by Mary Moody
It appears that the female hormones essential for pregnancy, childbirth and motherhood have the effect of keeping women in an almost permanent state of passivity. The intricate balance of female hormones is programmed so that she will naturally and quite gladly take on the role of home-maker and caretaker and keeper of the peace. For most women, household harmony is automatically equated with happiness, and so we go to extraordinary lengths to maintain an atmosphere of love and safety, warmth and comfort, within the home.
Much has been written about women who, in times of great deprivation and stress, gladly give up their own meagre food and water rations to their children and go without, even if it means they die. This tendency for self-sacrifice isn’t a matter of conscious choice. Women are also conditioned to put the needs of others ahead of their own, and while not all women fall for this concept, I certainly recognise a lot of this behaviour in myself. When female hormones are added to the equation, it’s quite a combination. I have always believed that my ability to keep the peace in our family was a direct result of my own turbulent childhood, with it’s constant drunken brawls and domestic violence. I was determined that my own children would never experience the pain and fear associated with warring parents and I bent over backwards to ensure that the atmosphere in our home was happy and carefree.
My way of dealing with the irritating aspects of my relationships – especially my relationships with David and with my mother – was to make jokes about them. I used humour instead of anger as a coping mechanism. I became very good at inventing strategies for jollying everyone along. There was a lengthy period when Mum and David were not speaking after a row about something so trivial that I can’t even recall what it was. The atmosphere at mealtimes was leaden as they both sat in sullen silence, refusing to even look at each other. Eventually, I decided to highlight the stupidity of their behaviour by arranging three or four oversize vases of flowers and foliage from the garden down the centre of the table. David was on one side, my mother on the other. David immediately asked what was going on and I simply said, ‘Well, if you’re not speaking to each other it’s probably better if you can’t see each other either.’
They both laughed, of course, and the ice was broken. The flowers were removed and they started talking – awkwardly at first, but by the end of the meal the stalemate had been resolved.
That I should have resorted to such elaborate devices to maintain household harmony now seems ludicrous. The veil of peacekeeping has finally lifted and I am, as a result, simply not the same person I was thirty years ago; not physically, not emotionally and not intellectually.
My reading on the subject of menopause also informs me that women’s sexuality and libido can undergo dramatic changes at this stage of life. We start to produce testosterone, which can make us more sexually aggressive and may even lead to a change of sexual preference. I am quite shocked at my own feelings of sexuality during this phase. I expected my sexual desires to fade away. I somehow saw fifty as the cut-off point – I would lose interest in lovemaking and throw my energies in other directions – into the garden or my grandchildren. It’s certainly the image of middle-aged women that’s promoted in the media, and it’s one that I believed to be true. But here I am in France, in the mood for kicking up my heels, looking for a little excitement and feeling totally liberated at having abandoned my responsibilities. Reading the book about menopause has somehow reassured me that I am not abnormal, that thousands of women feel just as I do: restless and filled with yearnings for change and fulfilment.
However, the constant references in the book to marriage breakdown do worry me. The author cites dozens of case histories of women who simply walk away from their long-term relationships when they hit menopause. They strike out on their own and make new lives for themselves, much to the shock and dismay of their families, who don’t understand the changes that are taking place. One of the main problems, it seems, is the shift in the needs of men and women after thirty years of marriage, especially if the children have left home. Most men at this stage are approaching retirement and they start to look to their family for love and support; even if they have been out and about pursuing their career for decades, suddenly their sphere of interest contracts and they want to spend more time at home developing relationships that may have been on the back burner for years. At exactly the same moment women are coming out of their shell after decades of home-making and nurturing and starting to look outside the home for excitement and fulfilment. It seems that nature plays a cruel trick on us. Or perhaps it’s nature’s way of saying that we simply don’t belong together as couples ‘happily ever after’. Sitting alone in the little French house, sipping rosé and nibbling fine Cantal cheese, I wonder if this is what’s happening to me.
Some people are sexually predatory, while others spend their whole life hoping that someone else will make the first move. Waiting for the other person to make a pass is undoubtedly easier because it reduces the risk of rejection, and I know that in my younger days, before getting together with David and having a family, I preferred men to make a move in my direction rather than the other way round. During that period of my life I was quite vulnerable to seduction in the sense that I am the sort of woman who finds it very difficult to say no. Not that I was promiscuous – once again it’s related to the way women are conditioned not to make others feel uncomfortable or unhappy by rejecting them. That said, if in the past a man did make an overture and I was not interested I could always find a humorous way of deflecting the situation so that it didn’t cause hurt or offence. However, if a man I was genuinely attracted to made a move in my direction I found it almost impossible to resist.
I was fortunate, therefore, that I wasn’t a single woman for very long, and lucky too that in the many years of my relationship with David there have been no sexually awkward situations that I couldn’t wriggle out of with my dignity intact. Looking back at three decades of sexual monogamy I felt proud that I had never been tempted to stray from my marriage bed even though David has spent so much time away from me and the family and I have enjoyed a career involving lots of contact with bright and interesting men.
Outsiders might imagine that working in the media, especially in television, is glamorous and sexy. They are fooling themselves. It’s a lot of hard work, and the notion of engaging in torrid love affairs at the end of a long day’s filming or a day chained to a computer screen is ridiculous. All those years as a full-time working mother served to remind me of how unsexy real life can be. If you make it to the end of the day without collapsing in an exhausted heap you are doing really well. Love affairs, on top of everything else, aren’t worth the energy of a passing thought. Even sex with a long-term partner or husband seems a bit tiring when there are deadlines to meet and expectations to be lived up to.
But back in the little house in France, alone and without my husband or the pressure of work and family responsibilities, sex suddenly takes on a different perspective. Is it those troublesome menopausal hormones reminding me that my sexual attractiveness to men is fading away and that if I don’t seize the day I might just as well accept that this part of my life is coming to an end? Or maybe I’m curious about having a sexual relationship with another man after three decades? Whatever, I suddenly start looking at the men within my orbit a little differently, and imagining all sorts of interesting possibilities. By putting such a vast physical distance between myself and my spouse, family and friends I have created a situation where I can easily have a love affair without causing too many problems and complications on the home front. Being alone in a French village provides a certain anonymity. I have met dozens of men, some of whom I find most attractive, and they are all great fun to spend time with. I now realise that my pheremones are in full flight, sending out all sorts of unsubtle messages that could be picked up by anyone who is even vaguely sexually predatory. It’s a risky but exciting position to be in.
Now, out of the blue, I am contacted by a man I first met last
year on one of my overnight sightseeing trips to Toulouse. He is an academic with excellent English, and is handsome and charming, but married. We started chatting in a café one balmy evening and eventually exchanged email addresses and phone numbers. We have loosely kept in touch since I left France last December and now he’s proposing I meet him, alone, in Toulouse for lunch. It’s pretty obvious to me that lunch isn’t all he has on his mind, and my gut reaction is that I should politely say I’m too busy to meet him. But I don’t. I say yes, I would love to see him again.
Looking back on this defining moment I realise that I chose an option fraught with danger. My eyes were wide open and I knew exactly what I was getting into. I was determined that I would not leap into bed with this man at the first opportunity but I realised that I was allowing our relationship to move onto a different level. I was opening the door to an intimacy that could lead to a sexual relationship.
What did I feel during this time? I felt incredibly excited yet daunted by the prospect of what might happen between us. I felt a sharp stab of desire coupled with such mental confusion that for days (weeks, months) afterwards I simply couldn’t think straight. He phoned every day, sometimes two or three times a day, as we planned a suitable time to meet. Initially, our conversations skirted around the issues but the more we talked – or, rather, flirted shamelessly on the phone – the more open and honest we were with each other about how we were feeling, about the direction in which our relationship was heading, about the possibility of a dangerous liaison.
For me it was a time of great confusion, and I felt alarmed and unsettled. I felt like a different person – and in many ways I was a different person from the one I had been even two or three years ago. The voice that spoke so candidly with this man, responding to sexual innuendo, was not my voice. It was the voice of another woman, an adventurous, free-spirited woman who didn’t care about risking her marriage and her family and her new farm. She just cared about the exciting possibilities that lay ahead.
I didn’t talk to anyone about what was happening, but I think some of my friends in France sensed that I was rattled and edgy. At dinner parties and lunches and friendly gatherings I talked vaguely around the subject of long-term relationships and infidelity. The topic was obviously weighing heavily on my mind.
Jock summed it up beautifully by telling me as I sat in his sunny courtyard one autumn lunchtime enjoying pastis, ‘You know, Mary, it doesn’t actually count as adultery if it happens in another country.’
I think he understood where I was coming from.
14
After several weeks of long-distance flirtation and discussion and planning, the proposed trip to Toulouse for a meeting with my potential lover becomes an impossibility because of my work commitments and the fact that he must suddenly go to Paris to attend an urgent meeting. We have run out of time and missed our opportunity. I feel a sense of relief mixed with a profound feeling of disappointment. We stay in constant communication and discuss the possibility of getting together when I return to France next year. It seems a long time to wait, but it will add a certain edge to the relationship, an anticipation and yearning that will make the meeting even more exciting. It will also give me much needed time to think about it and analyse what’s going on here. After all, we are both married and past the age where casual sex or one-night stands are likely to be really satisfying. We are walking down the path towards a much deeper involvement and, in every respect, an emotional relationship is far more dangerous to a marriage than a sudden, impulsive sexual encounter.
Instead of my usual cheerful, chatty self I am on edge and feeling so frail and unsettled that David detects a change in my voice when we talk on the phone. He says I sound ‘disturbed’ and asks if I am okay. Initially, I reassure him that everything’s fine, that I’m just tired from too much socialising. But he persists in questioning me and eventually I tell him a little about the phone conversations I’ve have been having with the man from Toulouse, whom he has never met. He becomes very quiet, almost withdrawn, and simply tells me to take care and not exhaust myself. I realise that after living with me for so many years, David can probably read me like a book. It’s not really surprising that he senses a change in me simply from my tone of voice. He’s obviously worried but not likely to make a big fuss about a few phone calls, even if they are with another man. Yet I am also aware that this is what he has been fearing for some time, since I first ‘ran away’ last year to live alone. Back then we discussed the possibility that I was planning to have a fling while in France. He made several half-joking references to it and I simply laughed them off. Although at the same time I teasingly taunted him with jokes about French lovers, I didn’t seriously think it was on the cards. I wasn’t feeling confident enough about my own appearance or attractiveness to imagine that I would be in a position to engage in illicit relationships during my travels. How wrong I was.
It’s just a few days before I am due to fly back to Australia and I fill them by saying farewell over lunches and dinners with my friends, taking long walks in and around the village, playing music (probably too loudly) and drinking wine (probably too much). I am overwhelmed by a sense of melancholia. What am I doing with my life? Here I am hurtling headlong into an emotional relationship with a man I don’t really know very well, betraying the trust of my already long-suffering husband and threatening to wreak havoc in all directions. The alarming reality of it all, from my perspective, is that the more I talk with the man, the more smitten I am by him. He’s bright, charming and very funny, and there’s nothing sexier than a man who can make you laugh. I realise that a certain mechanism is kicking in here: I am actually falling in love with this man, possibly because it’s the only way I will allow myself to become sexually involved with him. Like a lot of women, I am probably not capable of satisfying sex without a deeper involvement, and now I have months and months where our relationship can only develop via phone and email. It’s a worrying and quite daunting prospect.
15
On my return to Australia at the end of October, I am immediately launched into the release of the book I finished writing earlier in the year. We have decided to use French words in the title – Au Revoir (which translates more accurately as ‘farewell until we see each other again’ rather than just ‘goodbye’) – with the added teaser line ‘Running Away from Home at Fifty’, which I believe will appeal to plenty of women of my generation. I am confronted by the usual barrage of media interviews that surround a book launch, including print and television but mostly radio. One of the first interviews is with Geraldine Doogue on her Radio National morning program ‘Life Matters’. Geraldine read the book just before publication and wants to be first cab off the rank with an interview. Logistically we have problems finding a time to suit us both, as Geraldine prefers a face-to-face interview rather than one over the phone. In the end we compromise, with me in a booth at the ABC studios in Orange and Geraldine in Sydney. With this type of technology it still sounds like an intimate interview, not a prerecorded or telephone talk.
Before the interview starts we have a chance for a brief chat and Geraldine tells me how much she has enjoyed the book, how brave she thinks I am to have written it in such a candid fashion. I’ve never really thought about it being brave – just honest, really. If you are writing down the memories of your life there’s really no alternative but to be totally honest.
The interview is gruelling. I suppose I imagine that we will chat a bit about my past but probably concentrate on what I consider to be the main thrust of the book – the desire of a woman in middle age to strike out and do something for herself rather than continue with an overcrowded life. But no, Geraldine is far more intrigued by the family story – the drinking and fighting, the suicides, the disappearance of my sister Margaret, the death of my baby sister Jane and the pain of growing up in such a disordered environment – all the material I initially resisted writing about but expanded on when prompted by my publisher. I answer every que
stion as openly and honestly and with as much good humour as possible. Listening to it played back afterwards, I certainly sound as though I am enjoying the interview, just like a lively and intimate conversation. This, of course, is exactly how it is meant to sound. But inside I begin to feel a sense of panic, that I have revealed too much and opened myself up for close scrutiny by strangers. I bounce out of the studio into David’s arms – he has been listening to every word in the soundproof radio booth next door.
‘That was a fantastic interview,’ he says ‘very powerful and involving.’
‘Let’s get out of here, quickly,’ I reply, barely able to hold back my tears.
In the car I sob for thirty minutes. I am shaken and dismayed. It was incredibly naive of me, a trained journalist, not to realise the implications of what I had written in Au Revoir. What had I expected? You cannot chronicle such a vivid and disturbing story without expecting some reaction from those who read it. I suppose I believed that because I had written my family story in an accepting and almost cheerful fashion, the elemental truths of it would not upset or disturb those who read it – another naive assumption. And I suppose I believed that having processed the trauma by writing it down, I would now be immune to being upset by it.
I do what members of my family always do in crisis – I drag David to the Orange RSL Club for a stiff drink, even though it’s only 11.30 in the morning.
