Midlife is my Happy Place

5 minute read + 6 minute listen

I can distinctly remember experiencing feelings of deep envy towards the older population of Ireland. It was the early noughties and while I was at a desk, starting out in a career with a questionable approach to work-life balance, my mind would drift to those lucky, more mature, glamorous and greying ducks, who seemed to have it all together. At times in my 20s, the long road of life felt exhausting. And when I would look ahead at the demands a professional career would ask of me – along with attempting to meet a partner, keep a partner, have children with said partner, buy a house, save for a pension – oh my word! Even the thoughts of modern life felt utterly overwhelming, never mind the living of it.

It almost felt like middle age was my my holy grail, and I just had to put the time in until I got there. Of course there were other indicators I’ve always been a middle-ager at heart.

I (extremely happily) lived at home all through my college years and can still, distinctly, remember the relief of getting on the bus home from UCC, happy to escape the cold, people-dense college digs scenario with their horrible dinners and icky kitchens. From the age of 19, I’ve been a red wine drinker with an aversion to drinking anything with a straw. And anyway, who wants to go out when you can sit in with a glass of red wine and get an early night in your own bed without requiring a taxi trip home? While my counterparts were (quite healthily) climbing out of their bedroom windows to get to teenage discos, I was trying to avoid them by lying to my friends that I wasn’t allowed to go. Which, of course, I absolutely was, because my parents knew they could trust their middle-aged teenage daughter utterly – if anything, they would have liked me to get into a scrape or two.

It would take something of a miracle to get me to a music festival these days, but I can remember, with some amount of awe, attending Slane to see U2 and my not having a single drop of fluid in order to avoid the queue for the toilets, which would have been hell to me. I was obviously confident I could navigate the dangers of dehydration and high levels of irritation at intoxicated friends. I mean, you have to give younger me some kudos for the lengths I went to in order to be quite sensible. And, of course, there was a less sensible side to me too that had real craic at many junctures in my younger life.

But there was definitely something about being 20-odd that felt quite draining – all the ‘opportunity’ you were told to make the most of, the frenetic nightlife, the ‘go’ and the hustle.

I never felt an innate need to go particularly crazy and was usually quite happy going for walks and doing a bit of cooking. I can remember my excitement when the Avoca Cafe Cookbook was published for goodness sake – I must have been 22! (A classic which I would highly recommend, by the way).

While faxing press releases to busy journalists, I would daydream about being 50 and living in a cosy flat on the south side of Dublin city. As a near-penniless junior account executive from ‘down the country’, who never really managed to afford to live anywhere in the capital, I didn’t stand a fair chance of being egged or water ballooned or jumped at any given time, south county Dublin always felt so… nice! And safe! I might have a partner, but at 50 being single would be fine too, what with people dying and divorcing and all that being so normalised at that age. The pressure would be off in terms of needing to have a significant other. And I wouldn’t have to go to work every day, because I would be working for myself and be super successful. Not for middle-aged me the 9-7! I would swan around, gathering clients and clacking on my pretty laptop in a pleasant café, which would probably be in Donnybrook. Life would be lovely – and it would be mine! At 20, I felt like my life was my boss’s – and so did he actually, kind of. Being older would be so bloody relaxing!

Which brings to mind something my six-year-old daughter said on a recent holiday, when we dragged her along on a sightseeing trip in a horrid heatwave; “I wish I was in my grave doing nothing”. Ah. Out of the mouths of babes…

It is true to say that the youth will never appreciate being young. And they will find it impossible to fathom the obstacles provided by limited means, poor health and a lack of confidence that can often come with getting older. But being young can be really tough. You probably wont have a clue about what you actually like or want. You’ll have a vague feeling, of course, so you’re probably working in a job that isn’t ideal, but with the idea of getting ahead or segwaying into a better job. Or maybe you’ll be saving to travel or buy a flat. You’ll have a social life, of course, but it may well feel a bit wrong and a bit frantic. There are so many pressures – financial, peer, trying to work out who you are – that as fabulous as our culture makes “being young” out to be, most of us wouldn’t swap places with our 20-something selves. So it makes sense that midlife would always have appeared slightly enviable to me.

Even if life hasn’t exactly panned out as you might had planned, in middle life you will, hopefully, at the very least, have a sense of having survived so far and be proud of yourself for that survival – you’ll have learned the lessons, bought the T-shirt.

If you’re really lucky, you may even feel like you’re ever so slightly thriving. And I don’t mean to sound smug, but I really do wish I could let my younger self know that she’s already on the right path. It’s okay to want to live somewhere decent, to not have to work round the clock for a measly salary and to enjoy a night in with a glass of wine. In fact, it’s the holy grail!

As I reasoned with the six-year-old in the midst of her meltdown; “Let’s have a glass of water and a nice sit down in the shade”. It’s not Disneyland, but it’s a middle age-style approach to a problem that’s far more desirable than the drama of the grave her youth went grabbing for. Don’t you agree?