Brain fog in the meeting: the recovery lines, and why it happens to sharp women at 50
You know this one: "amortization," the word you have said a thousand times before. At 51, you are the chief financial officer four slides into the quarterly review when the board chair asks something whose answer begins with that exact term. The word is gone. Your mind reaches for it and finds only a blank where it belongs. Two seconds pass, then three, and you sense the room watching you rummage through a drawer you cannot locate.
What's really on the line for women here in Richmond
Three seconds is brief, but before a board those seconds can feel like a hit to your standing, and you are fully aware of that. This is why that fourth second ends up doing the most harm. The instant you start viewing yourself from a distance, the quest for the right phrase is replaced by dread over the quest itself. The chair is patient. The newest director on the committee has no such patience. For nine years you have built your standing on being the sharpest person at the table, and right now that standing rests on a single noun.
The turning point
The phrase resurfaces. It always does. You name "the amortization schedule," answer the question, and the meeting moves on to the next item. No one brings it up. For your part, you keep replaying that moment for three days afterward.
The slip did not signal a drop in ability. It was a symptom, and symptoms can be identified and explained. Broken sleep from night sweats, shifting hormones and a brain running on four hours of rest will occasionally drop a noun, in anyone, at any seniority. It seems like decline mostly because nobody prepared you for the possibility, which left "losing it" as the only explanation on hand, but you are not losing it. At 51, your body is adjusting its hormonal balance while you run a company in places like Short Pump and Midlothian.
Why it is not only you, as Richmond women leaders in Henrico and Chesterfield can attest
WebMD Health Services found that 45% of women managers and executives in Richmond and across Virginia keep their menopause symptoms hidden at work, and 34% have weighed leaving their jobs over them. Deloitte's 2025 study of 7,500 women showed that 36% of those dealing with menopause symptoms tough out severe pain without taking a break. Put those figures side by side and you see boardrooms full of capable women dropping the occasional word, each privately concluding she is the only one, and some of them walking away rather than saying anything. Women in their fifties in Henrico or Chesterfield are not getting dimmer. What changes is their rest and the information they have at hand.
Three things to remember
Have a go-to phrase ready to recover. Such a pause turns into a real problem only when panic fills it. Fill it with a sentence instead: "Let me approach that from the number first." Or: "I'll give you the figure, then the term for it." Either buys you five seconds and makes you sound deliberate, which you are.
Think of it as a sleep issue first, since that is what it most often is. See a clinician who understands menopause well, and name "word-finding" and "sleep" out loud when you do. Dealing with one tends to ease the other, and the two most frequent reasons women put off that appointment, lack of time and embarrassment, are not medical reasons at all. Richmond-area women have access to a wide range of health systems and clinics, so a referral is rarely hard to find.
Go easier on yourself, and let go of the constant self-criticism across Central Virginia. Forgetting one noun during a meeting where you correctly answered eleven questions proves nothing about your ability. Count the eleven.
The missing word was "amortization." The next time it slips away, you will already have a sentence in hand to use while you wait for it to return. What the board will actually see is a CFO picking her words with care, which is precisely the kind of judgment they rely on her to show.