Excerpted from her new book,
THE QUEEN OF MY SELF: WOMEN STEPPING INTO SOVEREIGNTY
IN MIDLIFE Published by Marlowe & Co./Avalon
Publishing. To be released June 2004 -- pre-order at Amazon.com
Aging and changing might be inevitable, but it ain't
easy. It precipitates in us a great uncertainty. The myriad
dramatic disturbances of modern middle life -- menopause,
health concerns, the empty nest, divorce, death, and career
shifts -- create an overwhelming crisis of identity and
purpose for us. What follows is an intense period of questioning
absolutely everything -- our goals and achievements, our
priorities and our operating systems, our morals and our
values, our fears and our fantasies.
Some of us spend a considerable amount of time -- easily
10 or 15 years -- swirling in the upheaval of this middle
age reassessment. What exactly is our role as older than
young and younger than old women who are still active
and more effective than ever? Who are we supposed to be
at this stage of our life when we are less likely to be
bound and identified by our kinship connection to someone
else -- as a daughter, a wife, a mother, a lover?
This middling transitional shift into the next stage
of our being promises us a vast world of positive possibilities
for the second half of life. But, first, before we are
able to avail ourselves of the advantages and rewards
of maturity, we must cross the Grand Canyon of midlife
change, steep, rocky, shaken, and ripped asunder by a
whole panoply of seismic ripples -- mental, emotional,
and spiritual -- beyond the obvious physical ones.
We climb and climb, and still we lose ground. The earth
that we once trusted to be solid under our feet is slipping
away and we are dragged out to sea where we bob along
in uncertain waters, in a leaky boat with no map.
In her book Goddesses in Older Women, the therapist Dr.
Jean Bolen, says that menopause is "A time of great
spiritual and creative unfolding -- although it sometimes
feels like great unraveling." Unraveling, indeed.
The whole damn sweater is falling apart and we are standing
here naked in the cold (and we are still hot).
Nothing has prepared us for this landslide of transitions
that greets us as we enter our middle years. There we
were, going along as always, then one day out of the blue,
we discover ourselves to be middle aged. Blindsided in
a youth-conscious culture, we never saw it coming, but
the overwhelming evidence of our aging can hardly be ignored.
The profound changes in the chemistry of our bodies and
in our intimate relationships, the terrifying disruptions
of our status quo, the daily life-and-death dramas, are
incredibly disorienting. Not only are we burning up physically,
blasted with flashes from our out of control internal
furnace, we are also, many of us, burnt out on an emotional
level after years of tending the home, the hearth, and
usually a job as well.
Society tells us, and our own experiences have verified,
that we will lose now that we are menopausal, everything
that has so far defined us: our power of reproductively,
our youth, our sex appeal, our children, our parents,
our spouses, our time left on the job, our very visibility.
This grim prognosis is frequently internalized by midlife
women as loss of direction, motivation, enthusiasm, and
self-esteem, our fear, our grief, expressed as confusion,
depression, and furious rage.
The relentless bombardment of losses that batters us
in every area of our lives effectively strips us of any
unrealistic, immature confidence that we once might have
had that we were safe in an unchanging and dependable
world. We were shielded by our youthful sense of indestructibility
as well as by our notoriously death-defying culture. We
now understand, because we have lived it, that nothing
and no one stays the same forever, that all things must
end sometime, that shit, does indeed, happen.
We have seen what we have seen. This rude lesson is brought
home, more often than not, on the wings of death. When
our parents sicken and die, they leave us standing alone
on the last rung of the ladder of life and we cannot help
but notice that we will be next to kick up our heels in
the ancestral conga line. It is also common for us to
start losing our husbands, friends, and contemporaries
now, which forces us with a mighty shove to confront our
own fragile mortality.
Our watch sports a much larger face these days -- not
only because we have trouble seeing it, but because we
are uncomfortably aware of time running out. In a flash,
we see that life has been moving along without us for
quite some time now. We just weren't paying attention.
We were busy, distracted by our responsibilities, lulled
and dulled by our routines and addictions, deluded by
denial. And, lo, before we realized what was happening,
we had reached, no, probably bypassed, the halfway mark
of our lives. From now on, we swear, we will make every
precious second count.
The notion that 50 years of age could be considered a
"halfway" mark is unprecedented in history.
We are blessed with an inestimable gift of many more years
of life than anyone who ever lived on Earth before us
could ever have imagined. Our future looks bright; it
is only the present that seems grim.
It is crucial that we wend our way with great concentration
and care through the crises of our midlife passage, so
that we can learn how to turn our losses into the very
lessons that will help us to achieve the life that we
want for ourselves as we age.
If we ignore our unresolved problems, chronic irritants,
and resentments, we can be sure that they will surface
as toxic stress that can cause cancer, heart attacks,
substance abuse, depression, and other debilitating and
life-threatening problems. How successfully we handle
our changes will determine the quality of our health and
wellbeing for all of our future years. Our life literally
depends on it.
At midlife, we are at a major crossroads in our lives,
and we can choose to move ahead, turn right or left, stay
where we are, or go back where we came from. The Queen,
my new archetype for mature women in charge, is an inspirational
role model for us as we wend our way through our middle
years. The Queen chooses always to choose, to involve
herself fully in the process of Her life and living, and
to actively direct the drama of Her myth.
She urges us take up the challenges of changing, of aging,
of engaging in all that life has to offer, and She reminds
us to look upon the difficulties, disruptions, disappointments,
fears, and failures we have experienced as important life
lessons, without which we could never hope to ascend to
a throne of responsibility and rule. She encourages us
to entertain the entire palette of our emotions, for there
is where we find our strength and knowledge and true value.
Some things in life just have to be learned the hard way
and evading them is counter-productive and eventually
destructive. The only way to get through them is to go
through them.
The roads leading to Queendom are diverse and many, The
way to Self-esteem can be complicated and long. Each woman
must take her own path, make her own trail, clear a passage
for herself through the thick brambles that reach up to
trip her. What roads do exist are unmapped, bumpy, and
full of potholes, tumbleweed, and road-kill.
There are no shortcuts along the Queen's Highway, no
services, no shoulders, no signage, but many detours and
cul-du-sacs. And the fare can be exorbitant. As Dear Abby,
Abigail Van Buren, once noted, "If we could sell
our experiences for what they cost us, we'd be millionaires."
Like any grand journey, the trip toward self-dominion
requires stamina, determination, and the passionate desire
to travel. But if we pack properly, check our tires frequently,
and take time for picnics, the adventure is incomparable.
And the destination of Self-empowerment is majestic.
Menopausal women are now reaching maturity just in time
to shape the new millennium for generations of women to
come. Possessing both the vital stamina of youth and the
experienced wisdom of age, our pioneering generation is
anxious to work through the debilitating panic of aging
and its negative, derogatory cultural connotations with
at least some measure of good grace. And, as a generation,
we are especially suited to such a task.
Unique in history for our unprecedented freedom, education,
individuation, worldliness, health, wealth, and longevity,
we now hold positions of hard-earned authority, responsibility,
and influence in ever-wider realms. Though certainly not
perfect, nor perfectly safe, our power is unparalleled.
Moreover, weaned on freethinking, idealism and independence,
we have been prescribing the parameters of our lives,
inventing and reinventing our culture and ourselves for
decades.
And there are more of us every day. One third of all
the women in America are over the age of 50, and one woman
reaches that milestone every 7.5 seconds. More than 4000
women enter menopause each day. As a matter of fact, climacteric
women, 50 million strong, now comprise the single largest
population segment of American society. Silent no more,
we are reading and talking and conspiring about how to
best traverse this profound transitional time in our lives.
We are determined to transform ourselves, and in the process,
redefine the parameters and archetypes of middle age.
We look to the past for grounding, we look to the future
for courage, we look to each other for inspiration, and
we look to ourselves for the answers. This is definitely
not our mothers' menopause!
You don't get to choose how you're going to die,
only how you're going to live.
-Joan Baez, American singer and songwriter
1941-