Not past it, just middle-aged

Clare Boylan contemplates with satisfaction the joys and rewards of life in the mid-forties
1 HAVE recently made an interesting discovery. There is no such thing as middle-aged women. They used to exist when I was a child. They drank a lot of tea and cried at weddings. In French literature, they were ample, experienced temptresses. In Victorian times they were, most of them, poor things, dead. This year I became 44. My father died at the age of 82 and that seems a pretty good age to me. People who live on into their 90s are still considered exceptional. By any ordinary reckoning, I have hit the half-way mark. Now and again I like to lay claim to the fact. Immediately all my well-meaning friends rush forward as if to smother a blaze. "You're not middle-aged. Why should you say such a thing? You're still young." I have hit a patch of the mountain that is full of warning signs. Sooner or later one has to make the dangerous ascent, but first one can enjoy the view from the top. I want to explore it but everyone is trying to pull me back. We live in an era dedicated to the cult of youth (though looking at youth I find it hard to understand why). A society devoted to the pursuit of pleasure can't tolerate the notion of a phase in life where vanity is not automatically assuaged, and physical gratification not guaranteed. But if nobody is willing to relinquish the selfabsorption of youth, then who is going to shape the world for the next generation? And if we are busy draping ourselves in the feathers of youth, how are the young ever going to get their chance to display. I am sick of looking at pregnant half-centenarians pretending to be young mothers, and of reading how this or that film star has surgically staved off the horror of maturity. There is, I suppose, a kind of superstition. Middle-age used to be a dismal time for women teeth and figure gone, hair ruined by tong-waving, kids getting on with their own lives, no career or money. Since women were not considered to have minds of their own, nobody gave any thought to the mental developments that follow the reproductive phase of a woman's life.
It comes as a shock all right the first time you realise you no longer belong to the up-and-coming generation. "All ow lives we were younger than everyone and now suddenly we are older than everyone," one of my longeststanding female friends recently, and startlingly, observed. It really does happen rather like that. Up to a certain point people indulge and encourage you. Then you are held responsible. You are no longer referred to in your career as
"promising" (sometimes, dauntingly, though, critics lament that you failed to live up to your promise). You are not, automatically, the object of men's indulgence and/or condescension. The reaction of most women at this point (me included) is to buy a mini-skirt. I suppose it's natural to want to hold back the years, to become everyone's little sweetie again. But there comes a stage where you realise that this is an insult to all you have achieved and survived, and a threat to, your emotional growth. And middle age is interesting. The novelist Margaret Drabble has spoken fascinatingly about the shift in one's psychological perspective from the emotional and domestic to the abstract. "When I was young," she said, "I was exploring my life in my books. As you get older, you get more and more interested in things that have nothing to do with you." Simone de Beauvoir has referred to middle-aged women as the third sex, suggesting that the woman unencumbered by domestic preoccupations grows so strong and independent as to be outside terms of sexual definition.
That is not to say that middleage means the death of femininity. Anyone can keep a good figure if they are prepared to bash themselves into shape with aerobics. HRT has taken the misery out of the menopause for a lot of women, but 1 don't think every woman should be too hasty in casting out the strange hormonallyinduced bouts of grief and insomnia. Women spend so much of their lives smiling and pacifying that perhaps one needs to let in a layer of stronger and darker emotion.
And if we are no longer so appealing to men in general, the close friendships grow more accepting, less jealous, more precious.
Much too much has been focused on the disappointments of middle-age and too little on its advantages. Middle-age brings the great revelation that you don't have to worry too much about how you look or what people think of you. In fact no-one is thinking about you all. They are too busy wondering what you are thinking about them. You are suddenly free to become eccentric. I have not miraculously relinquished vanity, insecurity and desire, but I have earned my promotion from girl to grown woman, and I won't be pushed back into the cub squad.
And besides, if people won't accept that a woman nearly half way through her fifth decade is middle-aged (and proud of it) what happens later on? Not old surely. That word has been banished from the dictionary even in regard to houses, which are now period instead of old. I refuse ever to be called a period woman.