{"id":87732,"date":"2025-05-09T15:50:11","date_gmt":"2025-05-09T15:50:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/87732\/"},"modified":"2025-05-09T15:50:11","modified_gmt":"2025-05-09T15:50:11","slug":"my-kids-are-grown-up-so-im-planning-a-tantric-sex-retreat-and-a-move-to-france","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/87732\/","title":{"rendered":"My kids are grown up, so I’m planning a tantric sex retreat and a move to France"},"content":{"rendered":"

I\u2019ve long known Michelle Obama<\/a> 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 \u201claunched\u201d.\u00a0<\/p>\n

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\u2019t turn 18 until next year. But Michelle and I are facing the same existential crisis. As she put it on Jay Shetty\u2019s On Purpose podcast: \u201cFor the first time every choice I\u2019m making is completely mine. I now don\u2019t have the excuse of, \u2018My kids need this, my husband needs that\u2026 So, how do I think about this next phase?\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

Like thousands of other menopausal women suddenly relieved of overseeing our offspring\u2019s every move or looking after wider family, there\u2019s a sudden crisis of identity. In Michelle\u2019s and my case it\u2019s undoubtedly sharpened by the fact we\u2019ve lost both parents, so aren\u2019t replacing school runs with hospital ones. Freedom should feel, to state the stonkingly obvious, liberating. <\/p>\n

But, in practice, many women in our situation are like zoo-raised lions released into the wild, sniffing the air suspiciously. Michelle says she\u2019s having therapy to help the fine-tuning process and to alleviate guilt. No need to ask what the guilt\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

But once you\u2019ve cleared your mental decks, what then? That\u2019s 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\u2019t have notable cognitive decline. <\/p>\n

As I gloomily contemplate the span of time where I\u2019m still spry, I\u2019ve become obsessed with the notion of wasting time. When someone asks me if I\u2019ve 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\u2019re sober \u2013 dear god \u2013 you\u2019re alert to bores. <\/p>\n

But how best to fill this \u201cme time\u201d as the hourglass runs out? First on my wish list \u2013 and I\u2019ve been procrastinating over this one all my adult life \u2013 is to write a book (proactive Michelle\u2019s managed two already), even if no one wants to read it. I\u2019ve even got 40,000 words of a draft that was abandoned in 2004 after I gave birth to my first boy. <\/p>\n

I\u2019ve 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\u2019s hard \u201cto write with people in the house\u201d. Damn right. And it\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

My next aim\u2019s more off-piste, but please hear me out on it. I want to go on one of Jan Day\u2019s week-long Living Tantra courses in Somerset, the hippies\u2019 own county. In 30 years of writing about erotica, relationships and sex, I\u2019ve never found the space to investigate this ancient spiritual practice \u2013 which induces sniggering and Sting jokes in your average Brit.\u00a0<\/p>\n

But many women I know, including the Costa Prize-winning novelist Monique Roffey, have found life-changing benefits in tantra<\/a>. They are at pains to point out that enhanced sensuality is only one part of the practice, though that\u2019s a huge benefit to women who feel out of touch with their bodies as menopause hits.\u00a0<\/p>\n

It\u2019s also about dealing with the emotional and psychological<\/strong> 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 <\/strong>like time well spent.<\/p>\n

I\u2019d 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\u2019t want to exit this life as a shabby British monolinguist. <\/p>\n

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\u2019 home in Mallorca\u2019s Dei\u00e0\u00a0? A loose-knit group of likeminded souls who don\u2019t see retirement as an option. <\/p>\n

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 \u2013 providing they\u2019re willing to do sufficient groundwork to join the Women\u2019s Revolution.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"I\u2019ve long known Michelle Obama and I share a birthday (17 January, since you ask) but it appears…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":87733,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5309],"tags":[2420,2000,299,36,3177,2250],"class_list":{"0":"post-87732","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-france","8":"tag-parenting","9":"tag-eu","10":"tag-europe","11":"tag-france","12":"tag-motherhood","13":"tag-retirement"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/114478673012122118","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/87732","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=87732"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/87732\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/87733"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=87732"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=87732"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=87732"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}