While Shakespeare talked about the seven ages of man, he omitted the 70 stages of woman.
(Warning: Rant ahead.
Quelle Surprise! Listen, as the fabulous book Invisible Women: Exposing data bias in a world designed for men by Caroline Criado Perez explored, women have been mere accessories to the Patriarchy since time memorial, with little to no consideration of the fact that we are different in every way. Just one of hundreds of examples Perez explains in her book, is that women were more badly injured in car crashes because there hasn’t been a ‘female’ shaped crash test dummy until fairly recently and so seatbelts were designed for men’s body’s only. We just need to look at the fact that despite half the population experiencing menopause, it’s only become a seriously discussed topic - albeit still with woeful research - recently. So no bloody quelle surprise actually that Shakespeare stuck to his seven male ages.)
Ok, rant over.
For now.
Let’s get back to women’s 70 stages.
Men might have their seven ages, but women shape-shift and transform through multiple stages, phases and versions throughout our lives, inside and out. And this can be a discombobulating process, one we often don’t acknowledge or support ourselves through properly which is why women are so often disconnected from ourselves because we never know quite who, why, where or how we are half the time.
From the moment we begin puberty, our bodies are in monthly transition: our bodies, our moods, our functioning. As we move from adolescence into adulthood, we transition from girls into women and then never stop. Throughout our lives we transition into roles in a much deeper sense than our male counterparts. We literally embody motherhood (or judged if not). We very physically and then emotionally transition into mothers, and then we very physically and emotionally transition into a different stage of after-fertile-life through menopause.
The old Patriarchal system strategically set the roles of women as accessories… the daughters, mothers, sisters, grandmothers, wives to the men. The notion that a woman can be a person in her own right is a shockingly new idea. Even the ceremony of marriage ensured we are ‘given away’ as if we do not own ourselves.
I’m currently visiting my dad and am writing this from my teenage bedroom and can’t but wonder at the transformations of myself since I first stood at this mirror as a young teenager to the woman reflected back now 30 years later. Last night I was flicking his TV channels and came across a show my mum used to love, called Butterflies. We watched it so religiously in the late 1970’s and early 1980 when I was transitioning into teenagehood, that I still occasionally hum the theme tune, a version of Dolly Parton's “Love is like a butterfly”. But it was only last night I realised how relevant that song was… because it’s not just love that is fragile and transient, transformative and strong, but a woman’s life. The main character Ria desperately wanted a life for herself, not just be seen as the accessory to her husband and sons.
Her husband, a butterfly-catching dentist and her two sons take her for granted and she is a bored housewife “with thoughts in my head, you know!” desperate to shake the shackles that kept her rigid in roles that gave no scope for her to explore who she was as a person. When she tells him she wants to get a job, he exclaims that her job is him and complains “Why can’t you just be a housewife?”
As I watched it with my mum all those years ago, who was in her own transition at the time from young midlife women to invisible in societal eyes, I was too busy drooling over the two sons to realise how she must have felt so seen and heard because despite it being a comedy, it explored the frustrations women felt being confined to the accessory sub-plot of men’s lives with no further trajectory of substance once their main role of breeder was finished.
Transitional Times
Which is why we are the generations of women in the transition between Patriarchy and Equity because we’ve moved away from that rigidity but have not come close yet to a system that supports and empowers women to be who they want and need to be, alongside whatever roles they choose to embrace. So we struggle to straddle the two opposing theories - that a woman’s value lies in who she is to others and that a women’s value is in who she is to herself.
From early life we are moulded into the societal shape deemed delicate and docile. Despite myself coming from fairly liberal parents growing up in the 1980’s, still the gender guidance was specific and strong in my home: when my brother went out on a Saturday night he was waved off and told to “have a good time!”. When I went out on a Saturday night I was warned off and told to “be good and stay safe!”. We were transitioned from human being to Good Girls in a slow, seething, un-noticed campaign.
Then we transition from single to wife in a way that is different to men. A man is called Mr whether he is single or married. A woman was denoted by her relationship to a man - Miss for single and Mrs for married - until the ambiguous Ms crept in recently.
Throughout this now long and extended midlife, we go through so many transitions: in our careers (often changing, adapting, progressing in different ways because of children); in our relationships with others, marriages, increased separation and divorce; transitioning in our roles from pressured parenting to bird launchers (I refuse to say empty nester as it implies we are now redundant when in fact we are the generations transitioning into a whole exiting new phase of younger for longer post-family-raising re-purposement); we transition, often through years of care and even sandwich care caught between care of parents and children, from being daughter to parentless.
And it is often the transition between roles that we can really struggle with. I work with women in midlife particularly in the transition from perhaps spending 25 years raising a family to children leaving home, or divorce and separation or menopause and ageing. We go through natural transition through menopause into this whole new phase of our lives and yet when we try to do that with some level of autonomy we are faced with creams shouting anti-ageing. We are faced with research-proven gendered ageism on a crippling level and I see this all the time with some of my clients. We have been told the transition to older is wrong, yet we’re here, thank you very much, vibrant and valiant and demanding to be relevant.
Women are in a constant state of flux, because our lives tend to be so pulled by external demands and expectations, and even our transitions through our own bodies can take decades. As I said, it’s discombobulating.
We transition in terms of what’s acceptable or not. If I was born in the 1930’s or 40’s I’d have been “ideal” with hips and boobs and an hourglass figure, but being born in 1970 means that in the 1980’s when I was transitioning from child to woman, the body du jour was Kate Moss. That meant I was no longer “ideal” which has impacted me all of my life. Over the years, while women’s bodies are women’s bodies there has been near constant transition in what is ideal and not. From Torpedo bras to waif look, from the lean, toned supermodel to the androgynous feminine, it’s been exhausting for women as our bodies transition thought fertility, pregnancy, post-pregnancy, menopause, we’ve also had to deal with the bullying bullshit of the unreal “ideal”.
After 40 years of pilates-ing my arse to the small firm shape of ideal, now big bums are in. My daughter asked me recently, “Does my bum look big in this skirt?” and I felt a PTSD flush of terror before I remembered this is now a good thing and I nodded. The only place we haven’t transitioned to is bodily autonomy to look our own version of ideal.
And women are constantly transitioning into and between the different roles that they play. And it can be utterly exhausting.
Transitions on your terms
And in so much transition, we need to stay centred. While the tornado of life swirls around us, we need to be standing in our own calm centre.
In each transition we need to recover. To make peace with the before and make ready for the next.
We need to reset, ground ourselves in who and how and where we are now.
Then we need to relove, our repurpose or reveal ourselves more fully to we move forward with confidence in ourselves, clarity about who we are regardless of the roles, and courage about where we want to go.
I love this quote from Jane Fonda in a recent Bazaar interview: “My energy doesn’t come from anybody else. It comes from inside myself.”
Oh if every woman can learn that. I have always sensed it and have had access to my own energy source throughout my life - sometimes a lot of it, and sometimes not very much, depending on my particular transition. But now, in this glorious midlife that we women are redefining, I know I have to access it all. No-one is coming to save me. Or you. The biggest transition of all in this time of enormous transition from patriarchy to equity is the transition to live from the inside out not the outside in.
That’s why all of my coaching, writing, and speaking starts with self-discovery. Women weren’t taught to self-know. We were taught to serve others, to know what others needed and wanted without accessing what we needed or wanted.
Only from a place of self-connection can we connect to the right pathway (and I not suggesting for a second that makes any of it easy by the way).
As we write the coloured markers on this virgin landscape, as we role model and fight and trailblaze and figure out who and how we can be rather than who and how we should be in the transitional period between what was and what can be, the most important transition is the one where we start to listen and use our own voices - for ourselves - to love and learn from ourselves, to lead and inspire, to explore and experiment ourselves, to challenge and champion ourselves.
A woman recently booked a coaching session with me. She is in her early 60’s and she wants to leave an unhappy marriage, repurpose a 40 year career and stop living on everyone else’s terms. She has a lot of work to do, a lot of painful and potent decisions to make, she has to gather her wits and her bravery and find the right direction and as we finished our session, and I asked her most of all, what does she want, what is this transition she is instigating, she simply said:
“I want to feel alive by the time I retire.”
And I sat back and smiled because that is the goal: to transition from living to feeling alive.
As I leave my old family home again to return to my own family home where my three teenage daughters are transitioning into the next stages of their multi-staged life, I stand in front of the same mirror where I once stood as a teenager 40 years ago, seeing her then and me now reflecting back in the same glass, marvelling at all I have become, some of it through adventure, accessing my own energy, coming out as a butterfly from a chrysalis when life fell apart, some of it boring and mundane, some through hard lessons and I know that I am lucky to know that I never want to stop transitioning through life to become all I can become.
I’d love to know how you are transitioning right now, so please join me in the comments below (if you’re reading this in an email, please click on the link below to go through to the website to join the conversation.)
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Come join me on the 30th June! Discount for paid subscribers!
RENEW - Recover, reset & relove after divorce
Myself and Genevieve have been taking about this one day retreat for over a year, and I just wish I’d had something like this when I was going through my own divorce.
We’re going to be workshopping with practical tools and holding space in three areas: recovery, reset and relove.
Recovery - looking at past patterns, we’ll be doing a how to let go of the past ritual, and giving practical tools for navigating the actual process of divorce in terms of defining your big picture, establishing clear boundaries, and co-parenting.
After lunch we focus on Reset… focussing on your present values and needs, checking in with who and how you are now, and defining what success looks and feels like for all aspects of your new life.
And finally in the afternoon we’ll be looking at relove - your future choices and chances and how to make sure you are embarking on a new love / sex adventure with the right curiosity and intentions.
All the details are here and we’d love to have you along in Howth on the 30th June. If you are one of my lovely paid subscribers, email me at alana@alanakirk.com for 10% discount code.
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