no. 69. 40 is not the finish line - and 13 other unformed thoughts

All of the soceital milestones that we’re indoctrinated with - partner, property, babies - need to be in the bag, or else. Or else what?

Thank you for the wonderful reaction to Woman, Interrupted. I’m so glad the conversations resonated. Launching a podcast this late in the game felt terrifying but it was actually only a joyful experience. That’s it for the moment, but I’d very much like to do more should the media gods be willing.

I’m going to keep this bit short as it’s a longer one today. As ever, you can buy me a coffee, hit pledge or the like button, or send to a friend if you’d like to support Writing About Women, aka me, a tired mother who has just escaped a nearly two hour bedtime marathon shitshow. I lost my mind in that dark room, enraged by the endless white noise and a 2.5-year-old tangled in a blanket he couldn’t decide if he wanted or not. Hitting send on this feels like I might have found it again. For now, at least.

On with the show.

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In the last 9 years, 19 children have been murdered by a parent who was a preparator of domestic abuse. This came from a Woman’s Aid report published on Monday that hasn’t had enough attention because, as you might have heard, it’s been looking like World War Three has kicked off. Plus, 19 children doesn’t sound very many next to the 50,000 killed in Gaza but, obviously, any murder of a child is a murder too many. Women’s Aid has been tracking child homicides for decades and report there have been 67 children deaths caused by abusive parents over the last 30 years. This means that in the UK, two-three children are killed by their violent father every year because the state is fixated on a outdated and dangerous notion that literally any father - even a dangerous, violent one - is better than none. This powerful image deserves to be seen.

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Many of my peers are treating 40 as the finish line.

40 is not the finish line.

All of the soceital milestones that we’re indoctrinated with - partner, property, babies - need to be in the bag, or else. Or else what? Alas, I find myself succumbing to this feeling, too. On a daily basis my brain reminds me that as a soon-to-be 40-year-old, I should being earning more money/have more savings/be more successful/throw more dinner parties. It’s an exhusating daily reckoning as the date edges ever closer to the Indianna Jones tomb door closing forever.

And yet, while I understand the panic that we’ve been relentlessly conditioned to feel, I find the assumption troublingly naive. Because if your life blows up at 38 - through illness or grief or divorce, and it often it does because life is mostly like that, despite what Instagram tells you - 40 may well just be the beginning.

There’s nothing new in pointing out that a woman’s value to society doesn’t diminish with her ovarian reserve. Or that punishing women for the wholly unpreventable biological reality of aging has been a way of enforcing the idea that a woman is only useful in service to men, namley as a sexual object or a mother. But these points feel worth repeating. Especially when I see women on instagram stick tape to their face because they are so terrified of crossing the threshold and suddenly becoming invisible. And this is perplexing, not to mention very sad. Because, conversely, I see something liberating in escaping decades of having to navitage unwanted male attention and punishing so-called beauty standards. I’m not there quite yet but I am imagine being 40 feels like a giant fuck you to the type of man who tells a woman to not ‘let herself go’.

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I am really fucking glad that abortion has been dicriminalised in the UK. I would also like to see doctors protected. I do not think the American abortion landscape is comparable to UK. Geographically, politically, religiously, culturally and historically, we are very different. It doesn’t mean that Farage and co won’t give it a good go, but turning the issue of abortion into political frielighter took 40 years of big money, stacking courts, and grooming America’s large, southern evangelical community. To be frank, I don’t know if they’ve got it in them.

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While I resent hurtling towards 40 like I do the cut off time on the Ocado shop, I marvel how I’ve made it to 39 with so little strategy. I take it as a huge compliment when my dear friend P says I’m the most ‘present’ friend he has, utterly committed to the moment I am in. This makes for great bar-side conversation but I wish I had spent more time thinking about where I wanted to get to a bit later down the line. Not so I can tick off those milestones, the most dreaded to-do list of all time, but because I wanted shit to happen in my life. I regret assuming life would just happen to me, everything magically falling into place, like my own private Fantasia. But nothing just falls from the heavens, apart from rain and the occasional bird or piano. Success is active; it’s manual labour. You have to make it happen and for that you probably need a plan, a map, a strategy.

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Getting married at 40 looks really fun. Everyone is so much more relaxed. Everyone knows who they are, what they like, why they are there. The speeches are better because there’s so much more material to draw on. The meal-time chat with strangers is better because everyone is so much more interesting and well practised at the doing this type of thing. It feels completely genuine and honest and for all the right reasons.

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Dancing to a playlist curated by two gay men till 2am is all the therapy you need.

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I’m still worried about how much I shout at my son. I’m concerned by a voice of rage that is far closer to the surface than I am comfortable with. I feel mean and slightly out of control, and I desperately want to scoop him up and apologise a million times because he is a baby and I want for him to know me as someone loving and kind and safe and calm.

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Is it too much to say I’m lonely? (Mum, please don’t worry too much)

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Substack’s Notes is… a bit much? Why is everyone a 29-year-old acting like they’ve lived more lives than a cat?

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I really loved this Bazaar cover

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I did a couple of big things recently related to my career. I severed a professional relationship, one that hasn’t been “serving me”, as someone on the internet might say. And I also said no to a nice project, one that would have, albeit temporarily, soothed some of my career angst. At first I thought it was because it wasn’t enough money. And it wasn’t. But as a wise friend pointed out, it wasn’t enough time. If it had been a dream gig, if it had been significantly more money then maybe finding the time would have felt more achievable. But now, as a parent, finding time doesn’t mean setting your alarm an hour earlier (No 4.30am starts for me, ta very much). It means negotiating time with your partner. It means your partner rechudeling their working week. It means not seeing your partner or child or friends on a weekend. What you can never know before children is the abudance of time you have; the absolute bountiful supply. What you learn when you have kids is that the trade you’ve made to recieve this living and breathing treasure in your lap is all that time. As Naomi Sheldon told me in her episode of Woman, Interrupted, motherhood has been “the greatest economics lesson of her life”.

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Speaking of which, have you listened yet?

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I got braces. They’re “clear”. This is not my first rodeo (sorry, mum), and I didn’t opt for Invisalign because I’m not that personality type (my othadontist applauded my self-awareness). My friend Mary said they are not that noticeable. Sure, I’m not Darla from Finding Nemo, but you can see them. And I don’t mind. I was way more concerned by my cross-over front teeth - always closing my mouth in pictures, hating my smile. Somehow, a brace is like a pregnant stomach: it’s takes you out the game and there is relief in that. (What an awful indictment of the pressure we feel, consciously or otherwise).

Darla

I’m also going grey. I don’t plan on covering my greys or hiding my brace-face. Just carrying on, one foot in front of the other, some days avoiding the mirror, somedays nudging a bit closer to something that feels like peace.

My grey era has arrived

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My son’s grandparents recently bought him a windmill. We stuck it in a flower pot in the garden and waited for the wind. Not working, he said, looking from the windmill to me and back again, on a hot, still day. Not yet, I said. A few days later we went into the garden again. The wind was up, approaching like a train, the tall trees at the back of garden bending over like dancers warming up. He hears the rustle of the leaves. The blue shiny windmill comes alive. A squeals in delight, laughing with his whole body. He shouts, Good job, Wind! And I shout, Good job, Wind! He says, Again, Again! I say, We have to wait. We can’t control the wind. We don’t know when it’s coming. We just have to be ready.

Some great things:

I loved the sound of this biography of Claire McCardell “The Design Genius Who Gave American Women Pockets” from this exellent review by Kate Bollick (author of the fascinating book, Spinster) in The New York Times.

Eve Livingstone’s podcast for the Observer, Brute Force: Domestic Abuse in the Ranks, is excellent. We hear from three survriors, all of whom are also police officers, who explain how abusers learn abuse tactics from police training courses, how the force unfailing protects abusers, and how victims are routinely accused and investagated as abusers lies about them are routinely believed. It’s not news that a culture of abuse, misogyny and violent masculinity flourishes in the police because it is essentially aided and abetted, but remains staggering none the less.

I took a lot from this parenting podcast from Dr Becky on fathers and sons with Richard Reeves.

If you’re an middle-older millennial who’s waking up to the sexist horror of the 2000s, What did pop-cultrue of the 2000s do to millennial women? by Dayna Tortorici in The New Yorker is a lot of food for thought, both about what took place at the time and how we respond to it now.

Reading Rebecca Traister is always a good idea. This piece, the beautifully entitled This Fucking Guy, is particualry relevant.

As always, thank you for reading

Marisa