Forty something

Notes from the Motherhood Trenches: The First Year

/ sunnyrap / 12 Comments

 

Everything we did was a first: first bath, first walk, first drive in the car. It was like we walked into an alternate universe that looked just like the old one, but all the rules were different and we had to relearn how to live.

– Soleil Moon Frye

 

It is sometime in February in England and I am skipping—yes, skipping— to the cinema, cappuccino in hand, like a prisoner on day release, or a teenager skiving off school. I am off to see La La Land, on my first afternoon off after giving birth to my son in October. My sister is looking after Noah and I am giddy with excitement—at reconnecting with my old (first?) love—the cinema—and at having a few hours to myself, after weeks of focusing on a tiny new being.

Another memory: A frosty early morning in December, around 4 a.m., and I am sitting up in bed, bottle-feeding my son with one hand and editing an urgent brief for work on my laptop with the other, wondering sleepily how my life has come to this. I’m learning to do a lot of things one-handed these days. A sunny November afternoon a few weeks earlier, and I’m preparing to take my son out in his stroller for the first time. I’m terrified, almost as much as when I went to the hospital to give birth to him. I’ve tried to avoid using a stroller in favour of an eco-style wrap, but Noah’s a heavy bub and my body simply isn’t built for it. I am frightened both by the sheer logistics of taking my son out, and the fact that his pram symbolises to the world that I am now, officially, a mum.

Right back to the beginning: I am lying in a hospital theatre in North London, woozy from a spinal block, and the world is swaying slightly. It is around midday on October 24, 2016 and my son is about to be born—by an elective C-section—on the same date, incredibly, as my best friend’s son, in a hospital in Cairo, exactly seven years earlier. After months of trying to come to terms with this pregnancy and wondering whether, given my advanced years and despite a battery of tests, my child will be healthy, the moment of truth is here. Within what feels like minutes, I hear the wails of my son— loud, angry, determined. There is so much life in this cry. Relief overwhelms me and I feel my eyes welling up.

 

This is what I learn about motherhood—that like many of the biggest life events, it is both intensely profound and intensely banal at the same time. My son is a constant source of wonder. I still haven’t grasped the fact that I ‘grew’ this child in my tummy, that he is a product of my husband and myself and all our forebears, that he bears our genetic blueprint and yet is his own little person, that he evolves every day before our eyes. And yet this process of evolution, though miraculous, can also be profoundly tedious, involving long relentless days of nappy changes and feeds and bottle washing and baths and naps and drool, on what feels like a constant loop.

Intense is the word I use most often, when people ask me what it’s like. Every emotion is heightened. I spend the first few weeks of Noah’s life in a hazy, slightly surreal, but deliriously happy blur. Everything has gone better than I expected—I am lucky with my C-section recovery; my child, who is perfect, spends most of his time sleeping; and I am in awe every time I look at him. I read somewhere that having a child releases similar hormones to falling in love—for women anyway. Despite the bone-wrenching tiredness, I feel like I’m floating on air; my heart flutters every time I see him; love songs take on a whole new meaning; and there is a smile on my face and a softening in my heart that can only compare to being utterly, and completely, in love.

But when I try to write about my experiences of motherhood, I hit a block. I find I’m still struggling to comprehend the enormity of it all, to describe exactly how it feels. I feel an obligation to be completely honest, to ‘keep it real.” I want to avoid the cult of motherhood—the dreamy, idealised version of beautiful young mums; bodies already back in shape, beatifically breastfeeding cherubic infants. The reality is, of course, more complex. You may not be able to breastfeed, like me. Your stomach will feel like a lump of dough for the longest time. There will be poop—lots of it, explosive at times—and spit-up and projectile vomiting and frantic attempts to burp him at ungodly hours. Your bub will cry at times for no discernible reason, as will you. You will argue with your partner, also for no discernible reason. Sleepless nights and rioting hormones will play havoc with your emotions.

When I ponder later why it’s so important to me to write about the bad stuff as well as the good, I realise a big part of me feels guilty. I think about my friends and people I know who desperately want a child, but can’t have one. I didn’t seek to be a mother and I didn’t invest any time and energy in becoming one, and yet I have become one, despite myself. And so I hold back from celebrating my new status too much—it seems unfair. When I finally write a brief piece that I think is relatively light and send it to my sister for feedback, her response, after a long pause—and for the first time with my writing—is negative.

“It’s so dark,” she says, carefully. “Perhaps you could try and inject some humour in it?”

 

In late April in Cairo, as the season turns from spring to summer and the shadow of Ramadan looms, depression strikes. I am exhausted, from too many interrupted nights and a sleep deficit I wonder if I will ever remedy. My usually moderate workload has tripled because of a forthcoming event, and I’ve barely left the house in days. Most of my closest friends have long since left Cairo and I haven’t had the time to make new ones. Friends contact me from abroad but I never find the time to write or initiate a call. My husband, though supportive, works long hours, and it is exhausting to constantly renegotiate our relationship as new parents. I am lonely and tired and I miss my old life. One night, after I put my son to bed, I drink half a bottle of wine and listen to my favourite (maudlin) songs, and find tears rolling down my face.

I spend a few days like this but throughout it all, my love for my son, and my happiness when I see him, never dissipates. This is another truth about motherhood, I learn—it is a paradox. It is possible to feel intensely lonely, while realising that you will never be on your own again. It is possible to grieve your old life, your old body, the old you, and all the freedoms you took for granted, while taking absolute delight in your child and loving him like you’ve never loved before. The truth is that there is no greater change in a woman’s life—hormonally, practically, physically and emotionally—than giving birth. There is such a profound shift in your circumstances, and such a huge sense of responsibility for the tiny creature now dependent on you, that it is almost impossible not to feel overwhelmed.

I read somewhere that the first year of motherhood is the loneliest, and the most crippling for your self-esteem, and I understand this. In my son, I have gained the world; yet as a new mother, I am more vulnerable, more emotional, less confident, less myself perhaps, than at any other point in my life. I suspect exhaustion has a lot to do with this. But I am also an accidental mother, singularly unprepared for this experience, a woman who has carved out her whole life on twin poles of freedom and independence. In this year, I often feel like I have neither.

 

But as much as the lows cripple me sometimes, the highs sweep me away also, on great clouds of sweet fluffy baby goodness. There is so much sheer joy in a child, of a different kind than I’ve ever experienced before. How do I explain the beauty of a baby’s babble to someone who has never heard it, the delight I take in the very first sounds he has decided to make? Or the rapture of every milestone we experience together—his first bath, his first smile, his first tooth, the first time he puts his hand in mine, or reaches for a hug, the first time he rolls over, the first time he says ma-ma, his first attempts to crawl or stand up. And most of all, his giggle—the ecstasy of a child’s uninhibited chortling, which is now my favourite sound on earth.

As much as I’ve cried in this first year—not just in my own life but at every terrible, sad story I hear or read about, because the process of giving birth also seems to loosen your tear ducts and leave your heart permanently exposed, so my already empathetic self is now so sensitive it hurts—I have laughed too. Because it is impossible to feel anything but joy when I see my son. Impossible not to try and make him giggle, as I go through my daily repertoire of silly sounds and made-up words and games of peek-a-boo. And impossible not to feel a new sense of contentment when I am alone with my husband and son—after years of struggle to imbue meaning into my life, there is a singular peace in reverting once again to a family unit.

As the seasons shift, and my son grows stronger and more resilient—as he literally begins to feel more solid in my arms—so, ironically, do I. It isn’t until Noah’s eighth month or so that I stop worrying that I will drop him every time I take him out of his car seat or carry him down the stairs (I always imagine the headlines in the paper the next day)—something I refrain from vocalising because I fear it will make me sound slightly crazed. And it is probably around the same time that I—mostly—stop checking to see if he is still breathing, if he hasn’t stirred for a while in his cot; the terror of SIDS haunts me. A friend jokes that if I manage to keep him alive his first year, I’ve done well. Another lesson I learn this year: Babies are much more resilient than we give them credit for.

And though I wish I could fit into my old jeans—I also rediscover chocolate this year, which means my love handles have yet to shift—and there are days when I have no time to shower, and my nails are a mess, and I stop wearing my favourite dangle ear rings and thank the universe daily for dry shampoo, my predominant emotion this year is actually gratitude. I am profoundly and incredibly grateful for my beautiful, funny, magnoon child with his cute Stevie Wonder head shake, and the fact that I get to share my delight in him daily with my husband and family. I am grateful that I have lived enough to not regret the things I can no longer do because of my child, because motherhood is all-consuming, to say the least. And I’m grateful that I’m old enough to be largely impervious to the judgments of others, though mum guilt is impossible to avoid completely, because there are so many opinions from every corner on everything.

But most of all, I am grateful that we have the resources to raise our son in the way we want—to feed him, and clothe him, and put a roof above his head, and give him as much love and security and as many cuddles as we possibly can. I cannot imagine having a child that I cannot make happy—the instinct to protect and love and nurture them is so overwhelmingly strong. In our increasingly fragile world, this seems like the greatest privilege of all.

 

Yet as this year of my son’s birth—the most profound of my life—draws to a close, I know I am no closer to coming to terms with the concept of motherhood itself. It is a word I still find incredibly loaded. There are mums and moms and mommies and yummy mummies and that very English fear of looking ‘mumsy’ (translation: frumpy—god forbid you actually look like a mum) and the fetishisation of MILFs, versus the sickly sweetness of Mother’s Day, or the various prescriptive cultural and religious tropes to wrestle with. I think sometimes that feminism has failed mothers; failed to reclaim and redefine motherhood for those of us who don’t want to be categorised, or defined by it; failed to convey just how much strength and resolve is necessary for the average mother to survive.

The process of becoming a mother this past year has been a baptism of fire—alternately terrifying and joyful, a privilege but also a burden, and searingly lonely at times, even if I’ve had to interact with society at large more than ever. Nothing has shaken my sense of self more, or tested my physical, emotional and mental health so profoundly. It has distanced me from some friends but brought me closer to others. I have always tried to avoid becoming hard but it has softened me even more, and increased my compassion and empathy. At the same time, I have discovered reserves of strength—both physical and emotional—that I didn’t know I possessed. As one of my favourite writers, Barbara Kingsolver, says, “Sometimes the strength of motherhood is greater than natural laws.”

And I am barely there yet—I have just one year and one child under my belt, and there are mothers all over the world who struggle with much more and survive and flourish. Or simply persevere, through the exhaustion, and the aches and pains, and the long days and nights, because they know something fundamental has shifted, and that for the rest of their life now they’ll be wearing their heart on the outside, hoping and praying and pleading with the powers-that-be to always keep their child healthy, happy and loved.

To all the mums out there—this one’s for you.

On love: For the odd couples and the free spirits and the ones who never thought they’d make it

/ sunnyrap / 36 Comments

lucy love

My husband and I celebrate our first wedding anniversary this month, after some four and a half years, and one child, together. To the average person, this isn’t a big deal. To a commitment-phobe like me, it’s a lifetime—and it’s also a milestone I never thought we’d reach.

I don’t write about us very often, partly because I think it’s tempting fate—I’ve seen too many couples express their undying love on social media only to break up a short while later—and partly because I still remember what it was like to be single and lonely, (which wasn’t all my singledom, but a good chunk of it), and how smug PDAs can seem when you’re in that place. But the fact we’ve survived for as long as we have—and grown closer together rather than apart—amazes me as much as it must amaze those around us.

The truth is this: My husband, though a wonderful, kind and very attractive human being, is probably the last person in the world I expected to celebrate this milestone with. We are, in every sense of the word, an odd couple. There is a considerable age difference to begin with—he is significantly younger (I won’t say how much, but it’s in the double digits). We come from different cultures—I am British Indian and he is Egyptian. We are different religions—I am a lapsed Catholic—he is Muslim. His first language is Arabic; mine is English.

And we are also vastly different human beings. He is a personal trainer (which is actually how we met, but that’s another story), a generally upbeat man-of-the-body who can’t stay still for long, who loves his action movies, a man of few words in social settings, who likes silly comedies and sweet cartoons, rarely reads a book, loves house music, will eat pretty much anything, and can’t handle what he would call ‘depressing’—and I would label ‘thought-provoking’—movies. (We once watched a relatively anodyne Hollywood flick at home, which ended on a bit of a downer; he had to go to his favourite club immediately after to dance, just to get it out of his system).

I, in stark contrast, am a coffee-drinking, wine-loving writer and editor, a former journalist and smoker (he has never enjoyed either wine, caffeine or nicotine), who has always loved reading and poetry and film of all kinds (I studied film and literature at university). I love a diverse selection of music (but not house), follow current affairs keenly, relish history and deep conversations with friends, would secretly consider myself a bit of a foodie, and am probably happiest, at this point in my life, curled up on the couch with a good book, or watching a film I love—in essence, being still. I also have a penchant for melancholy and a tendency to cry at sad stories and films.

These differences have been the source of much agony and soul-searching over the years—predominantly on my part, since I have a tendency to over-think everything—as well as long searching conversations with close friends. At particularly troubled times, when I’ve convinced myself that two such different people couldn’t possibly have a future together, I‘ve also done what every other angst-ridden person in love probably does these days and consulted Google: Can relationships with younger men from profoundly opposing backgrounds, and with almost comically varied tastes, actually work?

The answer has nearly always been a big fat resounding ‘no.’

But I’m here now to tell you otherwise. I’ve learnt a lot about love over the last few years. One of the things I’ve learnt, for example, is that what you long for on paper may not actually be right for you. When we met, I’d reached a point in my life where I was happy to be single. If you’d asked me what I was looking for in a possible partner, I was fairly sure I knew. It would have been an older man, smart and funny, perhaps an intellectual, not necessarily conventionally attractive but someone well travelled with plenty of life experience, who was also fairly settled in life in terms of his career and life choices, as I am.

For the longest time after my husband and I got together—after he’d wooed me, incidentally, in the sweetest, gentlest way—I still held on to that ideal. I looked with envy at other couples that seemed on paper to be perfectly matched, who talked of coup de foudres and undying love and the certainty of a lifetime together. They had joint friends and joint bank accounts and joint interests, so the practicalities of making a life together seemed simple. Choosing a film to watch on the couch together of an evening, for example, didn’t result in tense negotiations or stand-offs, and an inevitable compromise–usually by me, since I do actually like action movies, while my husband simply couldn’t stomach the latest depressing French art house flick.

(On the plus side, I have a whole new appreciation for The Fast and the Furious movies, Vin Diesel, and the Rock : )

We, on the other hand, had few things that held us together. I couldn’t share a favourite poem with him, or my more maudlin music, or a great cup of coffee, or my political musings, or my peculiarly British sense of irony—though I did it anyway. I didn’t always feel connected, or like he was my soul mate, or my other half, or all the other things you’re supposed to feel. What I did find, however, was that he made me laugh—a lot. He was remarkably easy to live with. We communicated about the things that bothered us. He came home every evening with the biggest smile on his face. And he gave me the best and sweetest cuddles.

I told myself—and him—one thing: I would stay in the relationship for as long as it made me happy, since I’d fought too hard to give up my freedom for anything less. And from the very beginning, he did make me happy—in ways I didn’t expect and that slowly melted my cynical, lovelorn heart. When I fell asleep on the couch, exhausted, he’d pick me up and carry me gently to bed. When I had a pancake evening for friends, he spent most of the evening in the kitchen making the pancakes. When my freezer was iced up, he spent most of another evening diligently de-icing it. When we had a squabble, I came home to find a fruit salad in my fridge topped with yogurt and a heart shaped out of nuts. At other times, he’d say nothing but just lie next to me and squeeze me extra hard, as if he’d never let me go.

My husband didn’t over promise and under deliver. The biggest advantage of dating a non-verbal man, I discovered, is that it isn’t about what he says, but about what he does. We didn’t spend hours—much time at all, in fact—either dissecting our relationship or discussing our future. We just went with the flow. It helped too that my closest friends and family loved him straight away—and they loved him for me especially. They saw past our differences to the essence of our relationship—that we were good for each other, and that his solidity and kindness would temper me and curb my existential malaise.

What I’ve learnt now is that you can overcome any number of practical differences if you have the basics sorted. If you still like and fancy each other, after all the time you’ve spent together. If you can make each other laugh—which comes in handy when you’re wiping up your child’s explosive poops in the wee hours of the morning. If you respect each other and don’t try to change, diminish or possess the other. If, and this is especially important, you can fight fair. If you’re kind and respectful with each other’s friends and family. If he holds you when you’re sad and gives you one of his extra-special tight hugs when he senses you need it. If he can cope with you at your worst. And if the two of you make time for each other, so you continue to grow together, rather than apart.

Those are the things that count, not your income levels or ages or interests, or even that you speak the same language.

We are not a perfect couple but I’ve learnt that perfection—especially in relationships—doesn’t exist. Your feelings will ebb and flow, and that’s ok. You will never see eye to eye on everything. You will drive each other crazy at times. You will wonder what the hell you’re doing with each other at others. Longstanding issues will continue to rear their ugly head. Unexpected life events—like an unplanned pregnancy, for example—will test you to your core, and force you to redefine and renegotiate the parameters of your relationship and your future together. There will be tears and arguments and petty quarrels.

But you will also discover that love isn’t in the flowers and the poetry and the love songs and sweet nothings you whisper late at night. Love is in the cracks and the corners, in the places where the light doesn’t reach, in the things that aren’t said, the tiny gestures, the banality and mess of daily life, the pull of forces beyond your control that keep you together, despite the voices that tell you ‘this cannot work’ – ‘give up.’ It’s when you wake up one day and realise that you can’t imagine your life without the person lying next to you, and that this crazy, coincidental relationship—where both of you were just going with the flow—has suddenly become more serious and stronger than you ever imagined.

This is our love story, and I am grateful for it. Happy anniversary, my love.

On breaking up and a bar named Freedom

/ sunnyrap / 24 Comments

horreya stella_fotor

 

It is a sign of growing up, I think, that when my relationship came to its predictable – but still quietly devastating – end last week, I didn’t turn to a vodka (or three) to wash away my broken-heart blues. Nor did I call on the army of hardy friends who used to commiserate with me in these things (partly because I now live in Cairo and said friends, such as I still have them, are inaccessible for reasons of sheer distance). Nor did I sit for hours in a slightly darkened room, chain-smoking cigarettes and listening to maudlin love songs (David Gray, anyone?) in some tragic parody of a lovesick teenager.

No. This time I chose to Keep Myself Busy in a bid for Germanic efficiency, rather than the Gallic grand gestures I used to favour. My logic is this: all the energy, time and mind-and-heart space I invested in the great love must be transferred elsewhere if I am to survive this. I’m not sure the logic-over-love scenario is one that works for everyone, but it’s applicable in my case, partly because our end – sad as it was – was always out there on the horizon, like those storm clouds that linger on a beautiful day. And as with all good dramas, we’d had several dress rehearsals along the way.

So I called every good friend I had and set up dates and activities that would keep me occupied for at least the next several days. I went shopping in City Stars with one and spent a glorious afternoon lunching and shopping (why does trying on a new pair of shoes seem to reach the parts of a female soul that other things can’t?). And I called another good friend for a more cultural evening Downtown – somewhere I rarely venture to these days from my cosy Zamalek bubble.

Thus it was that we spent a suitably intellectual – and very funny – evening catching up on life over mezze in one of Cairo’s oldest restaurants, venturing to the Townhouse Gallery afterwards for a spot of Culture, and finishing up in Horreya, or “Freedom” in Arabic – a Downtown institution and rare alcohol-serving ahwa that is the haunt of wannabe intellectuals, trendy expats and a surprising number of gay men – both foreign and, dare I say it, Egyptian.

It had become almost a rite-of-passage for me – this trip to Horreya – seeing as I’d lived in Cairo for more than a year and hadn’t yet ventured there. With dreams of domestic bliss and babies disintegrating faster than a cheap Downtown dress, and sad singledom furiously beckoning, a trip there seemed more important than ever. In other words, swapping faux Zamalek glamour for hard-core Downtown grunge – two harassed-looking waiters, grim fluorescent lighting that did nothing to hide the grimy ceilings and floors, ominously cracked mirrors, and a menu that seemed to consist entirely of Stellas – made infinite sense to me at this particular point in my life.

So we ventured in and found a table and had a Stella each and I tried surreptitiously to people-watch through the broken mirror opposite me. In places like this, obvious people-watching is not cool – a bit like getting your camera out at an exclusive dinner party. I was struck by the hideously bright lighting first, and then the men intently playing backgammon in a corner (in the non-alcoholic section, this being Egypt after all), and then the huge crowded table behind us, packed with people so disparate it was impossible not to wonder what could possibly have brought them all together.

It turned out that it was a very sociable gay Yemeni who was responsible for this. Determined to spread the party mood around, he insisted we be given a plate of food from his table. As he told us when he ambled across, he was celebrating, of all things, the acquisition of a British passport, which he’d gained by marrying an older Englishman three years ago.

I was surprised, given the Daily Mail-inspired Cretan maze of British immigration law, but happy for him. “Do you love him?” I asked, after he had told us for the third time about the three homes his husband had bought for him and the different countries he could now live in (with England being very low down on the list). His careful pause before the “yes” suggested that love – on his part, at least – may not have been the main motivation for this particular union.

Did Horreya live up to its hype? In many ways: yes. Would we have been invited into the celebrations of a gay Yemeni and his entourage in the generic coffee chains that I frequent in Zamalek? Never.

Here in the heart of downtown Cairo, all the contradictions of daily Egyptian life came together in one glorious tumble – like a washing machine in full spin. A gay man could celebrate his marriage and the fruits of it in a society where homosexuality does not exist, in a café that looked like a traditional Egyptian ahwa but served alcohol, and in a space where different nationalities and classes and age groups blended together happily, in a kind of Boho Benetton ad. But it is the curse of our post-modern age that I could never quite forget that I was in Horreya. A dive by any other name is surely still a dive.

And, no matter how much I may want to deny it, age catches up with you in the end. We stayed for a couple of hours or so, nursing our individual beers, enjoying our conversation and the food we had unexpectedly been given. I happened to catch sight of the time at around 10.30pm and asked whether my friend wanted to stay. Neither of us, it turned out, wanted another beer, and she was also in need of a toilet break. The toilets here are terrible, she said, so it might be easier to go home. I agreed, willingly. Our night had been eventful, funny and suitably satisfying and it led me on this occasion happily to my bed.

Once I was incapable of leaving a party early in case I missed a piece of the action. Is it wisdom or cynicism now that assures me there will always be a party going on somewhere and I will, in fact, miss very little I haven’t experienced already? It seems to me that, with age, a bite of the apple is now often as satisfactory – if not more so – than a whole one.

That’s got to be a good thing, somewhere down the line.

(Full disclosure – I wrote this piece around six years ago now, when my last relationship was coming to an end and as I was approaching my 40th birthday, but never got around to publishing it. I have not been back to Horreya since. )   

On the challenges of keeping an open heart

/ sunnyrap / 13 Comments

When I was much younger, I read an interview with Debra Winger – an actress I adored growing up – talking about a meeting she’d once had with Kathleen Turner, another strong, sensual 1980s heroine who’s sadly fallen off the radar today.

I can’t remember the specifics but Winger said she’d met Turner briefly at a party – or perhaps on a film set – and the latter had been friendly enough, but a little aloof. To paraphrase Winger, she said she got the impression that Turner had made all the friends she wanted in life and wasn’t interested in acquiring any more.

I must have been in my late teens or early twenties at this point and I remember thinking: Why would anyone do that?  There was something very disconcerting about it to me – this idea that you could suddenly reach a point where you’d made all the friends you needed in life and you weren’t interested in reaching out anymore, in meeting new people, in being challenged. It seemed to me to be the ultimate sign of a closed heart.  And a closed heart was exactly what I wanted to avoid.

As I’ve grown older, however, I’ve had two major, but very contradictory, realisations.  The first was a sudden and profound understanding of exactly what E.M. Forster – a writer I read a lot of in my youth – meant when he said ‘Only connect’ – an achingly simple phrase that was only very loosely penetrable to me in my teen years. (That connecting with your fellow human beings, whether by seeking out ‘kindred spirits,’ or by having a brief but uplifting exchange, was actually the very essence of life.) Living as I do here in Cairo, far away from family and friends, those words have often echoed in my head. People can make you miserable, no doubt, but they can also make you blissfully happy.

But running alongside that realization was the slow dawning that age and experience, and perhaps also my life as an expat, had terribly coloured my view of my fellow humans. I realized that I was no longer as willing as I once had been to give everyone a chance. No longer did I repeat to myself fervently that everyone had good and bad points; nor was I willing to be as open as I’d been before. I had better instincts now and I was more willing and able to follow those instincts. To put it another way, as I told friends, I had become smarter, and thus fussier, about who I spent my time with.

Perhaps that, in itself, is no bad thing – it seems to make sense that you should surround yourself with good people, as hundreds of positivity books will tell you.  There is the undeniable fact also that we understand ourselves better as we get older and become more comfortable with who we are, which then influences the choices we make. And yet, it still seems to me a fundamental fallacy, somehow – this idea that age and wisdom make you more discerning about people and your circle will narrow but strengthen as a result.

I think the truth is more prosaic – life and age can harden your heart, and sometimes you never even realize that it’s happening.  An accumulation of hurts, big and small, a multitude of let-downs – as is bound to happen in life – a cacophony of so-called ‘a-ha’ moments (I was an idiot to trust that person/ I was wrong about this one/ this person is going to let me down) and a few rejections move you further and further away from the open-hearted generous soul you once were, or may have aspired to be.

Once upon a time, I chose to trust and to accept that a bruised heart and ego might be an acceptable consequence of that choice, the price I would pay for having an open heart. Somewhere along the line though, I’ve lost that ability, to the extent that my life has now become littered with people who haven’t quite ‘made the grade,’ while the number of people who do make the cut become smaller and smaller.

At the end, it is always a choice. Living like this means a life lived from fear – a fear of rejection and hurt – a life lived from our lower rather than higher selves.  Better, I think, to force open our hearts once again, to live with courage and conviction and love, to remain open to life and to new people and all the challenges they may bring. If the heart is a muscle, as they say, only practice and exposure will strengthen it.

Overprotect it and it will wither away and slowly die.

Fabulous at forty?

/ sunnyrap / 6 Comments

I go through two schools of thought on this one.

There are times when I think – and feel – the distance I’ve come, the fact that I know myself and I’m more comfortable in my own skin than I’ve ever been, that I look better – and God knows I dress better – than I did when I was younger (on that note, I’m in awe at how groomed young girls are these days. My teenage make-up attempts were unmitigated disasters – I still remember the time I went for a free make-over and had to get the tube home with blue mascara and green eyeshadow).  

And then it hits me that there are so many milestones that I’ve failed to achieve and I’m filled with fear.  My biological clock is ticking louder than ever.  I don’t know if it’s because I desperately want a child or I desperately still want  the option to have one.  I do know – or I believe – that having a child will make me a better person, or more specifically, a less selfish one, with less time to worry about the petty things that take up far too much time and energy now  (anti-aging  products, anyone?)  There’s got to be more to life than worrying about grey hairs and my failing eyesight and whether I still look younger than the next woman.

The world is not kind to ageing spinsters…