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Overview
“It is never, ever, too late to change the course of your life... The world has underestimated what we midlife women are capable of.”
Have you ever looked at your life and wondered "is this it?" At the crucial halfway point, do you wish you had your very own manifesto to reassert your passion and place in the world? Hilarious, insightful, and encouraging, Midlife Manifesto throws the limelight on the untapped potential of midlife women instead of obsessing over the struggles and crises that come with the 40s and 50s. Whether it regards financial independence, personal style, relationships, health, spirituality, or making your home a sanctuary, this personal guide will inspire you to achieve the transformation you deserve and create the plan to make it happen.
Sharing her own ups and downs with candor and wit, Jane Mathews, who is still navigating but also rising above her own midlife crisis, provides a one-stop shop of ideas and resources to motivate you, guide you towards what really works, and supply you with a well-curated toolkit to write a blueprint for your future. With to-do-lists, tips, quotes, and pages for you to actively write on and piece together the real you, every reader will interpret the book differently, creating their own unique midlife action plan.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781510702936 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Skyhorse |
| Publication date: | 03/15/2016 |
| Sold by: | SIMON & SCHUSTER |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 304 |
| File size: | 5 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
Rewriting Your Midlife Story
In this chapter you'll:
• Realize that you are not alone in feeling how you do
• Shift from automatic to manual
• See how the Midlife Manifesto works
• Do some open-your-mind-up exercises
That was then ... "Bagels face inwards"
... was stamped on my toaster. How come the most mundane domestic appliance comes with instructions but midlife doesn't? Midlife. A small but loaded word.
Look in the mirror right now. For a whole minute. Really look into your eyes. Are you the person you thought you would be? Are you the person you want to be? Am I the only one looking at my midlife reflection thinking, Is this it?
It can hit you with a smack or it can sneak up behind you. The catalyst that makes you realize things have irrevocably changed. You have reached midlife and there's no going back. The boom gate is lowering! For me it was a perfect storm. The hurricane of finding myself lost in an increasingly toxic marriage followed by divorce and the death of my mother (my father and sister were already gone), while juggling two teenage children, getting back into the workforce and dealing with spiralling blood pressure — along with the gentle poke from the god of small things. Like letting the airplane seat belt out longer than I ever thought possible (there must have been a very, very small child sitting in the seat before me). And seeing a multi-chinned Shar Pei photo of myself. And having the words "dementia" light up, the size of the Hollywood sign, every time I forgot something. And being reduced to tears by the YouTube video of Christian the lion. And becoming a foulmouthed harridan in traffic. And then there's the hair thing. Chewbacca on a good day. Grey hair doubling as fuse wire. And not just on my head. In my eyebrows, on my chin. Marvelous. I have become The Bearded Lady.
But this is irrelevant as I am officially invisible. A whole generation of midlife women wearing Harry Potter's invisibility cloak. (My personal best is being ignored by five, [five!], shop assistants at one counter in a Sydney department store.) Who'd have thought? Midlife has crept up on me like a body snatcher. Midlife at the oasis. I watch the top of my arms taking on a life of their own as I wave good-bye. A fruit bat in drag. Bits keep moving after I've stopped. I hear the siren call of elastic waists, of Birkenstocks, bifocals, naps, and Crocs. But I still feel thirty inside. I need to find a way out and back to myself.
"I feel the best is behind me. I feel like I'm on the top of a roller coaster, going down and screaming 'Aaaaarrrrgggghh!'" Kitty, 51
"I see my forties as a decade of disappointment — things aren't quite what I had expected or hoped for — in my marriage, with my children, in my life." Susan, 47
So now ... Rewrite your midlife story
I did! I am writing this paragraph shortly after I completed the book — having written and lived my Manifesto for a few months, and the transformation is startling. I won't say it has always been easy, but truly, if I have managed to wrest the steering wheel away from the twin forces of Habit and Inertia, anyone can. You can. Is every single part of my life sweetness, roses, and fluffy little kittens? No. Do I feel stronger, mentally and physically, more engaged with my body and with life, more productive and confident, and optimistic about the future? Absolutely. Stick with this. It works. Read on. You will see how the world has underestimated what we midlife women are capable of. They will continue to do so at their peril!
"The most creative act you will ever undertake is the act of creating yourself."
Deepak Chopra
The Midlife Dip
The theoretical notion of a dip in midlife is well documented. Seven hundred years ago Dante wrote, "In the middle of the journey of our life / I came to myself within a dark wood / where the way was lost." I know exactly how he felt. However, I don't subscribe to the whole notion of being "middle aged" nor "midlife crises." Both are lazy, simplistic phrases, bleached of their sense with overuse. Forget middle aged and midlife crisis, think midlife opportunity. Many midlife women, myself included, feel the need to rid their lives of the things that are no longer working and replace them with things that more accurately reflect the person we have become, or are growing into. Time for a bit of personal alchemy.
In modern paganism, the triple goddess of Maiden, Mother, and Crone is honored. I am a mother, but I guess by now I've slipped into the Crone category. I don't know about you, but the word "Crone" conjures up the warty old hag, poisoned apple in hand, from Disney's Snow White. It's a shame, as historically midlife women — Crones — (who were considered old then, as most would die in their forties) were wise women, and highly regarded. Current society does not share this enlightened perspective, and I sometimes feel barely tolerated. Meh. Replete with battle scars and life lessons, I embrace my inner croniness. And it appears I am not alone. "Croning ceremonies" are now available to mark your midlife Coming-of-Wisdom. (Now there's a great fiftieth birthday present for a friend. At least you can be pretty sure she won't get two.)
Research shows that happiness over the span of our lives is a gentle smile shape, starting with a happy childhood and early adulthood, followed by a midlife dip and a climb out the other side towards old age. And that's not just true for humans. Studies have shown that even apes have the midlife blues. On your behalf I went to the zoo to see with my own eyes if this was true. I tracked down the orangutan enclosure, and looked into Willow's eyes. Oh, the ennui. "Is this it?" her eyes were saying. It was like looking in a mirror. Trust me, we are not alone!
My Turning Point
I blame the fridge magnet. I am sure the lady on some distant production line in China didn't realize what magma she held in her hands. In my forties I bought a fridge magnet that said "Destined to be an Old Woman with No Regrets." Rather than live on the fridge, it sat on my desk and stared reproachfully at me as I stared back at it, unsettled.
The more I looked at the wretched thing the more I began to admit to myself that on my existing trajectory there would be regrets. Those unsettling three words kept whirling round my head like the tigers who turn into butter in Little Black Sambo. Is this it? The flick of a wet towel. Is. Flick. This. Flick. It? Flick. Palms bruised from hitting the bottom of a ketchup bottle, I reviewed the detritus of another family meal with that question whirling, whirling. With a successful career, a nice husband, 2.4 children, good social life, and a house in Sydney's answer to Wisteria Lane (not forgetting the banana-eating, farting dog) why did I feel so savagely unfulfilled? The unraveling was approaching faster than I thought. Unbeknownst to me, like a considerate executioner, the blade was already being sharpened.
The moment I realized my marriage was over, thoughts turned to an exquisite Assyrian frieze of a fatally wounded lioness in the British Museum. She has been struck by several arrows, but she roars and refuses to give up. Just looking at the image still affects me profoundly. I remember feeling intensely, keenly wounded, but fought to keep my head above water, even as I drowned. Smoldering embers burned in my belly. One day they would be fanned back into life. A wingbeat of future happiness.
"Your life is speaking to you every day, all the time — and your job is to listen and find the clues."
Oprah Winfrey
As an aside, the stress of divorce can make you very, very thin. It can also make you very, very fat. Disappointingly, I galloped headfirst down the latter path, and ended up like a sumo Tweedledum. Because life is unfair, as I got fatter my ex-husband got fitter and slimmer, living on steamed dust and air, acquiring the requisite fast car (not quite menoporsche, but almost) and charming fishing-rod-thin girlfriend. Ex-husband and I continued to attend teacher-parent meetings together, with me feeling like I'd just stepped out of an old saucy seaside postcard as the huge wife with skinny husband. Embarrassing. Not I-need-to-move-to-Qatar-now embarrassing, but avoidable, humiliating. And totally my responsibility.
Post-divorce, wounds licked but not quite healed, I went back to a big job in advertising, traveling overseas all the time, piling on air miles, stress, and pounds in equal measure. I certainly gave the infamous Holmes and Rahe stress test a nudge. That's the scale that rates 43 stressful life events that can lead to illness. It starts off with "death of a spouse," then happily winds its way through "divorce" and "death of a family member," past the corridors of "illness" and "change in financial state" through to "Christmas." I don't recall being actually incarcerated, but I think I ticked all of the other boxes, because we know that bad things don't happen in ones, do they? They happen in twos, and threes, and sevens, and fifteens, and that's what happened to me.
My mother, who had been suffering from dementia (so very cruel to witness but bizarrely benign to the sufferer), died alone in New Zealand after a pretty traumatic series of events (a stroke on the plane from London, hospitalization in Auckland, having to find a nursing home), culminating in her wedding ring being stolen from her corpse. The cremation and burial were a piece of cake after that. But I had never felt so alone. At the same time I moved house, renovated, juggled major work projects in several countries, a less-than-easy ex, two teenagers, and a dog. Woof. Oh yes, and sorting out my mother's house and will in England, battling incompetent and expensive lawyers, warding off previously unheard-of relatives with a cattle prod, and shipping stuff back to Australia. When my job relocated overseas, I jumped off the carousel for a bit and decided to get my life on track. It was the best decision that I have ever made.
Shifting from automatic to manual
We live the first part of our lives on automatic. Childhood, university, job, marriage, and children all march in line like soldiers. This was vividly illustrated at my daughter's school's open day when she was seven. The children had to write the story of their lives. One of them caught my eye. It went along the lines of "I'll go to school, then to university, get married, have children, then die." Super. So I guess we're in that sliver of time between having children and dying! Better make the most of it then, and I'm not sure if doing it on "automatic" will cut it.
If the first half of our lives is dictated to us, the beauty of the second half is that it is in our hands. To use a plane analogy, we finally get to have first dibs at the oxygen mask, putting ourselves first. We are in control of our destiny, not the other way round. We are the conductors, the ringmasters, the captains of our ship. The past is irrelevant and I just don't see the point of pulling at the threads of it. Throw the bad stuff in the river, like Winnie the Pooh and his friends did with their Pooh sticks and watch them float away. The world has finished with your past — if you have. I know the past influences us, and we can't change it, but we can influence the future.
Time to shift to manual, ladies.
Do more than just fill in the dash
We all will have a dash — the dash between when we're born and when we die — for me, say, 1961–2043, assuming I live to be 82 (the average life expectancy for a woman in Australia). So it's all about how you fill that dash, another 30-odd summers. Here's a graphic way to demonstrate it. Get a piece of paper. Draw a line across the middle. The bottom half represents how much of our lives we have already lived, so shade it out. Then draw a line in the remaining section one third across. That represents how much time we will spend asleep, so shade that bit out too. Then draw another line a third across. That space represents how much time we will spend doing chores (driving, grocery shopping, cleaning, having a shower, waiting as your call to Virgin Mobile is put on hold, etc.). Now shade that bit out as well. That small empty rectangle is all that we have left.
On the one hand, it's sobering. On the other hand, carpe-bloody-diem. I know that technically I've crested the arc, but I refuse to let the days slip by, pleating into one another, blotting up time. We still have a lot of living to do! (If you are one of the few people who haven't heard of it, have a look at the Internet phenomenon that is The Dash poem by Linda Ellis atwww.linda-ellis.com.)
Nan Shepherd, a Scottish novelist, wrote a book called The Living Mountain about the almost mystical experiences she had walking in her beloved Cairngorm Mountains. She talked about "living all the way through (life)." I want to live all the way through my life too. I felt I was sleepwalking, stuck in a story that was no longer mine. Now it is time for a new story, and it is mine to write. I don't want to lead a little life. In my own way, I want to leave a footprint on the world, a comet tail across the sky. I roar.
Why no Life Plan already?
Like most women I know, I am a virtuoso list maker and planner. I'm pretty good at shopping lists, a dab hand with unfeasibly long To Do lists, and not too shabby at planning client conferences, dinners with friends, house renovations, or holidays. Every few years I travel somewhere with the same three girlfriends where we snort and leak our way through a week or two of non-stop laughter. I pathetically get as much pleasure from organizing the trip as going on it. Not a website, blog, or review goes unread or cross-referenced with nerdy precision before The Kickass Itinerary emerges from its cocoon. Not for nothing have I earned the moniker "Power Frau" among the girls. So it's odd, really, that for someone who spends so much time planning and writing lists, and doing stuff, largely for other people, I hadn't spent any time writing a plan for my life. And what could be more important than that? I needed a plan. Preferably a "cunning plan" to quote Blackadder ("A plan so cunning you could put a tail on it and call it a weasel"). So I looked for a book to guide me.
I went to bookstores, both real and virtual, but couldn't find what I was looking for. I wonder if I am the only person who feels very self-conscious in the self-help section of the bookshop? I am sure there is a large flashing neon arrow hovering above me shouting, "Jane is self-absorbed, has issues, and low self-esteem!" I spent about one bottle of Jo Malone (or three pairs of Crocs or a dozen bottles of Sauvignon Blanc's) worth on books that I thought would help, but I should have saved my money. They fell into two types — the annoying autobiographical ones of women travelling "on a journey" to find themselves, and the bullshit ones. Both infuriated me.
Am I alone in wanting to slap smuggins living in Tuscany or on a Greek island, waist-deep in productive olive groves, uncovering medieval frescoes (not rising damp) in their kitchens and not being ripped off by the local builders? Really? Down, Green-Eyed Monster, down boy. A friend of mine actually admitted she went to Italy to see if one well-known lady author lived up to her hyperbole, and she (rather stalkishly) tracked down her house. I am not sure if I was disappointed or happy to hear that, yes, as she cast a gimlet eye over the happy throng, the doyenne was having a picture-perfect al fresco lunch in the dapply shade of an apple tree with red-and-white-checked table cloths, eating effortlessly beautiful food washed down by carafes of local wine, having a fine old time with her chums. Good for her — but of no help or relevance to me. And then there's the other sort. With some notable exceptions (see bibliography), so much bullshit, so little "meat," and so painfully badly written. My local op shop did well that day.
"We either make ourselves miserable, or we make ourselves strong. The amount of work is the same."
Carlos Castaneda
If you Google "Life plan for midlife women" you get about five million results, mostly about losing weight. Five million sounds like a lot until you Google "how to make a cup of tea" and get one hundred million results. I kid you not. So no luck on the Internet either.
Better write it myself then.
Midlife Manifesto — a summary of how it works
A manifesto is a declaration of what you believe in. The Midlife Manifesto is more than that. It is a comprehensive life plan designed to lay out a clear path to take you from where you are now, to living the life you imagine. Often we are steered off the course that we were meant to be on. The plan helps you identify what that course is, so that what you want becomes what you have. Along the way you'll consider all aspects of your life, and incorporate elements into your plan. The word "manifesto" is derived from the Latin word "manifestum" which means "clear." By the end of this book, that is how you should feel. Clear about where you are, where you want to go, and how to get there. The answers are in you already — there's just a cloud covering them at the moment.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Midlife Manifesto"
by .
Copyright © 2014 Jane Mathews.
Excerpted by permission of Skyhorse Publishing.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
How to get the most out of Midlife Manifesto,
Preface,
1. Rewriting Your Midlife Story,
2. Your Vision,
3. Relationships,
4. Your Body,
5. Your Spiritual Self,
6. Your Interests/Work,
7. Your Home,
8. Personal Style,
9. Financial Independence,
10. Your Midlife Manifesto,