I was reading an article this morning that was a letter written from the ex wife to a new girlfriend. It struck a chord with me. Not that it was about ex wives and new girlfriends but one statement in particular contained within the article.
Apparently once a woman enters her 40s she starts to disappear. And in this last 12 months in my life nothing could be more true. I think I should stop reading articles as another I read this morning was about a career woman who was pregnant but didn’t want to announce her pregnancy as she felt it crushed her identity. And I totally and utterly understand where she is coming from. TOTALLY
When I was a career girl, I suffered countless labels. Labels placed on me by others. Labels I hated, labels I struggled against. Yet, when I met my husband and fell pregnant with our first child, my first inkling of the release of those labels, that were peeled off somewhat as brutally as they had been placed started to be.
I was no longer “party girl” or ” the one with the passionate temper” I was now a bride to be and a pending mother. And add to that a step mother (and obviously a wicked one at that). The minute I stepped into maternity leave zone, I discovered my first taste of the wasteland that my life could become. I simply ceased to be. Once I stopped working, once I stopped earning and providing for myself – a thing I’ve done since I was 14 years old, I simply ceased.
Sure I still functioned. I cooked, I cleaned, I paid bills with my husbands money. But I stopped having an identity. I had my baby in September and was informed in November that as I was on maternity leave in the world of work I didn’t exist, I had simply ceased to be. And it stung. I was no longer entitled to the Christmas party or bonus – that now was the privelidge of the younger, sexier non pregnant girl who had taken my role and my client base when I left to have my child. I simply vanished. I could no longer apply for a credit card without my husbands signature. I had no identity other than new mother, and I struggled silently with this.
Now I’m officially middle aged. And I have given up working for a boss a while back, and I thought I’d come to terms with this disappearing act that is a middle age. I no longer own the car I drive, it’s my husbands. I didn’t qualify to be on the loan documentation for the car, I don’t earn a wage, I don’t have an identity.
I set my original blog up seven years ago, in an attempt to forge myself some kind of identity. Some kind of place in the world. I worked on it for years and I lost myself for a while, and it vanished, like me, like the middle aged woman I am. And had to be resurrected, rise from the ashes so to speak. And this blog was created.
But for the last 12 months it’s languished like me, in a wasteland of self pity, wallowed in grief and been eaten by chronic pain. And I am lost. I have vanished into this oblivion of middle aged ness. So again, this blog – being the ever emerging beast it always has been will change and morph again.
I haven’t written on it in a while as I didn’t think the world needed nor required any more pain suffering and whinging that it already had. I wallowed instead. But it seems that my blog has renewed itself and so must I. So forward I go, attempting to reforge and refind me and acumulate some cooking along the way.
Xoxoxo Lyndal
The Domesticated Ms Hemsworth 