Twist
Back to the whales. What’s wild is that evolution didn’t extend the reproductive years of these orcas. It extended their lives after reproduction. Because their value isn’t just in producing babies — it’s in preserving the community.
Nature literally wrote into their biology: “We still need her.”
Which, honestly, should’ve been obvious. But here we are, centuries deep into civilization, still rediscovering that women don’t expire.
For the Record
Humans and orcas are two of only a handful of species that experience menopause. The others are a few other toothed whales: belugas, narwhals, pilot whales. So basically, the matriarchs of land and sea.
And note: when an older female orca dies, her family is less likely to survive. Her wisdom literally sustains them. The endangered Southern Resident killer whales of the Pacific Northwest are struggling in part because they’ve lost too many grandmothers.
A whole ecosystem is faltering because it lost its female elders.
So maybe the takeaway is this: the world needs its older females. We are the keepers of memory, the ones who remember where the food is, when the tides shift, and how to calm a storm. We are not finished after the reproductive years. We are repositories of knowledge, leadership, empathy, and strategy. We don’t need extended reproductive years. We need to build extended lives after the reproductive years. Perhaps our most crucial years weren’t back in the maternity ward but here at the front of the pod.
Our very biology has been trying to tell us this all along: we were designed to last.
Maybe science is finally catching up.