Competent Woman Hits Mid-Life Crisis

Angry Woman Meets the Monster

I don't really 'do angry' very well.  I don't enjoy other people's anger, even at a distance, and I rarely express my own anger.  I might snipe a bit, or drop in the odd sarcastic comment, or possibly slam a door - but nothing even mildly confrontational.

That might seem great - top marks for emotional management, well done girl!- but when you get to the age of 48 there a lots of things that start to make you really mad.  The frustration builds to an all time high: you get angry about losing your looks, angry about putting on weight and it being harder to shift, angry about grey hair and wrinkles, angry about being ignored especially when there are younger women around, angry about all the things your mother told you not to do which might have actually been GOOD FUN, angry about the great things you'd hoped to achieve that never happened, all the young lithe men you could have had unusual and adventurous sex with but didn't...Add this to the accumulated angst and frustration of all the times since the age of 4 when you've had to be 'nice' to impossibly  boring, rude or ignorant relatives and friends of the family (a restricted practice that you've un-wittingly carried into adult life ) - and this means that your blood is at boiling point most of the time.

For someone who doesn't "do anger", expressing all this is a very Big Job.  The danger, if it's all held in, is that it turns to depression - and I can feel that depression calling to me sometimes like a siren.  I fear it.  There is grief and loss too in mid life with relatives and friends dying and children leaving home. It's a confusing time and you can lose your bearings in the emotional fog.

I was saved from this trap, however, by an incident with an old mate of mine.  Jenny is a feisty woman; short, large breasted, blonde, sharp, entrepreneurial, influential in the town.  She's impressive all right. I've known her for 10 years, and for 6 of those years we'd been on frippery European city-breaks together with two other women, shopping and laughing and chatting.  We were close, and she was lively and entertaining - and acerbically funny. 

Jenny had the same difficulty as me - she got angry - but she couldn't express it properly.  She would get very very angry about something, send you a text about it, and then refuse to pick up the phone to discuss it.  Then that would make me angry.  There was something about Jenny that represented my biggest challenge yet; I was frightened of her and I was angry with her.  Call me a wimp, but I knew if I confronted her about her texting habit, she'd cut me off.  She'd be so angry, she wouldn't be able to speak to me again. 

The day came when she sent me one angry text too many.  She complained in an unjustified and pretty nasty way about something my daughter had done.  I phoned her.  She refused to pick up.  She left me seething for days - brooding over a veiled threat that she'd made in her text.  I insisted on a meeting and told her to stop this - explained how I felt.  I had to prepare very carefully, and I knew this would be really difficult for me, and shocking for her.  Now, 6 months later, she still walks past me in the street, refusing to speak. 

As for me, I am glad of it.  I found a way to express my anger with out losing my composure.  I have lost a friend in the process, which was sad, but I'm over that bit.  Since then I have sort of recoiled from town life - I feel I am gathering strength for a rematch of some sort.  Maybe something less angry.

 

Straight-laced woman in search of a tattoo

I woke up on Saturday morning full of vital energy.  This was not the same as jumping out of bed ready to do the household chores; it felt much more earthy and wild than that.  I was ready for climbing a mountain, walking 30 miles, running naked through the jungle or having wild unfettered sex rolling on a fern-covered river bank.  This is from a woman, aged 48,  who normally wakes up on a Saturday feeling groggy and ugly, and grumpily grinds her way through the day via a pre-made list of things to do, using sarcasm and disassociation as her main weapons.   I tell you, this was weird-feeling day.

The family were happily busy, so I decided to take the long walk option, setting out to cover 10 miles in a couple of hours.  The weather was fierce and unpredictable; moments of bright winter sunshine were blown aside by icy blasts of hailstones.  I felt so bloody alive.  Other folks along the way seemed alive too, a couple minutely examining a fallen tree, a bearded man in shorts cycling with a huge precarious plastic box under one arm, three teenagers with backpacks laughing so hard they could barely walk straight.  I laughed too; a little human echo...

All the time I was brewing this idea of getting a tattoo.  Weird, crazy idea.  I've always hated body piercing and snottily looked down my nose at tattoos.  I have always considered tattoos to be the mark of someone dodgy, from the underworld - to be avoided.  When I used to go dancing with my mates as young teenagers, the horror moment came when 'Bridge over troubled water' oozed out of the cheap speakers, you approached some hot looking bloke, and then you spotted his tattoo.  Toilet alert.  See ya later.  End of love story.

I frittered the time away once I got to town by parking myself in an organic cafe, eating a delicious three-bean salad and drinking jasmine tea.  A crinkly old lady sat opposite me and we talked about her bus tour of the local area.  I noticed her staring at me between utterances as if to wonder alongside me, whether I was completely sane.  Is this tattoo business really such a good idea, she silently inquired with her kind eyes.  Is this some sort of breakdown?  Have you completely lost touch with all that is good and right and proper?  What sort of a reprobate are you turning into?  Then I noticed she was eating a huge pile of white buttered toast.  Crazy. 

...up the hill, round the corner, along the exposed and elevated pavement, the traffic went whizzing by.  I walked past the tattoo parlour, peering in the windows.  I walked back again.  Then my daughter rang and I stood just outside the door to take her call.  I didn't let on.  What is a 16 year old supposed to make of this?  I imagined all the parents from the kids' school driving past, pointing.  What's SHE doing outside the very obvious, out of town tattoo parlour?  Weird woman.

Then I knew I had to do it.  This seemed to be an extremely important ritual for me.  I was claiming my own skin.  It was mine and I could do exactly what I wanted with it.  The tattoo man didn't have quite the same sense of ceremony about the occasion.  "What d'you want, love?"  I looked blankly at him.  He gestured to the thousands of designs that hung on the walls and dangled from the rail of samples.  "I'm not sure - something small".  "Well if you've got to mess about deciding, I'll come back out in 2 minutes"  He disappeared back into the adjoining room, shutting the door with some impatience. I noticed there were others waiting; one man in his early 20s who was already covered in swirling hearts and snakes and Aztec insignia.  He pointed to his lower arm.  "I'm going to get this one finished off with a ring of thorns".  Fair enough.  I felt like small fry.  My tattoo would be a trifle in comparison.  Just a wee mark.

I flipped through the small-designs rail, ignoring the dead roses and the skulls, looking desperately for a swallow or a sunrise or something softer.  I found a really cheesy looking seagull - or was it a dove?  All the same it reminded me of the BT logo.  Associations like that were a no-no.  Then I saw a sheet of little astral picture; stars and moons and planetary signs.  My body relaxed.  I chose a curly star with a little trail.  It was about two inches long - bingo. 

The tattoo man wanted to get on with it.  Sit there.  Where do you want it?  Take your t-shirt off, I can't tattoo through it, can I?  I told him this was my first tattoo, and I was terrified.  He was a bit warmer after that, telling me to relax, and saying that it wasn't painful.  But it wasn't the pain I was worried about, it was the concern that I might not really be in my right mind.   He placed the remains of the transfer in from of me while he tended to his art around my right should blade.  I could feel the needle following the curve of the trail and the points of the star.  Then he finished off with the little dots of the trail - zzz, zz, z.  It didn't hurt. 

Thirty five quid cash please.  This mid-life crisis doesn't come cheap.

      

   

What's this mid-life crisis like?

A mid life crisis is a moment in someone's life, usually experienced between age 40 and 50, when change is happening a lot faster than normal.  It's as if the individual's psyche or spirit is ahead of their rational mind.  Something overwhelming happens; men find themselves buying sports cars and leaving their wives.  Women are traditionally less expressive - in the UK anyway - and may descend into a quiet invisible depression.  Some people gently begin to do things they have always wanted to do - work in Africa, run their own business, emigrate to Australia.  Many people characterise this moment in their lives as being summarised by the question "Is this it?  Is this all their is?".  It can fell pretty bleak, and it's easy to rush into it,lurching from one new activity to the next, with nothing really seeming to 'solve the problem'.

Another way of looking at this period is to see it as an incubation.  Imagine a tortoise slowly burying itself for the winter, then reappearing in the Spring with a refreshed shell and renewed vigour, ready for all manner of lettuce.  Jungian analysts refer to this as a controlled regression.  For me it feels like a period of reclusive incubation; I'm giving birth to a new self.  Did I really say that?  Sounds batty, but it's how it feels. 

I'm in the middle of this right now.  Maybe it's like a mini-breakdown.  I haven't got any interest in friends and socialising but I'm reading like a demon.  I've got the energy for huge long walks - doing 12 miles in a morning - and really enjoying being outside and breathing in the trees and the sky.  My work is a practice=ground for me.  As a consultant, I can observe how I am changing the way I work; I'm more potent, straighter, more grounded.  I feel as if I know what I'm doing (a surprisingly new sensation, given that I've been operating as a consultant for over 15 years). 

When I read Sylvia Brinton Perera's book "Descent to the Goddess" I turned a huge corner, and her words enabled me to turn a lingering depression into a crystallising process.  She talks about intellectual women who have identified more with their fathers than their mothers suffer a basic fault.  I am one of these, although not particularly intellectual, I definitely grew up valuing correctness and precision with words.  Perera says that these women do not have an adequate sense of their own embodied strength and needs.  We need to travel back to the underworld, experiences the passions and rages which lurk there and search for the deep feminine.  This has to be done in a non-verbal way and will probably feel pretty weird.  I hope to keep you posted as this all progresses.  The first step features my tattoo...

Reach for the Stars - an Astrology Reading

I've never had a proper astrology reading before.  Of course I've carelessly read out my horoscope from the weekend papers as a passing amusement, but I've never really taken the time to find a proper astrologist and enter into the whole pursuit with seriousness and concentration.  I'm used to the non-specific language that's used in magazines: "you will encounter luck along your path in the near future..."  or "life will offer difficulties but friends will step in to help you..."  and was half-expecting the professional that was recommended to me to do the same thing.  I was anticipating a vagueness that I could then Pooh-Pooh.

But there was something about the twinkly-eyed 75 year old that bewitched me.  She knew her stuff very well, and was highly specific with her comments.  "You think in bubbles" and "around September you will have some more answers about what you will do with the rest of your working life" and excitingly "you cannot lead a small life".  The process involves the printing out of a very beautiful and intricate astrology chart which looks at your talents and skills and influences.  There are at least three layers of information available to do with your birth date, what was in the sky then, and the planetary movements that are casting a shadow on your life right now and in th future.  It was surprisingly accurate and enlightening.  It was as if we'd met before, but not in a corny way. 

She talked about being a spirit living in human form, and how past lives might affect current existence.  I found all that surprisingly reassuring.  Somehow that allows me to be more myself.  Have a look at www.astro.com and get your own reading.  I think you'll be amazed and humbled, then a bit sceptical, then probably a bit unsettled...then humbled again.

Womens' Studies Fades Away - "Feminism has done it's job"

It's 8.30am in the UK and our esteemed BBC Radio 4 announces the death of feminism.  I wouldn't mind, but I only started reading the Female Eunuch by Germain Greer this weekend and know absolutely diddly squat about the F word.  I have some catching up to do and the damned thing is already in decline.

The item on the Today programme explained that the rise feminism and womens' rights in the 60's led to the proud recognition of Women's Studies as an academic topic worthy of focus.  York University has a particularly active department; well funded and well subscribed to.  However, elsewhere the take-up of undergraduate degrees in this area of study is tailing off.  Is the job done?  And what was the job anyway?

Germaine Greer's angry radicalism attacked the position of women in society as passive stimulants for men; muses, wives, the fairer sex.  This has certainly shifted in the UK - but shifted in a weird way.  Jodie Marsh (TV star and glamour model) talks about getting her boobs surgically adjusted to be "blooming enormous" while Hilary Clinton is a serious runner for President of the USA.  My stomach is turning a bit at the polarity.  Is this progress?

The MA in Women's Studies at York actually looks very interesting.  Students learn about what the concept of 'woman' means starting with the notion of gender, then considering 'race', age, class and sexuality.  The economic situation of women in the Britain is compared with the Middle East, and there is a chance to view Britain from the Middle East, problematising western norms.  How women appear in modern culture, the influence of gender on historical texts, the development and impact of feminist ideas - it's all in there.  I'd spend a year on that.

Some are not so impressed.  "Feminist scholarship has become predictable, tiresome and dreary, and most young women avoid it like the plague," said Christina Hoff Sommers, resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute for public policy research in Washington and author of Who Stole Feminism? "British and American societies are no longer patriarchal and oppressive 'male hegemonies'. But most women's studies departments are predicated on the assumption that women in the West are under siege. What nonsense."

I asked my daughter, aged 16, what she thought of the Women's Studies syllabus.  and she said  "How does separating this out help the progress of equality?  Surely this kind of stuff will cause men to shrug their shoulders, roll their eyes and say oh for fuck's sake....I like the idea of equality but it's a bit separatist.  That's all I'm saying.

I just need to catch up with 'the movement' and see what needs doing.  My gut feeling is that the job isn't all done; it's just needs a different approach.  Meanwhile my own feminine realisations rumble on.  More of that next post.

 

Competent Woman Encounters Mid-Life Crisis

Woman Don't Have Mid-Life Crises - or Do They?

Twenty years of working as a management consultant in business has taught me how to hide my emotions, disguise my womanliness and act as much like a man as I can.  I wear a suit, speak in a straightforward manner, sit with my legs crossed and look people in the eye in a way that excludes any hint of demureness or coyness.  I prefer working with men.  They are rational, logical, pragmatic - and when they're not, I can help them to be so. 

Not to say I haven't been interested in things feminine: coaching, personal development, self awareness, psychotherapy, facilitation...but I have always been good at encouraging others to take this stuff on and less brilliant and doing it all myself.

I have never been interested in womens' groups or feminism, never really been able to see the "glass ceiling" or experienced descrmination or harrassment.  Perhaps I haven't  been that sympathetic to the recipients of this treatment.

And then it came.  Like a heavy, dark grey, highly charged cloud.  My spine shivers as I mention it.  Depression started to tap me on the shoulder as I entered my 40s.  It waited for me in the car, visited me late at night, hung around at Christmas... sometimes it overwhelmed me and I would cry and cry and cry.