So you had a non-influencer-approved dinner

The influencers are telling us to do menopause right. Who has the time?

Rachel Martin has been in my ear for a long time — as a national security correspondent at NPR, a “Morning Edition” host, and now as the co-creator and host of the interview podcast “Wild Card.”

But what I might respect about her the most now is her defense of what she has dubbed Trashy Tacos. On June 11, Martin filmed herself exiting the grocery store, clutching a bag of Old El Paso taco seasoning.

“This post is for all of my fellow geriatric moms — you know who you are — I’m talking about those of us who had kids when we were maybe 38, 40 — older — because guess what, all the health and wellness people in my feeds recently are talking about, you know, menopausal weight gain and how to avoid it or make it go away, and so much of it is about diet,” Martin says, running through the rain to her car.

(Getty Images; NPR)

“But guess what? I still have a 12-year-old and a 14-year-old at home, and they want to eat Trashy Tacos tonight. And do I have time to make a separate meal of tofu and steamed vegetables for myself? I do not.”

Her words — her rage! her taco seasoning! — felt deeply resonant.

This time of life is exhausting, and can feel even more so if you have school-age children while going through it. You run out of hours on the best of days. The last thing we need on top of all of it is to feel shamed for not doing menopause correctly.

So I called Martin up to scream into the abyss alongside her.

About those tacos

Martin grew up in Idaho without a lot of Mexican food around, and taco night — with Old El Paso taco seasoning and ground beef — was a cause for celebration. But she was reluctant to make her favorite tacos for her own kids when she became a parent, she said. “I was trying to live up to some standard, that mythical standard of parenthood — and that was not feeding my kids ground beef tacos with Old El Paso seasoning.”

But then sometime last year she had run out of dinner ideas (again, relatable) and thought, “You know what? I’m making those Trashy Tacos. And I went out and bought hamburger and sodium-packed seasoning stuff and my kids loved it and now it’s in the regular rotation, and it’s so easy and, I have to admit, quite delicious.”

Last week, as she was en route to the grocery store to buy the Old El Paso taco seasoning, she came across an Instagram post from a women’s fitness and strength expert she’s followed for years suggesting a dinner of roasted tofu and steamed vegetables as the ideal meal for people in perimenopause and menopause.

“The menopause influencers are talking to me ad nauseam about what I should be eating and then I look over at the Trashy Tacos — something’s misaligned.”

And you may ask yourself, ‘Well how did I get here?’

“We worked so hard to get to a point where we could even talk about menopause,” Martin said.

“This was not a thing my mother would have talked to me about, and we had a really open relationship. It was a kind of private suffering,” she said. “So the fact that it’s out there is something to be celebrated. It’s awesome, it’s liberating, and it gets it in the conversation.”

And yet, with the newfound openness has also come a set of expectations that for many are unreachable. Martin feels this as an older mom who’s not out of the stage where kids’ tastes and schedules are dictating many choices and reallocating her time.

Taking care of herself and her body the way the menopause influencers say to and managing the lives of a tween and teen, plus her own work, can feel impossible.

When it comes to ground beef tacos, Martin is happy that she found an easy meal that can feed the whole family and make them happy. But increasingly, she feels that the menopause influencer space isn’t telling her to take the wins.

“I’m now inundated with all these messages that I can be my best self despite menopause — like it’s something that needs to get fixed and I need to fix it and I’m failing if I’m not fixing it.”

But it’s hard to find the time.

“I’m not a priority,” Martin said of this phase of life. “Let’s be honest — I’m not gonna be a priority till my kids are grown, right? That’s not for a few more years, and so I have to hold out.”

You don’t have to like aging

One nice thing about a job like Martin’s — I know because my job is similar — is getting to mine other people for their wisdom. So I asked Martin if the many thoughtful conversations she has had hosting “Wild Card” over the past two years have influenced how she thinks about aging.

She immediately brought up her conversation with writer Zadie Smith in March 2025.

“I find it really hard getting older. It’s really hard and melancholy,” Smith told her.

When Martin asked why, Smith said, “Because I loved being young and I’m really gonna miss it.”

She heard echoes of this in her recent conversation with singer Amy Grant, who talked about aging as a form of grief, discussing how she went so far as to write a eulogy for her younger self.

In contrast to the way that so many menopause influencers make Martin feel, hearing these kinds of comments from these two women “doesn’t bum me out.” Acknowledging the hard parts about aging is “really liberating,” she said.

“It is OK to not have the same wonder as your youth, or possibility as your youth — it’s just different, because now in exchange for the possibility that I had when I was young, I have the wisdom that came from living my story,” she said. “I have the wisdom that came from making a bunch of mistakes and I have all this appreciation for who I was and I wouldn’t be who I am now had I not made those errors and gotten to live the lives that I then got to live.”

Time is a gift (and also a bitch)

Martin acknowledged some grief about aging — but said it goes hand and hand with a kind of reverence for the fact that you get to get older.

“My mom died when she was 60, so every day I’m still alive, I’m like, ‘This is such a gift.’”

It’s why, Martin said, the influencer’s post about tofu and steamed vegetables set off something inside her.

She saw it — between juggling karate practice for one kid, a baseball game for another, work, trying to make dinner, trying to just live her life in her body — and, “I just sort of lost it. ‘This is not made for me. What you’re making is not made for me. This content is not made for me.’ I felt left out of this menopause moment.”

Martin tells me that she is 52 years old and that she very much wants that fact reported.

“I like where I am. I can feel sad about what I used to be and also like my age and where I sit in my life right now. I feel good in my skin. I feel like I’ve earned my place here and I’m into it.”

After all, she tells me, “Time is a crazy, crazy, crazy fickle bitch.”