Well, who could have predicted…? No, not the complete pigs breakfast we are making of our democracies across the globe or the total neglect of care we show to our planet. Not those. I am referring to the fact that into my 60s I am finally beginning to grow up. It’s an odd feeling. I quite like it.
For the longest time I have beaten myself up for being awkward and sometimes difficult. I have over the years made a decent if variable fist of covering up social awkwardness, mostly, and have also made quite a good job of mothering, wifeing and friending. Less so daughtering, less so in-lawing. But at long last and partly due to my sons MA in autism and my own historic work with people with autism, I recognise that perhaps, maybe, if I squint at it a bit, I can see that it wasn’t all my fault, or indeed a fault at all. It just was. And having got this far I reckon I can keep going. I do work I love and am pretty good at it in all honesty, I have family and friends who are exceptional and brilliant, and this acceptance feels like the next and crucial stage in a mildly chaotic and chequered life story.
“On the spectrum” is such a lazily dismissive phrase which simultaneously manages to sound a bit fun and jazzy. It reminds me of when I was at school and we had to do sewing classes, which I hated. I was so excited to see one day, on the paper we had to read before class, that there was something called a selvedee that we would be making. It sounded whizzo! It sounded like a dance, or a new colour, interesting and inspiring. My disappointment on finding it was a typo and the thing was a selvedge, something that sounded like the sludge in the bottom of a bucket, was irreversible. I didn’t sew for years, but love it now. As I love the refreshed self confidence I have found in just being who I am. Some things just take time.
Why do I want to share this? Because I am not alone. Many women in my position muddle along for years making the best of it , developing coping strategies to enable family life to happen with as little disruption as possible and indeed burying ourselves in that family life, not seeing or valuing that there may be a reason for the uncomfortable feelings and struggles, but we do one thing really well: we blame ourselves. And then we burn out. We rage, resent, defy. And then accept. And maybe if women know that how we feel is ok, is just how it is, and we don’t have to try to conform in order to have a family life or a life at all, maybe then women can breathe easier and enjoy the life they have rather than try for the life people think they should have.
Women face a series of challenges. We are women for a start, subject to a torrent of expectations mostly created by and beneficial to men and perpetuated by everyone because that is how society works. How we look, sound, smell, behave, who we sleep with, live with, how we procreate, if and how we give birth and rear children. We are groomed into a mindset of daintiness and submissiveness and those of us who fail to toe the line have experienced a range of punishments over the centuries from simple rejection and mockery to a lifetime of dieting and anxiety, trafficking and rape, rejected for barrenness and equally rejected for having explicit desires, for being too old/fat/thin/clever/stupid/ambitious/addyourownwordhere to burning at the stake. Even, in the present day, some women and girls feeling somehow that they are better off as, should be, men and being encouraged to surgically alter their bodies, take sterilising drugs, and live a life they don’t need to live and from which there is no return, avoidable if only they could just be themselves. Control epitomised.
So much talk about wellbeing and mental health. For many women that starts and ends with rejecting others expectations, or at least adapting them. For me the catalyst that started my reinvention was grief. My parents died and I dealt with it very badly, although it was probably not obvious. I have had years of practice at carrying on regardless. Menopause also tagged along for the hell of it. A perfect storm into which I tumbled like a discarded, dried and wrinkled leaf, twirling down and around, cold and alone, waiting for the ground to meet me so that I could rest. Regret, grief, infinite change, a budding understanding that I wasn’t doing too well and that there may be a reason for that caused so much introspection that I felt a womans guilt for spending so much time on me. D’oh.
But here we are: not only a survivor of all that has gone before but also of covid, with a bit of a health hangover to go with it. That also causes a rethink or two. And in my 60s, perhaps now I can just be me. Businesswoman, poet, copywriter, social and community activist, whisky drinker, dedicated Mother and Grandmother, tattooed discreetly and probably more to come, part time battleaxe but mostly cuddly and fluffy, and not asking anyones permission to be anything at all. I think I am nicer now, if that matters, more patient, kinder, knowing that almost everyone who looks serene and competent is probably also paddling furiously under the water so I should cut them some slack. I manage very well, thank you, it works for me and I don’t need to change who I am, I just need to endorse it, love it, and work with it. It has brought some great gifts as well as challenges. I would say to women struggling in this way: You are your gift to yourself. It’s ok to just be, we are Human Beings not Human Doings, and you will find your way of being. Every day that I wake up I have a future. So do you.
