Don't ...
I am just flicking over my blog with a rather expensive ostrich feather duster, which I bought from a homemaking catalogue of the 'd0mestic g0ddess' variety. This is the first time I've used it as it was far too pretty to get dirty.... That's better ...
As you have sworn that you don't mind reading incredibly boring drivel I will carry on as usual.

I was thinking how much better I feel 'in myself' than I did two years or so ago when I started writing this. Massively due to knowing you and reading about your lives and especially the little things like music recommendations and stupid quizzes and detailed accounts of exotic sex parties. And the other reason is living on my own. My daughters were saying how odd it is that so many of their friends have mothers who have disappeared off to the country to live by themselves, while their husbands ponce around London having an intensive social life. But if you are my age you have probably spent at least twenty years being a selfless mother and crushing down your own personality (crucial ... as it was formed in the '60's and is not one that anyone halfway decent would inflict on their own child). While your husband carried on as if his family hardly existed. 'It's weird .. but Daddy really seems more as if he is some kind of uncle or godfather or something. Not a close relation at all'. said my son, only last week. 'I expect that is because he is HARDLY EVER HERE', (and never has been), I replied. With only a touch of bitterness because I am so used to it. And of course now, in the way of things, I so much prefer it when he isn't here as we have a much more fun time.

Weirder, is that for the past few months he has been really, really, nice. Not that much unlike the aimiable, pleasant, not at all mood swingy or screamy person that I chose to marry. He even said to me, after I had shouted at length about some annoying behaviour of his, (the old me also re-surfacing), 'Okay, point taken'. WHAT? 'Point taken?'. You have no idea how unnerving it was to hear that. After probably, well, fifteen years. In the interim (?) the normal reply was a variation on 'F.ck you'. With added very loud shouting about my endless shortcomings and invariably followed by stomping off and slamming the door.

Anyway, what I meant to say was that all these husbands have gone on having a social life on their own right through the entire child rearing process and their characters have hardly been touched by the fact of being a father. So their poncing around now is not odd, as my daughters were saying, it is just them carrying on as always. But for the women this stage of life is a serious change and starting all over again moment. If the last time you were 'free' and had no real responsibilites and were setting up a social life amongst people your own age, which has nothing to do with children, was twenty five years ago .. you find that relying on old memories of how to 'be' is not that helpful. It has to be faced ... THEN .. you were really attractive and cutting edge and amazingly dressed with a thousand friends and endless people in love with you .. and now ... YOU ARE NOT. Any of those things. Talk about the Past being a foreign country. 'Now' is more alien and peculiar than I could ever have imagined.

And that is why so many middle-aged women want to live on their own for a year or two. Not just to try to find some vestige of interesting personality maybe still alive in there but to get out of the habit of self-denial and servitude. To be the head of the household, yourself. To not cook a meal or even make a cup of coffee for another person for days or weeks. When the phone rings it is always for you. To go to bed and get up when YOU feel like it. To never wash or .. Yes! .. iron a single thing that isn't yours. The only music playing is your choice . The only television programmes are YOUR CHOICE. No one criticises or 'looks' or sighs. If you eat a biscuit in the midle of your diet week no one says anything annoying. No one makes an exhausting mess or picks up the book you're reading, glances at it and puts it down again silently.

These endless small impositions and insults and habitual undermining no longer happen to most women younger than me. We are the generation in between the old and the new. Though lots of women my age ARE like my own mother it is obviously so much more difficult to be the ones who broke through, because .. as I said .. we are getting old in a way that has never been done before. It has taken me more like three years to ''re-find' something like the person I was 'before'. Except, it is good. The person now, even without the helpful shortcut of sexy looks, is, ... actually because of that ... more like the pre- teenage person. Who liked doing things and knowing stuff and talking for hours without subjective emotions colouring everything. I was discussing with Squid whether Arth.r Rans0me was an author that her daughter would like and although I love him myself it's hard to know if he'd seem a bit dull to a child today. But I do and did love him just because he was so enthusiastic and got on with things and never moped around because someone didn't fancy him. (Well, maybe not in true life.) And I re-read his books every few years because they are so comforting ... and .. getting older seems to be a bit like that. And the more you can be yourself, even if that means being mostly on your own, the better it seems.
- posted by Iris @ 10/15/2005 12:00:00 AM comment