What Do I Want?

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There’s a question I’ve been asking myself for a few years now.

It’s not really scandalous, although some might find it so.

If you say that in a room full of women over fifty, watch what happens.

Someone will laugh. Someone will probably get very quiet. And chances are someone will look at the ceiling, or out of the window, like the answer might be written in tiny print someplace far away

At this point, we’ve collected a lifetime of opinions about ourselves, and most of them we didn’t ask for.

-Women our age do things like that.

-That’s odd.

-How selfish.

-Wow, embarrassing.

And underneath all of it, an old cultural bargain we probably don’t remember signing is at play. It says something like: I can have a wee bit of power, as long as I don’t become crazy, bossy or inconvenient with it.

Maybe you’re not either.

I used to love school. I know, how odd!

But this new education I’m receiving arrived uninvited after life gave me a curriculum I never would have registered for. A devastating house fire took the home, and most of the certainty I’d built my identity around, along with it. What followed was not a weekend retreat that led to a beautiful reinvention story.

It was years, years of just wanting my old normal back. I wanted the walls, the routines, the woman I was inside of them.

Eventually, and much later than I’d like to admit, I understood that life couldn’t give that back. Instead, I was being asked to listen.

So I did. Badly, at first. Then better.

I started making choices based less on who I had always been, and more on what was quietly asking for my attention now.

And somewhere in there, a sentence arrived that I’ve never been able to let go of:

What I want for myself and all of us is a real sense of belonging.

I approach belonging as a practice, with a focus on belonging without disappearing. I want to love people without having to manage their emotions, and be generous without becoming responsible for everyone’s happiness.

This allows me to listen without rushing in to fix things, and even to disappoint someone and still know I’m a good person.

Some relationships deepen when we become more ourselves. Some shift shape. And some can end.

And once you learn that last bit, you become more interested in cultivating real belonging among good company.

We don’t have to agree on everything to belong together. We just have to be willing to make a little room.

And this is the power that women, secure in their sense of self, have: we can be the door-openers for others.

I believe the world needs more women who know and trust themselves.

This is how cultures begin to change.

Perhaps this is where you become an active part of creating the ecosystem.

You can find more information on the upcoming Modern Female Elders

Forging Intentional Belonging in the link below.

Forging Belonging

Women secure in their sense of self can introduce women to one another. We can share each other’s offerings. We can create the gathering and feel comfortable walking toward the woman standing alone at the edge of it.

We can stop pretending to have all the answers because we recognize our unique earned authority, without feeling ashamed of not being the ultimate authority.

I don’t want to become a woman who has figured everything out.

I’m happiest being a woman who is still available to mystery. At 62, I find that oddly liberating and claim it as my superpower.

I’ve mostly stopped asking whether something is age-appropriate. I’ve fired the committee. I’ve skipped the certification process, and I’m not waiting around for the announcement declaring I’m cleared for takeoff.

What I’ll share with you is that at some point we simply have to decide that something matters to us, and let that be enough.

None of what I share with you is about reinventing ourselves out of fear of getting older.

It’s actually the opposite. It’s about becoming so deeply ourselves that getting older becomes less frightening.

Which brings me to the great privilege of becoming an elder. We finally understand that we don’t have to wait to be invited into the life we want.

We can build it, and then set the kind of table that will nourish us.

We can decide what happens there.

And, if we feel called, we can scootch over and make room for another woman.

Kyra🪶

Writer | Way-Shower | Weaver of Belonging

Come along if you like your women over 50 a little curious, a little unruly, and occasionally up to shenanigans. I write about sovereignty, belonging, becoming, and the strange, beautiful things we discover when we stop behaving ourselves quite so much.