Why we should all be asking a women her age
She'll revel in the answer
When I was growing up as a teenager, I would sit on my lovely mum’s bed while she lamented her thinning hair and bulging belly. She was in her 50’s and although she didn’t really have a name for it (it’s menopause by the way, oh and natural ageing) it just felt like she was slowly diminishing. I could see her - not diminishing in my eyes, but increasingly believing she was diminishing in the eyes of society.
And let’s face it, if she had looked for external reassurance that this was not thus, she’d have been looking a long time. This was the rip-roaring decade of the 1980’s feminism forcibly dismantling the patriarchy brick by brick. Not. Certainly not in Northern Ireland where everything felt a bit behind the bright expansion of other places.
This was the decade of ladettes and lads and Benny Hill and misogynist, ageist bullshit everywhere, where no women over the age of 30 were allowed on the TV screen lest their wonderful faces full of character and beauty and experience shattered the glass screens. Yes some glass ceilings were being smashed but not the TV screens it seems. Age and experience were only allowed to show on a man’s face and in his greying, balding hair. There were plenty of old ugly men on the screen but apparently it didn’t matter that women had to keep their dinner down while watching them. Only pert and pretty women, but as many old and ugly men as could squash around a politics panel show.
I still remember when the main newsreader of the BBC news, Angela Rippon, was told by BBC bosses as she approached 50 that she had to make room for younger women. (And what a delight it is to see her still be making programs at the glamorous and wise and witty age of 78). Yet plenty of men were able to keep reading the news well into their 60’s because funnily enough, it’s about skill and experience, not the colour of your roots.
My mum would try on clothes to go out with pals and she’d come into my room as I revised for exams to ask if the outfit made her look too young.
“Do I look like mutton dressed as lamb?” she would worry. And I would duly tell her she looked lovely and tried to help her pick her confidence up off the floor so she could go out in public and not be embarrassed to still be a vibrant, valiant, woman with friends who loved her, and a family who needed her despite the external social narrative that she was now official desexualised and devalued because she had the temerity of hitting 50 and still pursuing life.
Now? As I try on new clothes to go out, I go into my daughter’s room and ask “Do I look too old in this?”
In just one generation the mother to daughter question has been flipped.
Now, instead of balking at the idea of revealing one’s age, women are revelling in the reveal.
It’s less about age-defying and all about age redefining.
And it’s like a contagion. Like the genie let out of the bottle, now women are on the rampage to ageing wonderfully, proudly and pointedly. And powerfully.
My mum felt embarrassed to be asked her age - not because she had a problem with it but because society did.
Well I’ve been seeing a lot of Fuck That’s lately. What I’m hearing and seeing and feeling is how women are also emerging into their ages, rejecting the Age of Anti-Ageing Propaganda. I hear it over and over again - the dropping of fucks and the raising of hopes.
In this fab post,
discusses the recent research that has caused some stirs that concludes there are two clear points of our lives where there is noticeable ageing - 44 and 60, in both men and women (menopause is not related which needs to sit with us for a minute). And while that may be true physically, I don’t think it’s true psychology. In this piece, the writer talks about having a bounce and that is what I see over and over again in the women I meet. This is what she writes - “When I do these things, it’s not as if I’m trying to relive my youth - I’m often surrounded by midlifers also having a great time. Which is why I feel like the narrative around midlife crises needs to be changed, because it’s not what I’m seeing around me.”
The narrative is changing and we have to continue the charge of changing it, by being the women to redefine every aspect of the outdated version of women and middle age, and age in general. Society used to push women off a cliff when they had fulfilled their duty as birther of children…. Now we are picking our bloodied selves up and giving birth back to ourselves.
We do know that hormonally we drop a lot of the cuddle hormone oxytocin as we get older… which collides beautifully with this rebirthing, and we start to care less externally and care far more about ourselves internally. That doesn’t mean we stop being a loving mum or partner or daughter or colleague, but we do it with far better perspective, with a little more fucks about ourself and a lot less about pleasing others.
I love how
puts it in this great piece about how getting older being more liberating - “After a certain age and with less fucks to give it's harder to keep us quiet and demure.”
It’s a fab read and a rally cry to the younger women coming behind us to turn down the volume switch from all the thoughts and bullshit that tells a women who and how to be and to start listening more to our own voices that know who and who we want to be.
And in this detailed, enlightening piece,
explains how even the narrative around menopause can be adding to the doom and gloom ageing story. They say: “Quental, Gaviria and del Bucchia say their work may have been fueled by the rising awareness of menopause, but it was “animated” by a powerful statement American anthropologist Margaret Mead made in the 1950s: “The most powerful force in the world is a menopausal woman with zest.”A lot of this is about finding the work we were meant to do. And some of us have been lying to ourselves about that all along. One of my favorite things about this report is that it is at complete odds with doom-and-gloom, fear-based approach that we see in media and on social media, when it calls for “an educational approach that accounts for a ‘menopause renaissance’ and that acknowledges multiple lived experiences during this transformation.”
As I write in my latest book, Midlife, redefined: Better, Bolder, Brighter I explore this in detail - how we get to redefine this emerging version of women on our terms, including ageing:
“Midlife is a bit like adolescence without the acne and aching lack of confidence. New thoughts and impulses start firing up in your head, and you just need to find a way to channel them. Midlife is also the time when you feel more free to start saying exactly what you think, having somehow developed a ‘don’t give a fuck’ attitude which may in fact be from sheer damn exhaustion but I think also comes from an unconscious realisation that you may just have been giving way too many fucks about all the wrong stuff. You have to think about what you do in life that gives you gain, and what drains you. Start to realise that the Good Girl expectation you were conditioned to be never served you, only others, and being good to yourself serves you (and ultimately, the ones you love) better. Courage means grabbing midlife by the love handles and giving it everything you’ve got. It’s having the guts to create healthy relationships, create a healthy respect for your health and body, and create a nurturing environment around yourself. Go Girl!”
I’ll also share this splendid video on Instagram by the fabulous BigNikbh who is her 80’s and having all the fun on why you are never old.
Last night I gave a talk at a Women in Business network on women and money mindset. And I likened my work as the midlife coach to the story David Forster Wallace told about the two young fish swimming in the sea. An older fish swims by and offers a nod of hello with a passing “nice water.” The two young fish swim on for a bit, before looking at each other and one saying, “ what’s water?”
I help women understand the water we are working, living, swimming - and sometimes drowning - in. We have to understand the water - that we are the generations of women living in the biggest seismic shift from the lumbering beast of the old patriarchal system to a new, more equitable system. That doesn’t happen overnight. It happens over generations.
And one of the shifts that is happening is society’s attitude to ageing and women. Jane Fonda was interviewed last night on Jimmy Kimmel straight after the Trump v Harris debate and when he complimented her on looking fab, she threw up her hands in glee and shouted her age - “87!” Then the best, and most true, and more seismic shifting line we can all use; “Anybody can be young. Only the lucky get to be old.”
And I would say that from any age…. getting older is now something to celebrate - be that in our 40’s, 50’s, 60’s, 70’s, 80’s and beyond.
I wrote recently about the JOY of a woman like Kamala Harris being celebrated as young for only being 59… an age my mother felt was a death knell in terms of societal acceptance.
We will no longer retreat back in embarrassment when someone asks our age.
We can and will speak it with pride because age is no longer a definer of our acceptability or value or relevance. It’s just our fucking age. Be that 44, 55, 62, 76.
It’s ours and no-one else’s.
I absolutely love hearing from you, and I’d love to know how you feel about your age, 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.)
And please take a moment to like and share if you enjoyed it!
If you’d like some help exploring what’s possible for you at this age, I have a mini masterclass (a 15 minute video and worksheet) to help you explore and develop core versions of yourself each day to form your Midlife Daily 5. All the details are here.
If you’re a paid subscriber let me know if you’re interested and I’ll give you a 10% discount code. Just email me at alana@alanakirk.com
And if you’re in Dublin on the 29th September, please join The Confidence Conversation. This is our 5th event, collaborating with a fabulous stylist and a personal trainer where we cover off how to feel more confidence in your body, mind and style. Tickets are here.
If you’d like to take a moment to check in on your life to see how you can manage things differently or stop ghosting yourself, you can book a one hour 1:1 Discovery Coaching Session with me where you get to think about you, how to manage this life you are living, and invest some time and thought on you. Radical idea that, is it? To invest some time and thought on you? Details are here.
Paid subscribers get a 10% discount - just email me at alana@alanakirk.com
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51 and proud, and shouting it from the rooftops. I'm happier and healthier than I've ever been before. Glad to leave behind some of the insecurities of youth and excited for what comes next 😃
Thanks from me too, Alana! Where can I sign up for one of your talks? Ps, I’M NEARLY 47, wooooo!