At Last, an App for Menopause | The New Yorker

These days, every life stage has its own digital landscape. In adolescence, it’s something like TikTok or Snapchat (I’m guessing). As a single adult, it’s the showy world of dating apps. When you’re pregnant—or trying to get pregnant, or trying to feed and care for the product of the pregnancy—you are once again driven online, in search of crowdsourced information: Should I buy this baby gadget or that one? Why does my nipple look this way? Where do I find a pediatrician? There’s an urgent need for networking—for nanny-share buddies, hand-me-downs, and infant “play dates,” which are really for the parents. This can lead you into previously unthinkable corners of the Internet: TheBump.com message boards; Facebook groups with names like “Brooklyn Mamas.” Four years ago, when I was pregnant, I balked at joining such communities, but, once inside, I grew to like them. There’s something refreshingly democratic about the “mommy” Internet. It’s not slick or cool—such considerations are irrelevant when you’re trying to find a speech therapist or diagnose a rash. And it was socially liberating to shed my previous associations and assume a new identity: “mom to T., age three.” Under such a guise, I was granted an intimate,…
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