I’ve long known Michelle Obama and I share a birthday (17 January, since you ask) but it appears we share something even more significant: a profound desire to start living for ourselves now our children are “launched”.
While the former First Lady is a fully fledged empty-nester with two daughters living in LA, I am what you might call a peri-nester, since my younger son doesn’t turn 18 until next year. But Michelle and I are facing the same existential crisis. As she put it on Jay Shetty’s On Purpose podcast: “For the first time every choice I’m making is completely mine. I now don’t have the excuse of, ‘My kids need this, my husband needs that… So, how do I think about this next phase?”
Like thousands of other menopausal women suddenly relieved of overseeing our offspring’s every move or looking after wider family, there’s a sudden crisis of identity. In Michelle’s and my case it’s undoubtedly sharpened by the fact we’ve lost both parents, so aren’t replacing school runs with hospital ones. Freedom should feel, to state the stonkingly obvious, liberating.
But, in practice, many women in our situation are like zoo-raised lions released into the wild, sniffing the air suspiciously. Michelle says she’s having therapy to help the fine-tuning process and to alleviate guilt. No need to ask what the guilt’s about. Every mother who ever lived will have weighty memories of all the times they snapped at their families, yelled, waved away small children because a work task seemed more pressing, or generally felt insufficient to the enormity of care.
But once you’ve cleared your mental decks, what then? That’s the question that preoccupies me as I acknowledge the fact that, aged 57, I may not have oodles of useful years ahead of me. By which, I mean years where I can still work, hike, travel, dance, socialise, have sex and don’t have notable cognitive decline.
As I gloomily contemplate the span of time where I’m still spry, I’ve become obsessed with the notion of wasting time. When someone asks me if I’ve watched the latest mediocre Netflix series, like Ransom Canyon, I want to rage. I have become ruthless about abandoning anything average, including substandard company. When menopause hit I reduced my alcohol intake and when you’re sober – dear god – you’re alert to bores.
But how best to fill this “me time” as the hourglass runs out? First on my wish list – and I’ve been procrastinating over this one all my adult life – is to write a book (proactive Michelle’s managed two already), even if no one wants to read it. I’ve even got 40,000 words of a draft that was abandoned in 2004 after I gave birth to my first boy.
I’ve just been researching bestselling 1930s author Winifred Watson, who wrote Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day, but stopped writing when she had her son and moved in with her mother-in-law. She later explained that it’s hard “to write with people in the house”. Damn right. And it’s even harder to paint, because you need light and space for pencils, paint tubes, easels and drawing boards; alongside mental space for concentration. I long to dig out the lost teenage self, who spent half her life making art.
My next aim’s more off-piste, but please hear me out on it. I want to go on one of Jan Day’s week-long Living Tantra courses in Somerset, the hippies’ own county. In 30 years of writing about erotica, relationships and sex, I’ve never found the space to investigate this ancient spiritual practice – which induces sniggering and Sting jokes in your average Brit.
But many women I know, including the Costa Prize-winning novelist Monique Roffey, have found life-changing benefits in tantra. They are at pains to point out that enhanced sensuality is only one part of the practice, though that’s a huge benefit to women who feel out of touch with their bodies as menopause hits.
It’s also about dealing with the emotional and psychological baggage we carry, as well as having an enhanced connection with our partners, the planet and our own selves. I note that all my tantra-practising female cohort have become ardent environmentalists and, as I stare down the gun barrel of 60, more time spent hugging trees feels to me like time well spent.
I’d also love to live in France, even if my non-EU passport means I could only do three months at a time. That should be enough to brush up the only language where I have sufficient grounding and vocab to achieve some proficiency and even engage in mild banter, since the French see flirting as an age-blind activity. I don’t want to exit this life as a shabby British monolinguist.
But why stop there? Might it be possible to form one of those wayward artistic communities I used to read about with intense jealousy, like Robert Graves’ home in Mallorca’s Deià ? A loose-knit group of likeminded souls who don’t see retirement as an option.
Unlike most life plans, it might prove fun to die in the attempt and perhaps I could invite Michelle to join the rebel crew. Barack and my husband are also free to join the gang – providing they’re willing to do sufficient groundwork to join the Women’s Revolution.