I came across a book yesterday about birth stories. It was a collection of essays meant to convey the beauty of the experience while also owning up to the horror. The premise was that women’s heads get filled with ideas of soft music and dim lighting, their partner standing by their side saying encouraging things, and then the doctor or midwife says “push,” and the baby slides out.
While the baby will come out by hook or by c-section, many of us get only the briefest moment of relief before someone is stitching us up in a place the good lord never intended for sutures and our nipples start cracking. The book sought to right this wrong by injecting a healthy dose of reality.
I believe someone also needs to prepare women for middle age. In recent years menopause came out of the closet, but most of this talk is more medical than experiential.
What I’m interested in is how it feels in the years between youth and becoming an innocuous wrinkled sensible-shoe wearing senior citizen. I’m curious to discern if I am the only fifty-something-year-old woman who woke up to find herself invisible at the very moment I have finally acquired the confidence to be seen. I do not mean physically seen. While I have no quarrel with the myriad fabulous-after-fifty fitness and style gurus, that’s not what’s on my mind.
What is on my mind is how to elevate the wisdom and humor of women who have lived through some stuff, who have lost and gained the same twenty pounds over a decade, and who have finally acquired the insight to eat the damn cookie and get on with it. Getting on with it is the superpower of middle-aged women.
The Bonus Room 