Excerpts from her book, “The Queen of My Self: Stepping into Sovereignty in Midlife:”
Sometime, usually between about forty-five and fifty-five, we lose our monthly blood and hormonal balance. No matter how much we might have minded the fuss and muss of our periods, there is an alarming awareness of irrevocability when they stop. It is, after all, the end of a thirty or forty-year way of being in the world. Menopause marks the termination of our participation in the bottom-line, bigger than we are, biological imperative of our species. Our reproductive potential is now no longer an option. Whether or not we chose to use it when we had it is not the point. What is crucial is feeling that our choices have narrowed.
Women of the Sixties Generation were the first to enjoy an unprecedented access to a variety of birth control methods. It was also largely the women of those politicized times who demanded, and ultimately won, the right to legally decide the destiny of our own bodies. Once in possession of this precious, personal choice of whether or not to become and/or stay pregnant, we have chosen, on the whole, to have fewer babies and at a more advanced age than ever before in history. Freed of what we considered to be biological tyranny and possessed of sophisticated ecological concern, fully one fifth of us chose not to have children at all.
As the tenure of our Mother time ends, it causes many of us to re-evaluate the choices that we have made about fertility, decisions that have defined our life for the past few decades. The finality of menopause really rankles. Some women who had never wanted babies now suddenly become nostalgic for what might have, could have, been. Recently, my friend Barbara, an art therapist and educator who is approaching her forty-ninth birthday, confided that she was thinking, for the very first time in her life, that maybe she wanted to have a child, after all. Something was definitely missing, some lost chance, gnawing at her sense of certainty.
Thirty-three years after writing a ground breaking piece in Look magazine about not wanting to have children, the writer Betty Rollin admitted not long ago on the pages of Modern Maturity that she was “one of those old-time ‘career girls’ who forgot to have children. At the age of sixty,” she continued, “I began to mourn for the children I never had.” Others, upon consideration, are secure and still satisfied with their earlier choice to remain childless, or what many in that category prefer to call childfree. One such woman wrote in response to Rollin’s recent article that Rollin’s earlier piece had been “a source of strength” over the decades to resist the social pressure to have children when she knew she didn’t want them.
For the first time in history, large numbers of women of our generation, especially those with careers, deferred starting a family until we were in our late thirties and forties. Births to women between the ages of forty and forty-four increased seventy-one percent between 1990 and 1999. Consequently, today many of us are still very much occupied in the Mother mode when we reach our peri/menopausal years. Our hormonal changes (a decline of estrogen and progesterone needed for reproduction and an increase of androgens, which stimulate our assertiveness) produce a visceral withdrawal from and disinterest in mothering that is often at odds with the requirements of our parenting responsibilities. Our priority shifts from the desire to attend to the needs of others, to the imperative drive to address our own. This can result in a poignant interior push pull.
One of the women I interviewed, Saundra, a fifty-eight-year-old psychotherapist with a sixteen-year-old son, was extremely articulate about her conflicting emotions. She told me that though she adores her child, there is just something primal, deep within her, that recoils at having to shower all of her nurturing attention on him when she is so desperately drawn to care for herself. “Where is your mother?” she teases him when she is most resentful (and, needless to say, extremely guilty about it). “It’s not me, babe. No, no, no. It’s not me you’re looking for, babe.”
Many of us with children now face the future with an empty nest, our family grown and our kids off creating lives of their own, which leaves us with huge amounts of unaccustomed time to use as we please. This would be extremely liberating if it didn’t also make us feel so lonely and insecure. Not only do we “lose” our children at this stage of life, we also lose our sense of Self. As Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis poignantly put it, “What is sad for women of my generation is that they weren’t supposed to work if they had families. What were they going to do when the children are grown — watch the raindrops coming down the window pane?”
After a couple of decades of serving the needs and desires of others, we have lost sight of our own. Our early aspirations were sacrificed on the altar of nurturing others, murdered by self-denial, dashed by adversity, and starved by neglect. I can’t tell you how many times I have heard women exclaim in jubilation as their mothering days run out, “And now, it is my turn!” — the mantra of middle age. Then they stop in their tracks, dumbstruck as they realize that now free to pursue their deferred dreams, they have no idea any more of what it is that they want for themselves.
For older mothers, especially, it is crucial to keep nurturing our own dreams, even as we support our kids in developing their own. Quality Mommy Time is more essential now than ever — both for us and also for our kids — as we navigate our hormonal shifts. Remember: Ain’t no one happy unless Mom is happy!