no. 67. who we thought we'd be by now

This week, I slowly drove past anti-abortion protestors and yelled at the top of my voice: “GO AWAY! GO AWAY! YOU’RE NOT WELCOME HERE!”. Then I drove back again and while waiting at the traffic lights, I yelled (with a tone of horror and disgust), “YOU’RE MEN! YOU’RE MEN! YOU ARE MEN!!”. It wasn’t premeditated. The words just came out as the window rolled down. Telling someone that they are a man doesn’t necessarily qualify as an insult. But it categorically does when the man in question is telling a woman what she can or cannot do with her body, her life, her existence, and attempting to shame her into submission if she doesn’t comply, like it’s the fucking Middle Ages. You may recall that in my last Substack, I wrote that I wasn’t so angry anymore. Scrap that. Turns out I’m fucking furious. I yelled so loud I stunned my chatty two-year-old into silence. “YOU WANT TO KILL BABIES!”, one of these men then yelled at me. I had to use all my willpower not to yell, NO, I WANT TO KILL YOU! Luckily, a group of students were holding ‘My Body, My Choice’ placards and I beeped and we cheered instead. E correctly pointed out that I should have asked these men if they cared so much about life, why they weren’t protesting their church for raping young boys and being the largest paedophile ring in the history of the world. I was too angry to have been that clever, but I did feel better for screaming “YOU’RE MEN! YOU’RE MEN! YOU’RE MEN!” at the top of my lungs. Because I wasn’t just screaming at those individuals; I was screaming at so many of them.

On with the show.

***

I read this great piece by a woman turning 30, first published earlier in the year. It describes how the writer, Caroline Beuley, took a few tries throughout her twenties to find the right career path. It made me think a lot about each decade and what we expect from them. In the piece, Beuley examines a Sylvia Plath quote from The Bell Jar, which resonated with her when she was in her early twenties. In the quote, Plath’s character, Esther, compares life choices to “sitting in the crotch of a fig tree”, examining all the potential figs and wondering which one to pick. Esther is terrified of making a choice and, instead, “starving to death”, paralysed by indecision because choosing one would mean “losing all the rest”. This is when Beulely brings in Joan Didion’s Slouching Towards Bethlehem, and Didion’s suggestion that choices made in youth are revocable because “none of it would count”. Conveniently, Beuley marries the two ideas together: we can - and should - keep picking at the fruit until we get the right one.

In six months, I’ll be 40. Career was always the number one fig - until I had my son. But it’s increasingly easy to wonder if that was the right fig to pick. I chose an industry that has been increasingly unreliable for years (I’m sure you’ve also read this piece), and I lack the self-belief and the relentless hustle that is essential for success in this field. Now I can add another reason to doubt my fig choice: age. Not because I think being 40 is over the hill, quite the opposite - the most impressive women I know are over 40. But because I’m entering 40 feeling like a 20-year-old, unsure of what I’m meant to be doing, of what I can do. The editorial experience I have accumulated feels like it belongs in a bygone age. I feel both old hat and as if I’m right at the bottom of the ladder. So, did I pick the wrong fig?

We are lucky enough to have a (literal) fig tree in our garden. The smell is mesmerising, and it's rambunctious with life. It grows and grows and grows; small green “pears” (as A calls them) sprouting between upward-facing leaves off innumerable branches. Until, of course, the end of the summer when the remaining figs start to drop, lying rotten on the grass until someone picks them up. Arriving at 40, exactly 10 years on from Beuley, and it feels like I’m approaching late summer. The grass below is messy with spoiled fruit.

The word ‘messy’ is often associated with our twenties; hangovers, heartbreak, trying to get your foot in the door. General chaos. Those dizzying years are full of literal mess, too; chipped nails, tiny dishevelled flatshares and desks piled high with empty tea mugs and unread books. ‘Messy’ feels young and innocent and naive.

But I’ve noticed there is a return to messiness during this moment. And to me and the other women I know in their late 30s and early 40s, it means something else, a different kind of mess. It is not the mess of youth - a calamity caused by recklessness, like staying out in Soho until 2 when you have work at 9am. It is the mess of spoiled fruit.

It is the mess of a life that hasn't gone to plan. Ducks are not in their rows, stars are not aligning, we didn’t pick the right figs. Or maybe we did - at the time. But time changes things, and it changes you. And sometimes life throws everything up in the air. Perhaps Didon was wrong; our choices, even in our 20s, do count, we just don’t realise until much later, until it’s too late. Plus, unlike Beuley’s tale of picking figs over and over until she landed the right career path, the days of life being about a singular, isolated choice are gone. Life at this age is about the mess at the intersections: trying to make a career work whilst spending time with your son, trying to earn money while pursuing creativity when existing on five hours of broken sleep. At this age, it’s about trying to build the life you want in the face of a failing business or failed IVF or a failed marriage or a failed economy or a failed media landscape or not meeting the right person or a ticking biological clock or a testing relationship with your parents or a mother with a cancer diagnosis or a partner with an anxiety diagnosis or a more demanding career. Most problematically, it’s no longer even obvious which fig is the right fig! And we haven’t even got time to figure it out. We’re too busy juggling the figs we’ve already picked.

I don’t know about you but the messiness of my twenties was calamitous, and with hindsight, often hilarious. Now, life is playing crueller hands with much higher stakes. The messiness can be extremely painful. And it can rock something at our core: who we thought we’d be by now. (Especially a millennial core who grew up on their Boomer parents’ stories of social mobility and prosperity, and who were told they could do or be anything).

It’s a messiness that we just have to live with. You can’t sweep the consequences of the figs you picked a decade ago under the table. You can’t neatly fold away feelings of loss or regret. You can’t wipe away the agony of the body you’re living in not doing what you want it to do. Or not meeting the right person. Or discovering the right person is actually the wrong person. You can’t declutter the sheer amount of worries in your life, a list that is only growing with no easy wins to quickly cross-off. In your twenties, a hot bath, clean sheets and eight hours of sleep could go a fucking long way. It was a reset button that worked every time. If you have children, eight hours of sleep is as likely as waking to see a dinosaur in your garden. And all the hot baths and clean sheets in the world won’t help you now. The mess at this stage - the exhaustion, the dissatisfaction, the slog, the worry, the confusion, the fear you’ve lost your ambition, all this mess - is unavoidable. You live with life-Lego scattered across the carpet floor, hoping not to catch a sharp edge, tidying it away each evening, only for it to be everywhere again in the morning.

As I write this in the last week of April, I can see the fig tree through my window. Small green figs are growing and the leaves are stretching tall towards the light. What Esther failed to remember is that figs always come back. Esther fears she will starve because she won’t make a decision in time before all the figs drop and are ruined. But there are always more figs. And because there are always more figs, it means the dilemma is not really over which fig to pick, but it’s where Esther’s greatest fear lies: not picking at all. As I draw to the close of this decade, I feel confident in saying that for nearly all of us, there is mess in whatever figs we pick. What I need to know is that in my 40s, and beyond, I will have the confidence to keep picking.

Some great things I’ve read:

Careless People: A Story of Where I Used to Work by Sarah Winn-Williams. This could be described as a tell-all memoir by an ex-senior Facebook employee, but it feels closer to whistleblowing on the bullying, hypocrisy, sexual harassment and general disregard for humanity over immeasurable power and wealth at Facebook. It’s somehow both shocking and totally unsurprising. Feminists called out Sherly Sanberg’s Lean In bullshit at the time but even I was suprised to learn just awful she was as a boss to women, and I’m someone who knows only too well how allegedly feminist bosses privately give their female staff hell as the world watches on, applauding. Written with great pace and gusto, it’s a gripping read - and a true act of courage.

Love Letters to the Women of Lebanon. Rania Matar’s incredible photographs from her project, “Where Do I Go?”

Like me, my seven-year-old loves fashion. Can I protect her from impossible beauty standards? By Victoria Moss. “I didn’t want to be the mother who pulled out a pack of sad Ryvita when summer rolled around; I didn’t want my daughter to see me feeling uncomfortable on the beach. I wanted, for as long as I could, to shield her from both internal and external judgment about her body. The only way to do that was to abandon it totally for myself in the hope she won’t spend decades fighting with her reflection. The messiness of motherhood is a great tool for putting your skin-deep woes into sharp relief. A body that carried and lost babies, and survived it all, felt like one I needed to be kinder to”.

Why Am I So Tired All the Time? by Olga Khazan in The Atlantic. “The first sign of Mom Fatigue is leaving weird stuff in the fridge”.

As ever, thank you for reading.

Marisa x