It can get a bit confusing reading all this stuff on midlife. On the one hand, there are women writing about menopause claiming the experience is exclusively female and naming it as the journey into the “third” stage of life. On the other, there are people like Richard Rhor who write compelling about the “second” task of life and claim this experience is available to everyone.
So which is is that I’m going through – and does it matter?
Marian Van Eyk McCain, in her book Transformation Through Menopause, suggests a useful exercise. She asks us to write four headings – physical change, mental change, emotional change and spiritual change. Then she suggests we list all the changes we are going through at the moment, in each of those categories, whether they seem to be connected to menopause or not.
The exercise helped me to recognise many changes I was going through but dismissing as trivial (have you noticed that my eyebrows have faded?) even though they were signs of a different life stage. It also made me realise that while we all go through change in midlife, there are infinite variations in the particular form these changes take.
People who go through midlife with few physical challenges, will experience it differently from those who flush and weep and wring the sweat from their sheets when they wake up in the morning. Those who arrive at midlife happy and satisfied with their lives so far will experience it differently from those who look back with disappointment and regret. The loss of fertility will have a different meaning for a woman who has had five children than for the woman who always longed for children but never had any. Men will experience it differently from women. Those with partners will experience it differently from those who are single. Chaps who went bald 20 years earlier will look at their peers now sporting shiny rounded domes and think: “Ha!”
The important thing is to name your change, in all its complexity, recognising its universal pattern and honouring it as uniquely yours. And then the task is to embrace it, to see every aspect of it as an invitation, a whisper from an angel, a finger that beckons to a new way of being.
Next step: Welcome and entertain them all