Mid life women

Mid life women are all exhausted. Speak to any of your friends or relatives and they are typically tired. What if the demands being made on them are simply too much, too draining, too all-encompassing? I know women who are stuggling with energy levels, health issues, sheer exhaustion, and perimenopause or menopausal symptoms, which cover a multitude of things apart from just the well known hot flushes. Symptoms cam also include anxiety, headaches, overwhelm, increased neurodiverse traits, countless other health changes.

What if every day we want to tell people to f*** off? What if we want to hide away? Close ourselves off? What if we find ourselves becoming antisocial because more people are just too much and we have nothing left to give? What if all there is is a call to hold ourselves and be creative, whatever that might look like? What if life feels different but there is no-one around us who understands or is able to support us? What if we just want something else out of life? What if we can’t face what is looking at us at the start of the day?

All of these things might encompass just one day - maybe every day. What was manageable once no longer is and we don’t understand why, at least initially. And then it becomes every day and you realise that you cannot be what you have always been, and you cannot do what you have always done. Things have to change. What that change looks like depends on each person and it might be different for each person. And this isn’t just women by the way, something of the like can happen to men too, in that life becomes different and it’s not quite understood how.

Women often leave the workplace in midlife, sometimes for caring reasons, or maybe because of all the changes in how they can operate in the world Relationships often change because women are simply no longer in a position to put themselves last all the time. At some point women have to tend to themselves as well as everybody else, and this might coincide with a point in their lives where they are looking after both parents and children. This they have done all their lives, maybe without thinking too much about it, because that’s what women do. We are taught and socialised that we must think about others, we must be nice, we must give space.

But there is a reckoning and it must be met. Other people may not like the reckoning, the women themselves often don’t like it. What should happen is that mid life women will become honoured and acknowledged for all that they have given of themselves - home making, caring, juggling, mothering, being the one where everything stops, but this honouring doesn’t happen often or in some cases at all, so then they have to take it for themselves if they want to retain their sanity.

Who says yes to taking the honouring?