Midlife

Why midlife can feel like grief even when nothing has gone wrong.

This is for the women. That’s it. All of us.

When I read that only around 3 mammal species have menopause, I was proud. I thought that was cool. Go humans! Then I realised that the other species like whales honour their midlife females, understanding the value of the knowledge and wisdom that comes with successful survival. Who knows the hunting grounds and the safe passages when migrating? Well, for good old humans, this knowledge is passé. We build shelves and cages for our older women, ones that we not only have to fight out of but feel like we’re fighting internally too.

Reading about it all brings up the ‘grandmother hypothesis’, the idea that complex social systems benefit from older matriarchal knowledge of foraging and child-rearing. The cessation of being able to procreate erases competition between the generations and allows the elder to invest in the functioning of her family, helping the younger to survive.

So, is that true for humans? As a modern society we no longer understand the natural rhythms of life; we don’t live in connection with the land, and women are seemingly only valued for our breeding capacity and our youth. Both of which fade long before most of us drop off the mortal coil.

Do older women hold lived knowledge and learned wisdom? Yep. Is it valued? Do you really need me to answer that?

In this era, we have access to the most brilliant female minds (thank you, Internet). There are platforms and stages where knowledgeable, intelligent, and, of course, thoughtful discourse is served up for us to consume. There are tired women, angry, sad, despairing women all screaming into a void with voices growing hoarse from the effort, yet the number one factor tying them all together (according to keyboard warriors who need a shower and a mirror) is that they’re old, unattractive, or both.

Endless attacks on appearance. Or life choices or mistakes made in our past that we learned from and gained wisdom worth imparting.

Which has absolutely zero to do with anything.

Most of us are feeling grief, even if in our own lives nothing has gone particularly wrong. Because we should all be in this together. I’ve noticed as I age, as women, we do seem to feel the need to reach out to each other. But the gap between the generations is wider than ever. The further away from extended family gatherings to the insular world of social media we get, the less the young look to their elders for guidance. They now get it on a screen. This is true for all genders.

The inevitability of ageing is, to me, the strangest and strongest thing to point out to the young women who have been soaked in patriarchy and join the derision chorus. “You too, lovely, will age. What you say now will reflect in your mirror a lot faster than you ever thought possible.” I’m still not sure when it became a sin to age. My grandmother looked like a grandmother before she had grandchildren. I’ll bet it never crossed her mind to dye her steel grey hair at 45.

I missed out on the grandmotherly advice train from my own family. My dad’s mother passed when I was around 2 years old. My single memory of her is when we visited her in the hospital, and she stroked my hair. My mum’s mum, the above-mentioned grey-haired matriarch, was strict, harsh and vocally disapproving of me. But my early high school best friend lived with her grandparents, and I called her grandmother Gran, too. She was the white-haired, biscuit-baking, sweet, lovely soul that one imagines a grandma to be. I don’t even know her real name. She was just… Gran. We all have titles. She seemed to love that one.

We have a natural disorientation around midlife as humans. We live so far apart from the rhythms of the natural world that we don’t even know what to do, and our own grandmothers were so silenced by patriarchy that they didn’t sit around telling us what was to come. Shameful, never to be spoken about secrets about women that were uncomfortable and messy and just not valued.

But we have ways of connecting now that they never had. We can share information; we can talk to each other and normalise it as it should always have been. We can tell our children the truth, especially our sons, who should never be made to feel like they get a pass or that it’s nothing to do with them. They wouldn’t even be here without it all.

We need to tell them about midlife, about waking up every night at 3am, so tired before the day even starts. Looking at the years stretching ahead of us and feeling so isolated and uncertain that the idea of living those years feeling like this is more daunting than it should be. It’s the awful skin prickling feeling of not knowing how long this disorientation lasts or whether it ever goes away, feeling completely discombobulated in a life that from the outside still looks pretty ok.

You are not alone in feeling like this. At this moment, it’s 3am somewhere in the world, and a woman is awake right now feeling exactly what you feel, with no one to tell or to understand her. That’s the grief. Not because anything has gone wrong but because we didn’t have our grandmothers to warn us or normalise it, and we’re moving through it in the dark.

They think that Asian elephants also have menopause, but there has been less study of them than that done on the whales. Toothed whales apparently live years longer due to menopause. Mammals with teeth. We have teeth. Maybe it’s time to bare them.

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