Two Sides of the Same Coin

I was on a video call a few weeks ago. I had a glass of white wine in front of me and one of my best friends on the screen. I was settling in for a long Zoom chat. So far, so normal for the days that we live in. Not long into our conversation, my pal started to complain about her lack of sleep. It was, it turned out, due to the horrific night sweats she was having. That’s it she cried, it’s all over, it’s the menopause. I have it all, the sweats, the mood swings, the horrific skin. I tried my best to talk her down off the ledge she was teetering on and reminded her that the world as we know it is up in flames. We’re living through the new plague, I told her, everyone has mood swings, nobody is able to sleep. But she was having none of it. She was, and these are her words not mine, soon to be a dried-up old crone. Please tell me you’re going through this too, she wailed, I can’t do this alone. And then she stopped, looked down and laughed. You see there was someone else sitting in on our call, my six-week-old daughter. She was asleep (finally!), nestled in against my breast where she had just had a big long feed. I laughed too. Here, I said, give me a couple of months to get these hormones in check, before I tell you if they’re going to swing wildly in the other direction.

And that, my friends, is one of the weirdest things about being 42. I have good pals who are sure they’re menopausal and are worried about their children’s cancelled junior certs and I have other’s who like me, have a newborn or are about to give birth or have had fertility treatments cancelled because it’s not an essential medical procedure.

When I was younger, I refuse to say young, because I am certainly not old, I thought 42 was basically pensionable. I would have been horrified at a group of women in their 40s planning to go dancing, or shopping in River Island or getting pissed on Zoom. I thought you could tell a woman in her 40s from a distance, by her old lady clothes, wrinkles and terrible hair. But here I am in clothes that my nieces deem cool (though not currently you understand, I have a 12 week old and I’ve been Corona snacking like there’s no tomorrow), with the best hair of my life – because I can now afford to have the best hair of my life.

At 42 I am both young and old. If I shake my head at a gang of teens littering, I know that they’re laughing at the old wan giving out. I’m a senior member of work teams with 20 years’ experience and the confidence to speak up. But then when I take my baby out in the pram I get spoken to like a teen mum, given advice by strangers and told by public health nurses that I’m ‘a great girl, doing a great job’.

Although conversely, a baby bump at 41 meant that I did get told by a total stranger in the supermarket that I wouldn’t be so tired if I’d had my kids younger. I shouldn’t have waited so long she told me shaking her head, probably imaging my very selfish life and not the pain and heartbreak of trying to start a family. True story, aren’t some people the worst?

But it’s not just external, it’s internal too.

I own a home, am a mother of two, a wife, a professional - a grown-up on paper. But in my mind, I’m about 27. I want to go to festivals, to stay up all night with my friends, I don’t want to pay bills or worry about everything. I’m not sure where 15 years went and how I got here.

It’s a strange feeling to be both young and old. To want to wear clothes from both Marks and Spencer and River Island. To want to go dancing all night and stay in with a lavender pillow spray and a good book. To imagine the perfect holiday with dawn beach parties and a few nice old churches to visit. To read about menopause symptoms on your dimmed phone when you’re awake at 4 am feeding the baby.

No other decade of our lives has us see-sawing so wildly between life stages.

I have been reaching every milestone with my friends all our lives. Starting school, first kisses, the first time we lied our way into a nightclub, the first time we had sex, first jobs, moving out, moving back, first loves, weddings, breakups, breakthroughs; we’ve been through it all together. But at 42, some of us are turning left for menopause street, some of us are on Tinder row and some of us are in the baby cul de sac.

Because, happily, we no longer need to follow a prescribed road map for life that has us coupled up and childbearing by 28, our 30s and 40s are taken at a completely different pace.

I’m happy I spent my 20s and 30s working hard, having wild nights out and travelling the world before having a first baby at 40 and a second at 42. I’m glad that my consultant told me I wasn’t even nearly the oldest mother on her books last year. I’m relieved I don’t live in the world my mother did, when pregnant at 38 she was sacked as a patient by our family GP for having a baby so old. But I do wonder if, at 56, when I’m worried about my daughter’s junior cert if I’ll be jealous of my friends who had their babies a decade before me and are now drinking daiquiris on a cruise around the Caribbean. But then I remember that by the time we’re all 60 we’ll have caught up again. Children will be grown and we’ll be back at the same pace, hopefully behaving disgracefully on a beach somewhere and caterwauling the same way we did at 18 and in every decade in between.

Jennifer Stevens, May 2020.