THE TYRANNY of trying to stop time in our faces and bodies is robbing us of the chance to experience the full throttle joy of living in the moment.
My sons came across a photograph of me recently taken when I was just about to set off for university. “Look at you, Ma,” my youngest son said,” trying to make the picture of the old me fit with the real life version of his mother sitting beside him.
There’s a lot of water under the proverbial bridge since then and the girl in the photograph would most definitely have considered the age I am now ‘old’. Our youth obsessed culture tells us it’s downhill all the way once you’re over the age of 40 and yet I know people in their 40’s, 50’s and beyond who are living if not their best lives, then certainly their happiest lives now.
My child bearing days are over are over but I feel like this is probably the most fertile time in my life, strange as it sounds given that ‘fertility’ is only associated with such a brief window in a woman’s life. My children are more independent and lifting my head above the parapet of early motherhood I can see that I’m standing in a rich, loamy ground of experience to draw from and create from.
Since that college photograph was taken, there’s been love, losses, joy in abundance, heart-stopping sadness and treacle thick grief to wade through. These are the things that go hand in hand with life. Some lessons were hard won. There were little victories that meant the world. My heart holds hurts that will likely never heal but have got easier to carry.
I draw more deeply from life’s well now even though the cultural narrative tells us that if you’re not in the first flush of youth, your value is somehow less. No matter how many advances we make, it feels like women especially are running to standstill in this youth-obsessed time warp.
Director Coralie Fargeat’s bloody body horror film The Substance is currently prompting plenty of discussion about women and our preoccupation with ageing (or preferably not). The story’s jumping off point is the violent swerve in attitudes once a woman has turned 50 and hits what society deems to be her best before date. Demi Moore and Margaret Qualley play the older and younger versions of a woman at war with herself over getting older.
It’s entertaining and yet Hollywood seems unable to see a woman in all in her flaws and glory. In its slick, visceral sending up of oppressive beauty standards, it still somehow misses an opportunity to delve into how it doesn’t have to be a battle between old and young. How much more interesting it could have been for the old and young versions of the character to learn from one another, to realise that one was becoming the other all along, that they might in fact be proud of one another. They could be friends, not foes.
The real body horror in our society is how so many women and young girls seem unhappy with how they look. Filters, fillers, tweakments and surgeries are all part of the arms race in the modern fight against ageing. But if we are so caught up with trying to defy ageing, I would argue that we are spending precious time not actually living our ‘one wild and precious life’ as poet Mary Oliver calls it.
Valuing our own worth rather than slavishly buying lotions and potions that tell us we’re worth it and seeing the tremendous richness in our lived experience is counter cultural in a world that prioritises the shiny and the new.
But if we look closely there are lighthouses guiding the way; women who give us a path to follow in making sense of our messy lives in this messy world. They might be older women we admire who were unafraid to live life on their terms. As Michelle Obama spells out in the title of her book, we’re all ‘becoming’.
The actor Maggie Smith, who died last week, reminded us that every decade can be our best and that the important thing is to keep moving. “The ending of one thing is also the beginning of another. What is the next adventure? There is room enough in this life – with its many endings, its many beginnings – for things you could not have imagined last week or last year or ten years ago,” she said.
They say the past is a different country but we were still the same person back then, just a different version. Like a stacking Russian doll, we keep emerging from what we were. If we’re lucky we will recognise the beauty in all the versions of ourselves and not lament the lack of lines on our faces in the photographs of the past. No matter what age we are, we’re all still becoming.
We’ll shed many skins in this lifetime if we’re lucky. Being comfortable in the one we’re in is something worth striving for.