Women of a Certain Age
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Contents
Introduction
Still here still – Charlotte Roseby
A case for forgiveness – Goldie Goldbloom
Ignorance – Anne Aly
Black boxes – Jeanine Leane
Memories that shaped me – Tracey Arnich
Work in progress – Maria Scoda
A fortunate working life – Jenny Smithson
Flying kites – Mehreen Faruqi
Djana ngayu – Who am I? – Pat Mamanyjun Torres
Seeking singular single older women – Susan Laura Sullivan
Living at Clarkie’s Camp – Sarah Drummond
Sexy old women – Krissy Kneen
On relationships – Brigid Lowry
What took me so long? – Pam Menzies
Everday sadness – Liz Byrski
Contributors
Acknowledgements
Copyright
Introduction – Jodie Moffat with Maria Scoda and Susan Laura Sullivan
I was at a conference recently, at a networking group discussing elder rights, and one of the participants – a woman – said that for the purposes of government policy, to be considered an elder, a person need be sixty-five or older, fifty if you are Indigenous.
I was genuinely surprised. In my mind, an elder was someone wizened and ancient, but apparently, in fourteen years time, I would become that entity: elder. My youngest son celebrated his fifteenth birthday the day before that network meeting. Here I was, balanced on some sort of ridge-cap between mother and crone.
There is no handbook for ageing. Time is unidirectional, impartial, indifferent and unsparing; not all of us will have children, or partners or careers. But we will all age.
I remember being heavily pregnant, half my body weight again, waiting for a woman on the train to notice me and take her son on her lap to give me a seat. These days when I get on the train someone always stands for me; that’s what the stick figures on the posters tell us to do: stand for the pregnant, the infirm and the elderly.
I was half the age I am today the last time I was asked for ID at a pub and I thanked the lad on the door for his query. It was always my greeting at pub doors, but these days I get the feeling I have erred by expecting to be allowed entry to a pub at all.
You never feel age, it happens without your permission all the time: one minute being pulled over by a cop because you don’t look old enough to drive and the next being unable to read road maps without your glasses.
But even my glasses don’t show me how the world sees me at this age; that is something I see reflected in the eyes of others, and in how they treat me. I was always older than I looked, but at some point the big reveal of my actual age stopped being the point at which I gained respect and started being the point at which I became invisible.
I was thirty-odd the first time I was advised with no encouragement or preamble by a salesgirl about products suitable for ageing skin. I was fortyish the first time a doctor told me I should accustomise myself to everyday back pain because it was inevitable, a necessary consequence of having borne two large babies, and age. About that time, hairdressers started asking me what I wanted to do about the grey in my hair: ‘Nothing’ was implicitly the wrong answer.
Being possessed of a naïve and unshakeable belief in justice, and a blissful ignorance of whether or not the profession would welcome me, at forty I decided to study law. At forty-five I became a solicitor with a respected law firm. After continual positive performance reviews, I thought I had reached a place where I was being judged by my employer solely on my skill set and work ethic. I was nearing fifty; I stopped dyeing my hair and wearing the lipsticks and tight skirts that were no longer flattering, and the high heels that were painful and at times life-threatening. I sought a pay rise commensurate with my experience and revenue-generating capacity.
And that is when it happened. I began to fade. I faded so much that I became a grey smudge in the peripheral vision of my employer, both overlooked and looked through. The younger, brighter solicitors began outstripping me, not in performance but in recognition. I had witnessed older female support staff vanishing from my workplace, one by one, but they weren’t money-making legal practitioners as I was. It didn’t matter. There was no pay rise. When I left the firm abruptly, with a quick sideways push from the middle-aged male principals, the space contracted around my absence seamlessly, as if I had never been there at all.
I started noticing it elsewhere in my life, a gradual diminution of my presence in the world. In places I had been formerly welcomed, cafes and pubs for example, I became a piece of unwieldy furniture impeding the real customers. My children tripped over me on the way to their lives.
But I was not alone in my pall of invisibility. It became a primary topic in conversations I had with similarly aged female friends. At the crux of one such conversation, my friend Maria suggested we write a book about what was happening to us. I contacted Sue, another friend of our age, and we set up a teleconference to discuss what we could do. In that conversation, this book was born.
Maria, Sue and I agreed we would reach out to a cross-section of women past the age of forty and gauge their willingness to write about things they may or may not have done to arrest the assumptions and presumptions that age deposits on us, like so much dust. Our mandate was simple: we weren’t looking for stories about ageing gracefully; we wanted stories that recognised the woman inside and outed her, stories that embraced her.
We were heartened by the positive response and like-mindedness amongst the women we approached. We found that most of the women we spoke with were in the same place as us, a place we had arrived without fanfare and, somehow, unexpectedly. We found that, despite a span of some thirty years in age between our youngest and our oldest contributors, each had grown to have a strong sense of self: some coming to terms with regret, some seeing this time in their life as an opportunity for growth or giving back, some feeling a sense of accomplishment, some feeling a restlessness about what is to come. Many were generous with their time and with advice on how to nurture this idea of a book into a reality. We brought our idea to Fremantle Press where we were welcomed with an extraordinary amount of support and encouragement to bring this book to fruition.
We selected fifteen stories that for us captured the essence of women of our own age and beyond; stories of public achievement, personal development and private reflection. Our book begins with the tale of a woman who did not expect to live to menstruate, let alone reach motherhood and thereafter, menopause. We move through the phases of a woman’s life, through androgynous childhood to fertile motherhood and, for some who did not become mothers (and some who did), rich and productive working lives. We hear from women whose lives have been affected by their cultural backgrounds, regardless of any personal preference, and from women who have reached a place where they are older but perhaps not wiser, still yearning to live and become content with themselves. We hear from women who continue to make a difference in the face of indifference. We move through a multitude of experiences to end with an observation of the inevitable ordinariness of life, reconciling oneself to a certain sadness and not recoiling from it.
Each of these stories is singular it its detail, though certain themes, beyond ageing, create links and connections between the different pieces. We hear from women whose challenging childhood has wrought in them a profound capacity for peace and the ability to endure, as seen in the very different narratives of Charlotte Roseby, Goldie Goldbloom and Tracey Arnich.
The idea of a ‘typical’ Anglo-Australian lifestyle is challenged in migrant stories from Anne Aly, Mehreen Faruqi and Maria Scoda, and examined in two quite different ways in the Indigenous woman’s experiences of Jeanine Le
ane and Pat Mamanyjun Torres. The idealised Anglo-Australian existence is viewed through the prism of lived experience by Jenny Smithson, Pam Menzies and Susan Laura Sullivan, with the latter two providing something of a historical context.
Many of our writers address the quintessential discrimination that exists between men and women, most keenly experienced in the traditional male-dominated workplaces in which Mehreen Faruqi, Jenny Smithson and Anne Aly have prevailed to a greater or lesser degree.
And within this mix are the ordinary, inescapable experiences of women of a certain age. Our bodies betraying us, changing without our consent in ways with which we may disagree; our relations with people around us delineated by how we are seen and not seen. These are the experiences explored in intimate detail by Krissy Kneen and Sarah Drummond, Brigid Lowry and Liz Byrski.
These stories speak to the everyday and sometimes very raw experiences of women of a certain age. We look at the diversity of our lives and are heartened by our commonality and our capacity to endure. Rather than being diminished, we are strengthened by the absence of expectation facing us, and the extraordinary opportunity and unshaped potential this gives us to be exactly whomever we choose.
Just as one conversation between Sue, Maria and I yielded this abundance of personal wisdom and lived experience, it is our hope that these stories will begin conversations amongst readers about what it means to be a woman of a certain age.
Still here still — Charlotte Roseby
I dreamed of funerals like other little girls dreamed of weddings. It would be a big production and, because this was the 1980s, set to my cassette of Hooked on Classics, all of us in the processional stepping out to that cracking electronic back beat. This was my party so I got to be alive as well as in the box.
I knew I was about to die. I wasn’t sure when, but looking around at the other kids with cystic fibrosis in hospital, the ones looking like skeletons with oxygen tubes stuck in their noses, it looked to me like it was going to be about thirteen. I was twelve.
Most of our medical information was transferred from bed to bed.
Six-bed rooms: teenage girls in one, boys next door; intravenous antibiotics for four weeks at a time.
That we were teenagers was pretty new. Before 1960, a baby born with cystic fibrosis (CF) typically lived just a few months. It had been this way for centuries; in the 1600s these infants were believed to be hexed: ‘Woe to that child which when kissed on the forehead tastes salty. He is bewitched and soon must die.’
In the 1970s, eight years was the average survival age. By 1998 it was 29.5. So there we were, right in the middle, rewriting a little corner of medical history.
The nurses had cultivated school-camp cool, against boys putting Fanta in their nebulisers to see what happened when you breathed it in, and spitting ‘frogs’ into cups and tossing them out the windows. Messages and cassettes left under pillows: ‘Do you like him?’, ‘She likes you’, ‘He wants to pash you’, and the Great Raid of September 1985 in which the letters ‘R’ and ‘O’ disappeared in the night from the Royal Children’s Hospital street sign and we were all threatened with expulsion. Pretty funny given all we wanted was to go home.
A photo shows us dancing on the olive linoleum. Like wartime platoons we formed strong bonds based on survival, friendships as strong and as long as ‘lifelong’ could be. Baiting each other: bet you can’t pierce your own ear with that syringe / sneak out to the cinema / get those antibiotics into your vein in under a minute. Compared to the banality of life outside, these kids were the liveliest, alive-est, kids I knew.
There was a lot to be frightened about. The total sum of effort towards comfort was a poster of Garfield someone had tacked on the ceiling, so you could watch him mouth ‘Why me?’ right above your head, while they dug around in your arm for a tired old vein they could stick. If you cried you’d be heard through the glass and get mocked by your buddies, and half-mocked by the nurses who’d seen worse, so I’d have to really concentrate on not.
We sometimes debated who was next. As in, who was next. But quietly, because saying things like that would get you into trouble with the nurses.
To think of these kids’ lives as being ‘terminal’ is to miss what went on here, and what they brought to life. Their lives were rich and hilarious and sad and painful and joyous and in all ways, focused. They had been given the gifts of mortality: lack of pretence, intense focus, intense relationships. Enjoying the small moments and making sure they’re funny. Attentiveness to life. And the corollary: a falling away of things that aren’t important.
They passed those gifts to me and taught me that on the bedrock of the fear of death, a very full life can be built. Staring death in the face wasn’t so bad. Just remember to look away most of the time.
We had so much fun that we started to resent hospital visitors.
Each day my mother brought food in a basket. Dad visited in the evenings, so uncomfortable I kept trying to let him off the hook. ‘You don’t have to come,’ I pleaded. He was a pharmacist specialising in mental health. He was dedicated to his patients, but here he was rendered unbendable. He couldn’t seem to sit down on a chair or on the hospital bed, so we wandered the empty night-time corridors, getting ourselves lost and riding the lifts up and down in the deserted shopping-mall wards.
‘You have to watch it,’ he warned me every visit. ‘You’ll become institutionalised. You’ll start loving the place.’ He always spoke like this, over the tops of children’s heads.
I sort of understood. You offered up your lungs for repair and offered up every little decision at the same time, starting from the moment the nurses woke you, wheeling along a hot breakfast trolley offering baked beans and cold toast. The cleaners arrived each day midmorning to swirl the mop in the toilet and wetly sop the floor. You settled into place so that your bed number was yours and you couldn’t imagine it being anyone else’s.
My father shouldn’t have worried; these hospital corridors gave me a real education.
Joanne started out well enough in the bed next to me. She was a tiny girl with a sharp wit and unmerciful giggling, coughing, giggling. Her bed was the meeting point for everyone else, and she was the centrifugal force. In the middle of the night she started breathing out with noisy sighs. The ins seemed to be okay, if not a little faltering. It was the outs. Grinding. An electric knife in the night. Like giving voice to years of pain in every breath.
I lay there rigid, hoping the night nurses down the corridor would hear what I was hearing. Then I half-woke as they quietly moved her into the isolation room. By the morning, we all knew what that meant. That’s where the sick kids went. Or someone studying for their year twelve exams. Either way, serious.
Her big brother sat on the end of her bed and cried while the rest of her family faced front, looking overly interested in the music videos. I’d never seen a teenage boy cry before. So fascinating. My memory of him is firmly embedded along with Bonnie Tyler and Foreigner.
Joanne taught me how you die from a respiratory illness. How I would die. The fast breathing seemed to just rip the weight off. Faster at the end. Joanne sat on her island bed, skinny crossed legs in front, spine curved in a ball. Somewhere under that rounded back there would be nasal oxygen cannulas pressing in the air. I could start to pick the sick ones because they started leaning over.
I realised what Joanne’s sounds were, years later. Those ones that pierced the half-darkness of the hospital room. Cheyne-Stokes breaths (or as I thought at first, ‘chain-stoking’ – dragging a heavy chain around made perfect sense). Dying people often experience them, to the distress of those around them but of no distress to the one doing the breathing.
Joanne’s mother Margaret was just above her daughter’s height. A stocky, devout Catholic with lots of children at home and never without her button earrings and a hairbrush. She was a constant presence, stepping out of that isolation room to check in on us all. How are you? How are you doing? I was doing embarrassingly well.
Four days later, Margaret wanted us to be allowed to view her daughter’s body, which she had lovingly laid out herself.
It was an extraordinarily generous gesture. The CFs, the anorexics, the depressives, the asthmatics, the diabetics were ushered in; that’s how they called us and we called ourselves, two by two.
It was my first real sight of a laid-out dead body, one looking exactly like an angel in a lace and satin full-length nightdress with a pie-crust collar and perfectly straight, brown combed hair and her hands set. I didn’t mean to view the body. I just followed Christine in the room because she was fifteen, and I was not quite. Christine probably thought she was saying it inside her head, but she burst into tears and yelled it out loud – ‘Yuk!’ Joanne’s mother was very understanding about that.
Usually, you only knew someone had died because they worked so hard to hide it. A nurse came along and ushered you into whatever room was closest. We all just looked at each other. A lock-in. This was interesting. I’d never even noticed there were doors. They did the long wheel down the corridor with the body, making sure no-one saw. Or, more correctly, making sure no-one would comment. Then a designated nurse took us downstairs to the park for consolation, on the dry, dusty plain of yellow grass. After someone died, a nurse, Peter, gave me a small red leather coin purse that unfurled like a flower. Here you are.
Kelly was hunched over her feet in her isolation room. The position. Rounded back, crossed legs, sucking up that oxygen. She cried, aloud, for days on end. She sometimes howled. I guess while she still could. Behind the safety of the nurses’ station, they rolled their eyes to each other and muttered, indignant somehow, ‘Oh my god, there she goes again.’
How unprepared, how ill-prepared, those nurses were. How unable to provide anything beyond what was prescribed.
This was the mid- to late-80s, a period of looming medical leaps. The mapping of genes. Isolating the CF gene. The first Australian lung transplant in Melbourne in the early 1990s.