Just Us: Barbie, feminism, and Not Kidding

This is the last topic I ever thought I would write about. I had a Barbie when I was a girl - it must have been a birthday present, and it was very unlike other birthday presents I had received. I was a bit of a tomboy - I got a gun, holster, bolero, and Deputy Sheriff badge when I turned five, and was terribly jealous of the boy next door, who also had chaps! (As you can see, our one channel of TV in the late 60s early 70s was dominated by US Westerns. lol) Most of my dolls, teddies etc seemed to be hand-me-downs, so a brand new Barbie was exciting and terribly glamorous. Until, just a short time after my birthday, my mother gave me a haircut. So my little sister decided to give Barbie one too. Her long glamorous blonde hair was gone - she had a raggedy pixie cut for the rest of her life. I was not impressed. And my sister is tired of being reminded of it!

Barbie was always unrealistic - I didn't really know any/many blondes, her figure was ridiculous, and when I knew enough to understand, infuriating. And I'm pretty sure I had her before the unrelenting pink phase (I abhor unrelenting pink for girls - even though I quite like the colour), and before the cars, houses, and all the other Barbies appeared on sale. The commercialism, the sexism, the impossible physical expectations of Barbie turned me against her.

So when I heard there was a Barbie movie, I didn't think it would be for me. But a fellow No Kidding friend and I decided to go. We'd heard good things, and we knew we couldn't drag our significant others along to see it. We went this morning. It made this old feminist happy. There were so many brilliant throw-away lines. And I especially loved the comment "if my feet were this shape all the time, I'd never wear high heels again!" Hear, hear!

I'd heard about America Ferrera's monologue about the contradictory expectations of a modern woman. What I loved about it was the inclusion of those who were not mothers, as well as those who were mothers. I had been enjoying the feminism of the film up to then, and realised I had been unconsciously bracing myself against the onslaught of expectations for mothers, and to feel ignored. But we were not ignored, not forgotten. The message was acceptance - of who we are, regardless of whether we have children or not, regardless of whether we are high achievers or not. I loved that latter point too, because so many of us without children feel that we have to do find the "Next Big Thing" to make up for not being a mother. But we don't. We can, of course, and that is wonderful. But equally wonderful is finding happiness in our lives being ordinary. Surviving. Thriving. By just being us. Ken and Barbie both learned that lesson in the movie. We all need to be reminded of it. Brava, Barbie!

Personal growth: it will change your world

A Letter to my Younger Self

To 30-something Mali

Without any spoilers, I am going to give you some advice for your personal growth over the next 20 or more years. I wish I had known these things beforehand. I am very glad that I know them now, and hope they will help you:

Give yourself permission to feel your feelings and roll with them. By feeling them, you learn to recognise them, understand them, and, ultimately, this knowledge helps you grieve, and it helps you heal. Feeling them is not always pleasant, and there is usually no easy shortcut to get through them, but it is worth doing the work. You’ll come to accept them, and you won’t be afraid of them. That’s a gift.

Take joy, delight, and happiness where you find it – the warmth of the sun on your back, laughter with a friend or from something funny, the luxury of a hot shower or bath, the pleasure of helping someone. Joy in life is in the little things, even when you might be afraid, or sad, or angry. Those big things come and go. But, as your mother will say a lot in the next 20 years, there is always “a good cup of tea” to be relished. And never feel guilty about feeling joy. It is healing. And you deserve to feel it.

Learn self-compassion. You are kind to others. So, don’t you deserve the same kindness from yourself? When you learn to be kind to yourself, and eventually, to like yourself, you will find it easier to stand up for yourself, and to care less about what others think. You will learn to say “no” to things and people who are negative and draining, and “yes” to new opportunities. It isn’t selfish, though. You will find it easier to be tolerant of others and show them compassion and understanding in turn, and you will grow as a person. You become more content in yourself but that also makes you more demanding too, because you know who you want to be, and who you can be.

Speaking of caring less about what others think, it gets easier! I am not kidding, though you won’t be surprised if I admit that I’m still not very good at it. But you know what really helps? knowing that others’ opinions of me or my life almost always says more about them than it does about me.

It is possible to retrain your brain! If you find yourself thinking negative thoughts or going over and over negative experiences (as I know you do, have always done), you can teach yourself not to think about these things. First, you need to recognise these thought patterns as unhelpful and negative. Then you can challenge them. Ask yourself, “are they true? Or am I catastrophising? Can I fix the issue behind them? Or am I self-flagellating for no reason?” Once you know, then you can counter them, and dismiss them.

Write your thoughts down. It helps. It can free your brain from trying to remember something, or from going over and over a particular event. It can and will also help you figure things out –how you feel and what you think, what is important, what you want to do in the future, who you want to be. In fact, it can be quite therapeutic. And it will new open worlds to you. You will learn to love it, even to need it. And you might find you are quite good at it!

Make the best decisions you can with the information you have available to you at the time. Then don’t beat yourself up about them. You can’t turn back time. Hindsight is wonderful, and you can and should grow from it, but there is no benefit in wishing you’d made different decisions.

You know what you’re good at, and what you enjoy, and of course, what you’re not good at, and what you don’t enjoy. Be honest with yourself, both for the good and the bad. You will find that gets easier as you get older. It is liberating to learn to look at yourself without judgement or self-recrimination but with curiosity and compassion. It is liberating to be able to move on with an intention to improve where possible.

Learn to know and challenge your values. Hold them close. I have learned to embrace them without feeling that I was letting anyone down, including, perhaps especially, you, my younger self. Solidifying my world views and values has made a great difference to me, my thoughts, my level of contentment, my authenticity. I let go of a lot of things. But in doing so, I was able to begin to fully embrace myself, and my life.

As humans, we survive by adapting to new situations. We can find happiness without achieving the big goals, whatever they might be. I’m sorry to say that you won’t win the lottery! But you don’t have to have the perfect family, career, body, or mind to be happy. You just need to be able to appreciate what you have in your life, whatever that might be, wherever you can find it. You can achieve acceptance and contentment. It is easier than you think. And you are much more resilient than you think too. Take pride in that! I do.

Your next twenty plus years will be full of joys and adventures and scary times and love and sadness and disappointment, of mistakes and wonderful decisions. That is inevitable. That is life. Embrace it! It will be amazing. I am not kidding.

With love
Older Mali

 

It is World Childless Week. Learn more about it and see all the other submissions on this topic here.

 

Balancing my message

I read an interesting article* today, that talks about countries that measure happiness and receive a high ranking, and how that can actually increase mental distress. In brief, it said that if you are told you should be happy (because you live in one of the happiest countries in the world, for example) but you are not, then your level of isolation and mental distress is going to be higher. 

Effectively, it seems that this is the old equation whereby Satisfaction = Performance less Expectation. If you expect to be happy and are told that you should be, but you're not happy (for whatever reason), you are going to feel even worse. Your expectations have been raised, and by not achieving them, you feel even more deficient. The article noted of course that social media can accentuate this, because of the pressure to show only the beautiful parts of our lives, or only the best photos, implies that everyone else is living a wonderful life, except us.

When reading the article, it immediately made me think of those of us who are Not Kidding. We have been (or still are) surrounded by people telling us that parenthood is the ultimate goal (as it may have been for us at one time too), and that we won't know true meaning, love, and happiness if we are not parents. It is no wonder that, fighting against that paradigm, we find it so hard to deal with the world sometimes, and find our isolation and otherness to be distressing. But of course, that's because the difficulties and stresses of of being a parent, and the regret that some parents may feel, are not given equal air-time, or equal validity. Most parents, even if they do want to scream in disappointment, anger, and/or frustration, won't do it on social media because they want to protect their children from those emotions too, and (like us) they want to avoid the judgement that they know will result. Both those are very understandable reasons. But what it means is that they perpetuate the idea that parenthood is everything, and we continue to be bombarded with just one side of the story.

This brought me also to thinking about my blogs about embracing our new lives. I know I've expressed this concern before. I worry that by talking about the positives of life without children - which are varied and many - I might make people who are struggling feel worse. Having been there, I would never want to do that. It is a fine line between acknowledging the true joys of our lives with the losses that brought us here, and the difficulties that we might face. It's a fine line between emphasising the good times and denying the pain that we have felt or occasionally feel. I'm often torn. I want and need to let people know that life without children (not by choice) can be and is wonderful. I don't want pity, or condescension. I am not lesser, and I do not want to convey that. 

But at the same time, I don't want any of us to be ignored either. We face discrimination, we face bias, and we are often ignored or invisible. Our feelings are not often considered. Our isolation is dismissed. Our lives are joked about, even if at the same time, our lives might be envied. So I guess what I am saying is that if you are struggling, I recognise that, and have written about it, and will continue to write about it here. I would never want you to think that I ignore the tough parts of our life. Life is not perfect, and no-one has the perfect life. But life isn't all doom and gloom either. That is not our fate. Far from it. There is so much to celebrate. So much to hope for, even in the dark days. Hope that your life will be good, that you will find peace and joy again. That your growth will be extraordinary, even if you can't see it at the moment. That you will find gifts from this life that you would never have expected. 

I'm not kidding. It really does get easier.

 

* I can't find the exact link, apologies!

No Kidding 2020 Project: Day 15 - Admit

Admit. It’s a small word. A simple concept. We require admission from others, but often forget to require it ourselves. But after we’ve asked our own questions, it is time to admit the answers, or even just admit the truths of our situation, to ourselves at least. Being honest with ourselves, without debate, without recrimination or self-blame, is an enormous step towards a happy and healthy No Kidding life.

We all have different things to admit to ourselves. Or I do at least. We all have stories we tell ourselves. Sometimes it is worth questioning those, as I pointed out last week, and then admitting the truth. Because admitting the truth helps our acceptance. If we’re not telling ourselves the truth, we’re not finding full acceptance.

What might we need to admit when discovering our No Kidding lives?

Perhaps we need to admit that maybe we’ve been clinging on to hope that things will be different. Perhaps we need to admit that we’ve felt comfort in the grief and the what-ifs, and have stayed there too long. Perhaps we need to admit that looking to the future is scary, and admit that we don’t want to do it.

Perhaps we need to admit that we genuinely didn’t know that it would be so hard to face, that we thought infertility and loss and the uncertainty was the hardest thing. Perhaps we need to admit that the loss of hope, and the need to turn away from that hope, is harder than we could ever have imagined. Perhaps we need to admit that the end has been harder than anything we’ve faced so far. Or perhaps we need to admit that maybe, for us, it has not been.

Perhaps we just need to admit that we feel lost and alone, and that we need help. Perhaps we need to admit that we need to know we’ll be okay. Perhaps we need to admit that we don’t think we will be okay. That we are scared. Or lonely. Or both. Perhaps we need to admit that we need to know someone understands. Perhaps we need to admit that we expect far too much of ourselves.

Or perhaps we need to admit that we are doing okay, and that this isn’t the nightmare scenario we had led ourselves to believe. Perhaps we need to admit that we might feel some relief at the end of the journey. Perhaps we need to admit that we like our lives.

And perhaps we need to admit that we are not infallible. That we can experience and admit all these thoughts and feelings and truths of our lives, and that there will be contradictions. We can admit that it is never all good, but that also means that it is never all bad. That it is okay to slip, have ouch moments and down days. That things will bother us. That our growth will be a gradual process. That sometimes we will feel like we’re taking one step forward and two steps back. Perhaps we can admit all that, but still know we will be okay. Admitting that is a major achievement!

It’s an ongoing process too. Just this morning I admitted something to myself I didn’t really want to know. I’m questioning how true it is, but the admission has been useful. I just need to figure out how to deal with it.

There’s a freedom in admitting the truth to ourselves. Sure, initially it can be painful. But in admitting who we are or who we are not, what works or doesn’t work for us, we learn more about how we can get the best from ourselves, how we can get the best from others, and from whatever it is that the world offers us. It means too that we’re not hiding – at least to ourselves – the truth. That relieves us of a sometimes heavy burden, and gives us time and space and clarity to more freely navigate the future. 

What do you need to admit to yourself?

A No Kidding menopause: The emotional issues (Part 3)

There can be so many emotions involved around menopause. We are all different. For many women, the end of menopause is a time to grieve. It’s the loss of something that may have defined them – their biology, their ability (perhaps theoretical) to give birth, their lives as “productive” women in society. Women who identified themselves as mothers may feel bereft, because they don’t know who they are in this new phase of life.

As childless women, we have been through this before. For some of us, menopause may bring more grief. A double whammy, whilst we have already had to come to terms with the idea that we would never be mothers, for some, this is the last straw, the definitive end to the possibility that might have, for some, lingered. Jody Day wrote this in her article about The Childless Menopause:

“I call the childless menopause a ‘death you survive’ as it’s the end of our biological line as well as the end of our dream of motherhood. It can be a real dark night of the soul. And the transformations of passing through this ‘gateway’ can be profound and rather wonderful.”

But this isn’t how I have experienced it. I experienced that “death you survive” back when I first knew that I was never going to have children. I grieved then the end of my biological line and my dream of motherhood. It was, as Jody said, a “real dark night of the soul.” I know that many of you have already experienced this too.

I suspect we’re all different, having come to our No Kidding childless lives in different ways. Perhaps having that cut-off on my 41st birthday, when my tubes were blocked and IVF was not working meant that I was able to grieve what I had lost there and then. If I’d been through a different process, maybe I wouldn’t have felt that it was over so definitively.

For me, menopause (once the physical issues were dealt with) did not cause me to grieve. Instead, it brought freedom. It brought the obvious freedom of no periods. As Pamela mentioned here, the absence of periods is simply “BLISS!”

But it brought more than a physical freedom. (Four years on, that is still blissful!) Menopause also brought me a freedom from any obligation to have children. It brought me the freedom of not feeling biologically different from my peers. We are all (mostly) unable to conceive. It has brought me a freedom from hearing pregnancy announcements from my peers. It has (largely) brought me a freedom from hearing “you could always adopt.” Age has definitely made things easier.

Of course, it isn’t all bliss and freedom. The stigma around menopause is not dissimilar to that of infertile women. There is a stigma about menopause, and the stigma teaches that we are old, pointless, no longer relevant. No Kidding childless women can well relate to that feeling. Likewise, women in menopause complain about feeling invisible. The childless amongst us are also well acquainted with that situation.

And so I wonder if, because we have been through similar circumstances, are we better able to cope with the changes of menopause?

For example, many women talk about the sense of losing their attractiveness after menopause. You don’t see many images or hear of the desirability of older women, of women with grey hair, for example. (You can either embrace this change, or fight it, or – probably the answer for us both – do a combination). For women who may feel that their appearance and desirability define their femininity, this can be an unpleasant change. Outwardly, I am sure, we all go through this to an extent, whether we have children or not. The attractiveness of youth is pervasive throughout our cultures.

I think that there is an added dimension for those of us without children. We have (probably) questioned our femininity, our place as women, when we knew we would not have children. I know I did. A lot of women write about feeling that they are “not a real woman.” I also know that one horrible person actually said those words to a friend of mine. So is this another loss for the No Kidding? That our identities as women are being further eroded? Or have we already done the work and defined for ourselves what it means to be a woman? And so does the (perceived) loss of desirability do less to our own sense of self-worth, our sense of what it means to be a woman, that it would to others who haven’t had to deal with this before. Does our history as No Kidding women who could not have children make this aspect of menopause easier?

The invisibility of older (post-menopausal) women is well documented. (Though that may be changing, as posited by this article that Loribeth highlighted on social media.) Even within the menopausal category of women, childless women are frequently invisible. We are not, and never will be, mothers and so we are not, and never will be, grandmothers. I’m lucky that only a few (so far) of my friends and family are grandparents, and they can and do talk about so much more than that. It might change, of course. But I know many people are not so lucky. Bamberlamb has written recently about being surrounded by women talking about their children and grandchildren. Social interactions remain difficult if we are ignored and invisible. Governments, too, assume that ageing men and women have family around them to assist in their care. They even develop policies on this basis, ignoring the situation of people who don’t have younger family members who can help. Invisibility is real. And it is painful.

But I wonder. Do our experiences as childless women make us stronger and more inured to the invisibility and judgement of menopause? Women who are accustomed to being feted for their biological ability to reproduce, who are used to being the centre of the cult of motherhood, deemed essential to society, might find it harder to find themselves on the periphery of society as they age and their children leave home. It will be more of a shock to them perhaps, to find that they no longer hold such a special place in society. Whereas we have already dealt with that. Does it make us doubly invisible? Perhaps. I’m sure we all feel that way at times.

But I would prefer to ask whether it also makes us doubly strong? We have already dismissed society’s expectations, their judgement and norms, and have decided that they do not matter. That we cannot accept the premise of that judgement. We’ve decided that we will forge ahead living our lives the way we want to live them. We have already been through fire, and have come out stronger. And we are Not Kidding.