I started this week’s column thinking I would write about pants. Pants and the moon actually. I thought I would then come up with some witty heading like pantaloons and blue moons because if I can’t find alliteration, I like a bit of rhyme. But then I’ve also been experiencing low level rage this week - at politicians, at the news, at the injustice in Gaza, at the unfairness of this life for women sometimes, of the relentlessness of the mountain we have to keep climbing to convince society we are relevant, worthy and important people. And rather than dismiss the rage as another symptom of that midlife malevolence, peri/menopause, which once again actually invalidates how women feel sometimes about having some of it all while doing it all, I accepted my rage for what it was - a genuine, rational feeling. I let it bubble up through me like effervescent energy, driving me rather than clouding me, lighting my way like that big blue moon which was actually raging red.
So here goes an amalgamation of pants, moons and rage and hopefully, as a writer, I’ll find a way to tie them all together. Maybe not in a nice bow, but then maybe not as I’m so over nice these days.
I was planning to write about the rites of passage of a woman’s life through the history of her pants. About how we start off as children thinking our bits are for fun and frivolity - dainty colours and rainbow designs. Even educational pants… although I’m not sure I ever wore the right pair on the right day of the week. It’s now I probably need day-labelled pants now that brain fog is rampant.
Of how as I’ve watched my three girls change their pants with their stage, discarding the fun for the functional, experimenting with the downright unfunctional but sexy (without really knowing what sexy means) where I wince when I hang the thong things on the line.
As young girls we were told to always cover up, don’t touch, don’t ‘expose ‘ and yet within minutes it seems, some imaginary line I desperately searched for but never found, happened as my eldest grew older in teenagedom decided that exposure was worth exploring, and bum cheeks were akimbo. They dance between style and shapes and textures, from the plain of cotton to the pain of lace and string. But, alongside this, the periods arrive. Just like that, they need nighttime period pants, the spare pair pants always in the school bag, the grunge day pants for grungy teenage days.
My youngest recently joined the club and her sisters welcomed her with a text saying “Welcome to the worst part of womanhood.”
And I couldn’t blame them.
The spare pairs, the big pairs, the bloodied pairs, the sexy pairs ruined. And we trundle through into adulthood changing the size of our pants with the size of our confidence and monthly period belly.
Then I remember the indignity of the post-surgery paper pants I wore after my first C-section. Stretched over the no-longer-stretched-now-stitched skin; huge papery pantaloons to protect the most scared, scarred part of me as I cradled my newborn.
Then the pants I had to buy to upsize from the ones I’d worn before pregnancy, thinking they’d be temporary but they never reverted, two more pregnancies, two more paper pant positioned over two more scary scars.
And then, for a while at least, the pants settled. A decade where I could play with sexy and sanitary, I could be me, and my body more or less settled and my pants played out the roles I lived: the Perfunctory pants for the domestic days, the Patient pants (waiting for the weight to drop), the Pouty pants trying to save a marriage, the Safe pants for grieving and growing, the Experimental pants for daring and dating. And then the bloody menopause emptied my pant drawer of the little sexy numbers as I struggled to accommodate the menopause belly which outsizes the monthly period belly by some.
Oh it’s bloody exhausting the knickers in a twist our female bodies go through. How much pants define and impact the stages and ages of our lives. How we’re still told that bikinis are no longer acceptable as if swimming pants are an insult. My rageful self now takes joy in insulting those who think a women should have to hide her form in whatever form that takes, so the bikini makes an appearance, but the panting patriarchal narrative in my head wraps a sarong around me just to be sure. Our pants changing with the changing moon, our cycles linked to the moonly moody cycles of the universe above.
There was a super moon last week, and it was glorious just being its glorious self. So often missed and ignored but lighting the way for so many, always.
I hadn't heard the news that it was coming and so was driving home when I saw this magnificent red orb in the sky. I felt so drawn to it I drove past my driveway and kept going, following it, mesmerised. It led me to a beach (or the end of the road) and I sat in it’s gaze and felt grateful for this summer of love where I really felt I’d landed where I’m supposed to be… more to do of course, but also, so much done.
After a decade of recovering / raging / rolling with the aftermath of a marriage breakdown, single parenting, peri-menopausing, building a coaching and writing business, struggling, juggling, striving, surviving, learning, relearning, unlearning, trying to figure out who the fuck I was a single sexual woman with three teenager girls and three scary scars, dating in a midlife swamp of dating apps and bruised people with bulging baggage, I feel, like my pants, I’m ok with what I’m wearing. They fit and I fit my life now. For now. I know enough about this magnificent and extended midlife, that can change again by next Wednesday.
But for now I fit. The pants I wear and the life I lead. I’m not saying it’s easy. But it fits in a way my life hasn’t fitted me in a long while.
Parenting is still hard but I’m not so terrified.
Hustling for work is still hard but I’m not so frustrated.
Figuring out who I am is still hard but I’m not so put off by it.… and can find real places of joy in it the exploration.
And so as I sat on the beach the new super moon was a reminder of new beginnings. Of monthly cycles and new pants. A new moon means awakening… and I feel an awakening and with it comes the rage. A shedding of bullshit that keeps us women in the shade of our magnificent midlives.
Women live in a constant cognitive dissonance… we know what the truth is but the conditioning is so deeply ingrained that we judge ourselves for having thoughts of wild abandon. The more moons I witness, the older I get, the more I feel that shedding,.. the more what I know starts to come out from the shadows of what I was taught.
So maybe the super moon is a super chance to be superlative, to reflect on the shadow and how much I have come into the light. To shed the shadow of the thoughts that don’t serve me, of the thoughts that don’t belong to me, and to land in a place of awakening. And to accept with it comes the rage along with the contentment.
Can I be content and rageful?
I think the bright red moon has shown me that I can. In fact, I must be rageful.
Rageful that some of my clients - beautiful, strong women are so hurt by the inequity in their lives and marriages. That they deserve more, want more and yet are so weighed down by the layers of conditionings telling them (us, me) to be smaller, and quieter and give so much of ourselves when we want to soar and shout and shimmy and be the glorious women we want to be if it wasn’t for the crushing reality that we can have so much but the price is still that we do so much for everyone first.
As one client said to me today: “I don’t know where or who the joyful part of me is anymore.”
She said what so many women have said to me in different ways. What I have felt at times when the weight of my roles and responsibilities have smothered the joyful me.
It is so fucking hard to be a woman right now… and yes, it is also the best time to be a woman in the history of the world right now. And that makes me rageful too for all the women before.
Anger isn’t a good look on women: one of the thoughts we were taught. “Give us a smile love.” But when we know such rage as women, it’s because we know the unfairness, such hard work just to get to the point of being able to say how lucky we are to be here.
And so much of that hard work is unseen, unappreciated, unrecognised. Before we all stand on the summit, and look at the mountain we have climbed, we have to recognise that women carry more weight as we climb. The emotional burden, the physical burden, the misogyny, the ceilings, the gaps. It’s time to let the boulder roll down the hill and understand it was never ours to carry. And I remember my work is about helping women identify the inequity in their lives - not that they aren’t coping or aren’t good enough - and help them find the tools to slowly chip the boulder down to a more manageable size.
Can I be content and rageful? Yes.
I must put my big girl pants on and howl at the moon and embrace my rage in order to land in my contentment.
(and there, I tied it up in a pretty fucking bow!)
Please join me on the 9th September for a 4 week challenge to learn life-long habits that will help you listen to the rage and dance in the moonlight. All the details for my Happier Habits Challenge are below.
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I feel compelled to mention the joy I recently found in period pants, Alana. Absorbant pants for urine leaks. Unbelievably liberating to find the proper pants. I may be missing the intense crux of your piece so shall re- read. All I could think of was...she needs to know about the joy of proper pants! 😁