Editor’s Note: Dr. Judith Sills is a clinical psychologist and the author of five bestsellers. Her newest title, Getting Naked Again: Dating, Romance, Sex and Love When You’ve Been Divorced, Widowed, Dumped or Distracted will be out soon and is available for pre-ordering.

Three girls are strewn across the back seat — one headband, four pouty pigtails, a sprinkling of pimples and six recent breasts. They are happy and singing, purely pitched girl voices outshouting the car radio’s delivery of a popular song: “OOO, you can’t just be intellectual, the way I feel is sexual, the way I feel is sexual …”

I reach to turn off the radio, ready to exercise my parental right to censorship. Then, in the rearview mirror, I see past their sweetness and the still-childhood-rounded cheeks to the unmistakable hot glow that has come to the three of them. They’ve got the juice. This is not something I am going to be able to turn off. 

Instead of reaching for the radio, I find myself snaking fingers to my own hip. They’ve got the juice. I’ve got the estrogen patch. This is the new generation gap.

It’s a generation gap measured by the length of hallway between my daughter and myself as we simultaneously slam separate bedroom doors in emotional fits of unknown origin. It’s a gap that ricochets off the husband/father who is left standing in that hall, trapped between we two she-devils, perhaps dreaming of the 20-something thighs at his office. It’s the gap between we daughters of the revolution and our own daughters, the space between menses and menopause. 

We are a group unto ourselves, we menopausal mothers of adolescent girls. We are the women who so enjoyed the sexual power of making our own money that we wore T-shirts proclaiming, “OOPS, I forgot to have a child.” At the last minute though, we remembered. Then we became the first full generation of women who benefited from those biotechnical advances that allowed us to slip under the wire of motherhood just before our eggs cracked completely.

We had to do a hell of a limbo to get under that wire. We hacked mates from calcified bachelors or other women’s ex-husbands, retrieved them from their chrysalis of slobby apartments and sports fetishes. We charted temperatures, sucked turkey basters, prayed over Petri dishes and threw each other lavish baby showers to celebrate every last productive ovary. We did all this with one hand, while most of us were running some small fiefdom with the other — a law office or an elementary school classroom, a publishing niche or a social work practice.

Not all of us certainly, but a lucky many, became mothers — celebrating our 38th birthdays at Lamaze class, turning 40 when our youngest turned two and therefore never really turning 40 at all. We lived our decades between 35 and 50 the way women have traditionally spent the years from 18 to 35 — sheltering our babies until they were sexual beings, alternately basking in and balking at our central role in their universe. That we did this later in life, and while most of us earned a living too, only proved that we, as no generation before us, we had the juice.

Then it started to dry up.

It’s a sneaky thing, this sapping dry of a mother — a process as unique to every mother as the onset of sexuality is to every daughter. Both are seismic biological events, with prolonged and unnerving rumblings of random symptoms and phantom miseries. Both are cataclysmic psychological events too, marking every female at the end of the process as forever different from the person she was when the process began. Both are individual, inescapable and old as Eve.

What is new is the occurrence of two such psychic earthquakes simultaneously in one family. Think of it. All over the country there are mother-daughter pairs panting, weeping and snarling in tandem. Daughters in the first flush of premenstrual tension are standing in dressing rooms negotiating cleavage display with mothers in the hot flash of postmenstrual irritability. Mothers only recently consigned to sexual invisibility are left to guide daughters newly become sexual icons. One is no man’s land. One is every man’s land. No one is on neutral ground.