If you have ovaries and a uterus, and are somewhere in your late 40s or beyond, you will have a body-informed epiphany. It might be barely noticeable. It may stop you in your tracks. You can see when it happens to and for Linda, Bridget Christie’s heroine in “The Change,” because it slaps her upside the head.

The wife and mother of two is clearing plates and trash after her 50th birthday party, planned by a husband who enjoys all the attention and didn't do any work to make it possible. She even had to bake her own cake. As she cleans house, Linda quietly taps a button on her digital watch to time each chore, recording the tally in a journal once it is completed.

Then she opens an upper cabinet and is pummeled in the noggin by an avalanche of unmatched Tupperware – someone else’s task left for her to do. But the epiphanic ding! hits her as she’s smoothing a Band-Aid onto her forehead wound, and considers the superhero that decorates it: the Incredible Hulk.

The Hulk, she writes in her goodbye note to her husband Steve (Omid Djalili), is the only menopausal role model in the history of TV and film. He reads this to his mother over the phone after Linda has roared away on her old motorcycle.

“It's not funny, Mum!” Steve said. “I can't find the towels!”

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Oh, but it is funny – because it’s true. Dr. Bruce Banner is not a physician, let alone a gynecologist. Still, being that he is a man of science and completely fictional, he may be able to provide the correct and most basic medical definition of menopause, in that it is a point in time 12 months after a woman's last period.

Symptoms occurring in the years leading up to that point are referred to by the National Institute on Aging as perimenopause or menopausal transition, which typically occurs between the ages of 45 and 55.

But that doesn’t explain the purported 34 symptoms menopause is thought to encompass, the most Hulk-ish of which make you feel crazy. Maybe not the night sweats or hot flashes, but certainly the brain fog that can temporarily steal your verbal acuity and the mood swings that careen a woman from la-dee-dah to rage blackout in seconds flat, sometimes without warning or reason.

In Christie’s Linda, we have a more relatable menopausal role model than the Hulk, not to mention one that isn't a radioactive tone of chartreuse. Christie’s brain drops common........

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