So I’ve raised a family and earned a living and spent twenty-odd years running around like a headless chook and now, like so many women around the world, I’m standing on top of the hill that I’ve not only climbed but have also built, and I’m looking at the view and wondering, ‘Is this all there is?’
I wonder whether this is contributing to my ache.
Some people describe the years of raising your children and working yourself ragged as a period of anaesthetisation, because it’s only when the job is done, the career is achieved and the children raised that the exhausted delirium wears off and you realise the agony it’s been masking. But whether life is a matter of pain avoidance, a test to enter heaven or merely a series of endless attempts to keep ourselves amused, there comes a time when the old rules simply no longer apply, because it seems to me a new game is about to be played – the dangerous sport of the Midlife Crisis.
It’s an interesting phenomenon, the Midlife Crisis for women. Occurring just when we’re about to stop enduring our period and just before we reach menopause, it’s further proof that God is a man.
The Midlife Crisis used to be the domain of men, like the golf course or the urinal. It used to be the excuse for blokes buying Harley-Davidsons or dating much younger women, or suddenly coiffing their hair in a neatly tied grey ponytail (with an optional comb-over). But the Midlife Crisis is unisex now. Women are leaving their husbands when the kids move out and suffering lipo and boob jobs and needle jabs until their faces have all the expression of a refrigerator door. But then again, why not? Many women are leading what were previously thought of as masculine lives anyway. Women are creating business empires, running marathons, trekking mountains and sleeping with their trainers (who are sometimes other women).
The Female Midlife Crisis is a time of finding answers and finding even more questions, and it’s a time when, like never before, you can hear a clock ticking because the first thing that goes as you reach the forty-year mark is the luxury of eternal time. This is a moment when some women shine and others crumble. This is an age when suddenly mortality looms. The pandemic of breast cancer touches our lives, friends’ husbands have heart attacks and the tide has turned as we now nurture our parents.
I wonder why everyone I know is suddenly telling me that they’re constipated, or why my mother wants to be buried in a cardboard box.
I wonder whether any of us ever really learns anything in this life? Or has God got such a sense of humour that he makes anyone on the verge of being old and wise suddenly get dementia?
I wonder whether the rest of my life will be a time of great adventure or great loneliness? Is the decision really up to me or can I find solace and comfort, as so many women my age do, by seeking the affirmation of my predetermined existence through clairvoyants and liver-cleansing diets? Am I going to end up as one of those women who substitutes love for fifty-three varieties of organic herbal tea in the pantry and the possession of two cats that will forever be an excuse for never travelling further than Budgewoi for an overnight stay? Will the puzzle of life all suddenly become clear as I continue to age or is that all a load of codswallop propaganda designed to once again placate the battle-weary woman who’s had PMT for thirty years and is next to face the distress of menopause (which everyone says is absolutely foul, lasts for a decade and only stops in time for you to clarify your will and clean your house, do a quick cruise of the Mediterranean in some giant floating theme park, disembark and then die) ?
Suddenly my daughter appears and announces that she’s cleaned her room and is ready to go driving. I go to check her room, because you can’t trust anyone, especially your own offspring, and lo and behold it is kind of clean, particularly if you ignore the fact that she’s managed to get rid of the pile of newly washed clothes that lay on her bed by placing them all back in the wash basket.
We decide that she can drive us to the local charity bin to drop off some old stuff, and lug seven full garbage bags of clothing down our four flights of stairs. We get in the car and drive to an intersection.
‘Which way do you want to go, Mum?’ she asks.
‘I don’t know,’ I reply.
And I realise that this trip is a bit like my life in that I don’t have a clue where I’m going but I’ve sure got a hell of a lot of baggage.
A Decent Obsession
And you know, while we sit at the intersection, with my daughter driving and my aching heart now in my mouth, I wonder whether a search for contentment is an indecent obsession. With millions, perhaps billions, suffering in the world through starvation, disease, war and abuse, do I really have any right to desire to ‘fill an empty space in my heart’ … particularly considering it wasn’t caused by a bullet?
Is it greedy to want to make this ache in my heart go away? Is emotional disquiet the human lot and I’m simply foolish to imagine that it will ever be gone? Or is an internal emptiness the quiet luxury of a spoilt middle-class Westerner who, having covered the rudimentary food and shelter questions of existence, doesn’t need to spend from dawn until dusk exhaustedly foraging for sustenance for one’s family, building a makeshift shelter or fearfully seeking protection from hostile military factions and therefore has the time to self-indulge?
Navel-gazing and discontentment certainly seem to be the pandemic of the society which apparently ‘has everything’. But is it wrong to hope that there is a greater purpose to our existence? Because otherwise the reason for our lives appears simply to be to create others so that they might then spend their lives wondering about the purpose of their existence.
Is the whole life thing much more simple than I imagine?
Am I just asking way too much of it?
Put It in an Envelope
Every parent I know has had the following conversation with their kids.
‘Eat your dinner. I made it specially for you.’
‘I don’t like it.’
‘There are children in the world who are starving, you know.’
‘Well, put it in an envelope and send it to them.’
I wonder what the starving children say to their parents. I wonder whether any of their parents feel an ache in their hearts and don’t know why – or is it pretty clear why your heart is aching if the children you love are dying of starvation?
I turn the news on in the car for company. I hear that 300 people in the world are now dead from a brand-new contagious disease, which is spreading faster than the press can think of an acronym for it. No one knows whether the world is panicking in their reaction or whether this is a potentially rampant worldwide epidemic, capable of killing multiple millions. Some think the disease is just getting a lot of attention because there is no new footage of the latest American war. Others think the disease might be getting coverage because Britain isn’t doing very well in the cricket.
In the paper on my lap I read of a woman in Pakistan who was set on fire by members of her own family because she was raped by the man from the neighbouring village. I read that a man in Cambodia was stoned to death because they confused him with someone else. I read of two boys diving into a river to save their drowning mother … only for all three to lose their lives. I read that twelve per cent of surveyed Americans think that Joan of Arc was Noah’s wife.
I see a banner headline that reads Cult Admits it May Have Mixed Up its Armageddon Dates. I search the newspaper for the relevant story and discover that shortly after the world didn’t end at two p.m. yesterday, the cult leader announced that the end of the world has now been delayed for a week.
I read that eating a variety of different-coloured foods can make you feel more full.
I read that in Perth a beauty therapist is going for the Guinness World Record in bikini-line waxing. Her aim is to complete one hundred waxes in four hours. My immediate response is jealousy … because I wish that I had goals like her.
Carsick
We’re still in the car. My daughter Tadpole is still driving (though I use that term loosely).
‘You do realise,’ I say, ‘that you went round that corner very very fast?’
‘You’re supposed to accelerate into corners.’
‘Yes, but maybe not that fast.’
‘Shut up, Mum. You can’t even see the speedometer from where you’re sitting.’
‘No, but I can see us driving faster than every other car on the road.’
‘That’s because they’re parked,’ says Tadpole.
‘No,’ I reply. ‘They are not parked. It’s just that compared to your speed, they look like they are.’
‘Mum!’ Tadpole suddenly screams and turns to face me while still driving. ‘If you don’t stop interrupting my concentration, I swear to God we’re going to have an accident, and it will be all your fault.’
Tadpole changes the radio station and turns the volume up distractingly loud. (While she’s yelling abuse at an elderly pedestrian, I switch the station to easy-listening music and then wonder why ‘easy-listening’ music is so hard to listen to.)
Having finished her yelling, there is a moment of relative quiet during which Tadpole realises that someone in the car has changed the radio station … and it wasn’t her. I pretend to be asleep so she won’t think it was me … even though I’m the only other person here.
The Dream Team
I close my eyes and snore softly. During this time I wonder whether, when I die, I will realise that all the time I thought I was asleep I was actually awake, and that the real part of life occurred when I was sleeping, during the dreams that I thought were imaginary.
I hope this doesn’t happen because I don’t have many fabulous dreams. The night before last I dreamt that I was in a bank queue. No, the bank wasn’t held up and I didn’t save the galaxy, it was quite simply an entire dream devoted to me standing in a line. Sadly, meanwhile in the real world, things were much more interesting. A man in Detroit robbed a bank on his way home from work. He wore a balaclava to disguise his face but neglected to remove his name tag from the outside of his work shirt. In the real world an African man went to a witch doctor to be made invisible and then held up a bank for fifteen hours, only stopping when he saw his image on the security monitor and realised he wasn’t invisible at all.
Oh, yes, interesting things were happening in the real world but in my rich and fantastic subconscious, nothing of this sort seems to occur. ‘Queue-standing’ isn’t even interesting enough to appear in a dream analysis book as a symbol or metaphor in a world where anything straight, bent, long or short represents either great wealth or a penis.
But if dreams truly are indicative of the complexities and intrigues that our lives hold, then things do not augur well for moi in terms of life goals and achievements. This worries me because I’ve had a haunting fear since early childhood that I will lead an uninteresting life, and that when I’m dying and my life flashes before my eyes I’ll be so bored I’ll fall asleep.
I remember my dreams because I wake up so many times in the night. When I was little I used to wake myself with the wheezing violin-strain sounds of my asthma and my mum would come to open the window even wider and pat me back to sleep in her bare feet and homemade burnt-orange corduroy dressing-gown shaped like a kaftan. (‘It’s amazing,’ my mum used to say. ‘You just buy two and a half metres of fabric, sew it up both sides, put half a plate over the fold, cut around it, then pull the material over your shoulders, stick your head through … and voila!’) I remember that those wheezing nights were the only time I ever had my mum all to myself.
In those days a woman showed her love for her family by pursuing arts and crafts in her fragments of spare time, weaving lampshades and crocheting wind chimes and then forcing her children to wear them. So with myself and my similarly well dressed billion* siblings (all born within a nine-year period), time shared one-on-one with our parents was understandably not at a premium. But growing up in those days wasn’t about nurturing the individual, it was about moving in a pack, it was about conforming, and it was about not indulging oneself with the pursuit of selfish needs and idiosyncrasies. It was a different era of parenting. It was about teaching your kids to share and fit in, in stark contrast to today’s ethos where dads can be heard whispering to the embryo through the mother’s belly button, ‘Oh, we think you’re so special!’
My generation was raised with similar words but used in a different order to form the antithetical and accusatory phrase, ‘What makes you think you’re so special!!!’
I recall clearly that this was a rhetorical question and the correct response was an apology, not the response that kids would give today whereby they’d actually answer with a list.
I wonder whether the way we grew up has caused the ache in my heart. Maybe, but then wouldn’t everyone of my generation have the ache? Certainly my siblings would. But they don’t seem to have the ache at all.
Maybe I’m just having a really, really slow heart attack.
Blood is Thicker
It would be kind of a relief to hear that my siblings had the same heartache. Not that I’d wish it on them. But I would find it strangely comforting, as it would stop me feeling so alone.
It’s entirely understandable that there must be some residue from our childhoods that possessed so little individual attention from our parents. So time-poor in fact was our upbringing that my parents often didn’t refer to us by our christened names at all but simply by the number of our birth. ‘Number One daughter, Number Two son, Number Three, Number Four.’ I was and am Number Six* and to this day I dread the chaos this will bring to my life should I ever take up bingo.
(I was coincidentally reminded of abbreviated forms of communication recently when I bumped into a bloke who told me he’d been working ‘twenty-four sev’. I didn’t have a clue what he was talking about until I realised that ‘twenty-four sev’ is the phrase people use when they’re too busy to complete the word ‘seven’.)
Anyway, the point is that I relished my precious time alone with my mum and would secretly resist her efforts to woo my asthmatic self to slumber as she patted my back, just so that I could enjoy her focused attention. She never said much during these dark, comforting nights because she was no doubt completely worn out and knew that it was only a matter of hours before she was to be up again burning canned spam for Dad’s breakfast.
So asthma, malnutrition or fear of the fashion police – whatever the reason, I slept intermittently as a child. And then I finished high school and moved out, away from the family and the tree outside my very open bedroom window that I then discovered was the cause of my so-far lifelong allergic asthma. But by then the restless sleep had become part of my template and so I packed it in my bags and took it with me.
A Bit of Spit
The difference is that when you’re a teenager your restless, sleepless moments can be filled with daydreams of all that you will do in life and the fabulous people you will do it with. And when you get older those magical moments of unbridled optimism are replaced with relentless, tortuous worry – worrying about how you’ll afford the kids’ dental work, worry about how you’ll wake up in time to take your son to rowing at five a.m., worry about how you’ll fix the leak in the roof or the rust in the car, worry about how you’ll afford the relatives’ Christmas presents (and it’s still only July!).
And then you might worry about your constant headache and whether it’s due to stress or a brain tumour, worry about your health insurance, worry about your will, worry about what the hell you’ll do if works dries up, worry about whether you will have to go and live on a boat, worry that the children will get seasick, worry that the relentless sun on the open sea will give you all skin cancer, worry about how you will ever get the energy together to face another day, worry whether life will ever get easier, worry about w
hatever happened to all your old friends (you know, the people you knew before you married a man who showers in his underwear).
Maybe all those friends I imagined were actually imaginary. Maybe I was more lovable before I fell in love. Maybe I was more lovable years and years ago before the strain of raising two children on my own began to show in my skin, my hair, my stoop, my clothes and the way I sometimes wipe things from the corner of a complete stranger’s mouth using a bit of my spit on the end of my sleeve.
Maybe I really have passed my use-by date. Maybe that’s why the ache is getting worse.
Maybe everybody knows this and they’re all just too scared to tell me. Maybe they think it’s funny that I’ve passed my use-by date yet still venture out in public. Maybe I’m like that one-legged blind man at the end of our street who sings ‘Yankee Doodle Dandy’ while trying to tap dance and just keeps on falling over.
Maybe I should send a card of apology to everyone in the universe.
Sorry (For Just Being Me)
But then maybe I’d send it and then regret sending it, so I’d have to send another card.
Sorry for sending you that card that said Sorry (For Just Being Me)
Maybe I should leave all of the negativity out of the issue and just send a personalised card to everyone I’ve ever met in the universe, which simply says:
Thank You
But then again maybe the recipients would think I was being sarcastic. Maybe I’d send the card and then worry that everyone receiving it would think I was being rude. And then I’d have to send another card that said:
The Night my Bum Dropped Page 13
