The Creative Surge of Women in Mid-Life

Shifts in consciousness don’t happen in a bubble. The current unfolding of women seeing themselves in a positive light as they grow older is not a singular motion. Rather, it’s the result of a journey of reinvention and reclamation. Each of us has the potential to evolve psychologically
and spiritually throughout our lives, and a collective expansion of consciousness revealing a once buried truth is testimony to that fact.

Just consider the past fifty years:

My mom didn’t sit me down one day and explain the glorious passage of creativity that would bloom in mid and older-life. Instead she shared how she never told the truth about her age, as if being over the age of forty were some great embarrassment. I’m way past forty at this point, and I’ve tried to imagine how painful it must have been for my mom to feel so much shame around getting older.

Once upon a time, in the world where I grew up, a woman’s value was measured by her looks, her weight, and her age. Her opinions and insights into the world were not valued because just like the false adage that once applied to children, women should be seen and not heard.

The journey of reinvention and reclamation begins with a look back. To reflect upon the history that shaped us is to track the defining milestones that now inform us. As the philosopher George Santayana famously wrote, “Those who cannot remember the past are doomed to repeat it.”

The advent of oral birth control changed everything. It meant that women could plan their families. It meant they could enjoy sex without fear of resulting in pregnancy. I wonder sometimes if the feminist revolution and so many other movements that followed would have taken place without the societal shifts that happened as a result of oral contraception. While this newer form of birth control liberated women on the one hand, it was not without a shadow side.

There were some men who welcomed the change, not because it liberated women but because they felt now women could and should be ready for sex whenever men wanted them to be. For some of us, it took a decade to sort out the self-betrayal that follows such an idea.

As women claimed a voice in family planning, they began to want a voice in education and career development, too. And while it looked like opportunities were opening to us, there was extreme pushback from a male-dominated work culture, warning us that if we spent too
much time with our careers, we would grow too old to be marriageable.

The most extreme example of this was when Newsweek magazine (June, 1986) utilized the power of a cover photo that was a graph of marriageability based on a woman’s age. The article inside the magazine was titled “Too Late for Prince Charming” and premised that single women over the age of thirty-five had a better chance of being killed by a terrorist than of finding a husband.

The unpublished study upon which the article was based was completely debunked, and twenty years later Newsweek tried to do the honorable thing by retracting it. The idea had seeped into the culture nonetheless, setting in motion a divide, with good women at home on one side and selfish women with careers on the other.

With each passing decade, the uphill battle to live fully, love well, and be authentic pushed forward. The Woman’s March of 2017 was a watershed moment for that struggle, a reclamation of sorts, with a newer component.

A wave of sisterhood wrapped itself around decades of the feminine struggle, and the ideal of supporting and encouraging the women around us became strongly pronounced, unifying us across all ages. In the following year, 2018, more women over the age of fifty ran for local, state, and national political office than had ever before, and no one wrote articles in major news magazines about how undesirable—or
unmarriageable—they were.

After the solidarity created by the Women’s March of 2017, the #MeToo movement arose as an inevitable follow-up. Creativity is deadened by the secrets we keep. So many women had kept the secret of having been abused by their male counterparts, those men who’d never
outgrown the false notion that a woman should always want sex when a man did. Not advancing your career by granting sexual favor within a male-dominated hierarchy carried the label of “feminazi” and “cold bitch,” or worse than a label, pure force.

The stories of abuse were so abundant and so similar in nature that the use of #MeToo became the identifying symbol that we stood together and were no longer willing to keep the secrets of abuse—a cultural reclamation that allowed for true healing to begin.

Writing about the positive aging movement has had far reaching effects for me. Not only does embracing the years unburden my generation, but it unburdens women twenty-five years younger, as well. We fought the lie, reinventing ourselves as we did. We reclaimed our value,
knowing that it never resided in our age, weight, silence, or submission. As those false standards continue to drop away, we stand freely in the light of truth, a generosity of spirit rises up to meet us. That is the surge of creativity that midlife that women are feeling today, as our history tells the story of regathering the broken pieces and weaving them into wholeness. We are free and sovereign souls, fully engaged in the sacred endeavor of creating a life that is akin to making art.

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Stephanie Raffelock is a graduate of Naropa University’s program in Writing and Poetics, who has penned articles for numerous publications, including The Aspen Times, Quilters Magazine, Care2.com, Nexus Magazine, Omaha Lifestyles, The Rogue Valley Messenger and SixtyandMe.com.  A Delightful Little Book on Aging, her first book with She Writes Press will be released in the spring of 2020.

She is the host of Coffee Table Wisdom, a podcast that is a revolution in positive aging. Guests from the worlds of health, psychology, spirituality and the arts are changing the conversation about getting older, and it’s inspiring. A recent transplant to Austin, Texas she enjoys life with her husband, Dean and their Labrador retriever, Jeter (yes, named after the great Yankee shortstop). Stephanie lives an active life of hiking, Pilates and swimming trying to offset the amount of time that she spends in her head, thinking up stories and essays.

Find out more about her on her website https://stephanieraffelock.com

Follow her on Twitter https://twitter.com/SRaffelock

A DELIGHTFUL LITTLE BOOK ON AGING, Stephanie Raffelock

All around us, older women flourish in industry, entertainment, and politics. Do they know something that we don’t, or are we all just trying to figure it out? For so many of us, our hearts and minds still feel that we are twenty-something young women who can take on the world.

But in our bodies, the flexibility and strength that were once taken for granted are far from how we remember them. Every day we have to rise above the creaky joints and achy knees to earn the opportunity of moving through the world with a modicum of grace. Yet we do rise, because it’s a privilege to grow old, and every single day is a gift.

Peter Pan’s mantra was “never grow up”; our collective mantra should be “never stop growing.” This collection of user-friendly stories, essays, and philosophies invites readers to celebrate whatever age they are with a sense of joy and purpose and with a spirit of gratitude.

 

BUY THE BOOK HERE

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Category: On Writing