House of Hormones

by

Susan Maushart
 

 

It has become an article of faith among adult people today that “you’re only as young as you feel.” As a single mother of three school-age children, I can only say, “Oh God, I hope not.” Like every other female baby boomer on the planet, I object to the term middle-aged. Midlife is different somehow. It is softer and more flattering, a pearlescent forty-watt lightbulb of a word.  And yet I am old enough to remember a time when midlife was a term that belonged exclusively to men. (Remember the midlife crisis?  It used to be something only guys got—like jock itch, or promotion to partner.)

I accept that I am at midlife, albeit in the same way that I accept collect calls from my fourteen-year-old—that is, grudgingly.  But most of the time, I am as much in denial about how old I really am as any other member of my generation. (“You’re only young once, but you can stay immature indefinitely,” a large fridge magnet reminds me, encouragingly.) Six days a week, I still wear blue jeans and thongs—the old-fashioned kind that separate only your toes. And my daughters are constantly begging me to wear more makeup and accessories, exactly as my mother did back in the ’70s.

I tell my kids the good part about growing up is how much you don’t change on the inside, where it really counts. I try not to think about my pelvic floor when I say this.

At forty-seven, my own children are aged ten, twelve, and fourteen—and that’s about as far from an empty nest as you can get without a doctor’s prescription. For those women who embarked on motherhood in their twenties (which seems like such a good idea, all of a sudden), I suspect midlife has a different texture —and a much, much quieter soundtrack. For those who have remained “child-free”—a mere generation ago, the preferred term was barren—I imagine midlife to have a more seamless quality.  Then again, perhaps not. Perhaps, in the absence of offspring, such women experience an added urgency to become fully who they are.

But what about women who, like me, find themselves in midlife at the very epicenter of family life—and going it solo besides? We will devote our midlife years to arguably the most demanding and certainly the most mentally taxing phase of our parenting lives. Heaven knows, we don’t have time for a “crisis.” Hell, we barely have time to floss. When I think of the thousands I’m saving on therapy, this doesn’t seem like a bad bargain. And yet, to be still gunning the engine at a time when your body is longing to be set to cruise control is, I suspect, a mixed blessing. I know for sure it’s a consequence of the decision to delay motherhood that I never, ever conceived of.

We can repeat the mantra that “fifty is the new thirty” all we like. And trust me, I do like. Yet women who become mature-age mothers by choice—and then end up single by circumstance—do not magically collect an extra two decades for their daring. On the contrary. There are many, many Monday mornings when fifty feels more like the new sixty-five: high time a sensible person retired down South and devoted herself to extreme leisure—collecting rare elderly suitors, say, or knitting frequent-flier points for the grandkids.

As a mother, you have only one mind and one body, and a child will consume 100 percent of each of them. So will three children.  You can’t give more than everything, so they learn to be content with smaller pieces. And so do you, really. With no partner to pass the buck to—or to come home and stake out an interval called “adult time”—you learn how to live with your kids, not around them or in spite of them.

Tolstoy was wrong about family life. All happy families are not happy in the same way—and we are living proof of that.  There are a thousand ways to get it right. And many of them contradict absolutely the received wisdom we have learned, as Parents Who Think Too Much, to recite by rote. One of my own secret maternal weapons, I realize more and more, is how much I don’t do for my children—not because I don’t want to, but simply because I can’t.

My kids are not overindulged with lessons and sport and “enrichment,” as if they were so many loaves of mixed-grain bread. The reason is partly financial. Partly it’s philosophical (busyness, I have always believed, is the last refuge of the unimaginative).  But mostly it’s pragmatic. Unlike Stephen Leacock’s horseman, who leapt on his steed and galloped off in all directions, I drive a Subaru. And, alas, it can only go one place at a time. Around here, decisions about extracurricular commitments are of necessity family matters. (So, too, is extensive knowledge of the public transit system.) With only one adult at the helm, our family has never known the luxury of being exclusively childcentered.  Or the curse.

Unlike many of my partnered girlfriends, I never agonized about co-sleeping with my young children. Perhaps that’s ironic, given that I was the one with the extra legroom. (Another joy of single life too rarely celebrated: sleeping starfished smack-dab in the middle of a queen-size bed.) But the fact was, I needed my sleep and my space. Every inch of it. I regret that my needs made me hard-hearted at times. But somebody was going to have to do some controlled crying, and I was damned if it was going to be me. I’d done enough of that in my marriage.

Being a single parent teaches you that children are a bit like bougainvillea. A little benign neglect, and the occasional ruthless cutting back, can work wonders. The problem is, I am a hopeless gardener, so it’s a lesson I am prone to forget. As a mother, it is so easy to recede—so tempting, at times, to dwindle to two dimensions, to lose hold of who you are and (as a professor of mine used to say) what you represent. And that goes double when you are a single mother, and double again when you hit midlife at full throttle, with three hormonally challenged passengers whooping it up in the back seat. If I had a partner, I sometimes think, I’d least I’d have someone to blame. But in my more lucid intervals, I recognize that the road I’m on—though a long way from the route I’d planned on—has led me to places I’d never have gotten to otherwise.  And the truth is, I prefer a bumpy ride. At least you know you’re moving.

 

Columnist, author and social commentator Dr. Susan Maushart moved to Perth, Western Australia from New York 19 years ago but insists she is only passing through.

A recovering academic, she has worked as a communications consultant, television news reporter, stand-up comedy writer and freelance wife.

 

Susan has given birth to four books (Sort of a Place Like Home, The Mask of Motherhood, Wifework and What Women Want Next) and three children, and has needed copious amounts of pain relief for all of them. Her essays and reviews have appeared in a host of Australian and international publications, and she writes a weekly column in the Weekend Australian Magazine and is a Senior Research Fellow in the Faculty of Media, Society and Culture at Curtin University.  In 1994, her first book, Sort of a Place Like Home, a history of the Moore River Native Settlement, won the Festival Prize for Literature (non-fiction) at the Adelaide Writers Festival. Her second book, the bestselling The Mask of Motherhood, was hailed by the Sunday Times of London as “a feminist classic.”  Wifework: What Marriage Really Means for Women, was described by Publisher’s Weekly as “smart, witty and 100% honest” and went on to start arguments in seven languages.  Susan’s latest book, What Women Want Next, looks at the question of feminine fulfilment in a postfeminist world … among other outlandish propositions.

Sort of a Place Like Home

The Mask of Motherhood

Wifework

What Women Want Next

 

Good Reading Magazine calls it "outstanding."