by Sam
I had one of those "oh my god, I have turned into my mother" moments today
and the reason I know that I have crossed some invisible line on the map of a woman’s
life is that I didn’t then immediately think "and that is a very nasty
thing".
I am an expert browser of clothes shops (buy and return: always exercise your consumer
rights) and I was accessing this skill in one of those shops where the words "cut for
girls" rings out from every stitch. I decided to try on a dress out of defiance
rather than attraction. The cubicles were very interesting (to my horror, who wants to be
interested in a changing room?) because the cubicles were big with a door that locked! If
you are familiar with the average British changing room you will know that we usually get
a curtain that leaves a six inch gap when you draw it across and a cubicle not big enough
for rabbits to mate in.
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The thing that struck me - which is where my "mother" moment occurred - is
that I realised I would rather not try clothes on in an communal room. I want my own
cubicle. In my twenties I would happily change strip down to my itty-bitty knickers in
front of a roomful of other silky-gusseted girls. Now I am more picky about who gets to
view my underwear and I don’t want to feel another woman’s gaze graze my ageing
carcass - and I am sure that this is linked to age, that we become more conscious of our
‘faults’ as we age. Women’s bodies are used to sell everything from cars to
ice-cream but the bodies used are always very young and very thin and any cellulite is
airbrushed out.
When did I become an ageing woman who doesn’t want to wobble her booty at just
anyone? I don’t look or act my age. As a child I thought that adulthood seemed a
breeze and I managed to keep that dream alive throughout my twenties. I didn’t buy, I
rented; didn’t marry, didn’t breed. I bought too many clothes, read lots of
books, always had exactly what I wanted for dinner, went out often, and cleaned up when I
felt like it. People, I decided, weren’t meant to live together, not really. It
didn’t benefit the woman, she just ended up as a drudge for some cretin who
couldn’t find his arse with a flashlight. And babies! They were renowned for wrecking
everything: you can’t sleep, you can’t pop out to the pub… So I reacted
with genuine amazement when people I had known since teen-age began to have babies, others
had responsible jobs, and some of them even - eventually - married. What was happening?
What was wrong with them?
What was wrong - or right - with them was that their twenties were waning. Their
twenties were waning and their thirties were calling - a call like a dog whistle; only
those on that frequency can pick up the signal. Some people heard this earlier than
others. I was evidently too busy listening to the call of my duvet. But inexplicable
events began to occur, subtly, stealthily, as I made my ascent to 30. I now have
store-cards in my purse, I want to have facials, I go to garden centres with my partner,
and I do want private changing rooms in clothes shops. I do lady-things: I am on the
eternal quest for the perfect bag. I want stay-colour lipstick. I am an adult. It was not
an easy transition to make. I had assumed that I had no biological clock: I was never
aware of any ticking. I had always said that thirty was a good round number. The week
before my thirtieth birthday I abandoned all positive thoughts of goodness and roundness
and started hyper-ventilating in shops and wailing to people: "I will never be in my
twenties again!". Ages with ‘0’s on the end have more significance for a
woman than a man. A woman gets to thirty and she has to start making decisions about being
an old woman: whether to have children and how it will affect her career and her pension.
A man gets to 30 and he just carries on scratching his balls like he did at 18 and like he
will at 80.
I am thirty one at a time when being over thirty no longer means you wear a head-scarf
and smell of boiled cabbage. A woman’s sexiness does not have the same shelf-life as
a man’s (think: decrepit movie stars paired with nubile young women, think: TV anchor
women fired for being too ‘mature’) but there has been a shift in perception.
Women over thirty are now in positions of power and/or they are visible. Cindy, Pam,
Gillian, Madonna to name a few of the most obvious. These women would not have had the
luxury of still being sexy and successful twenty years ago and the longer they stay on the
front of magazines the more accepting society will be of women who are no longer girls.
This gets my vote. I know women of my own age and older who are not conforming, we are not
responding to the implied messages: tone/calm/settle down. We want to run amok with our
inner child. We want to be smart and scary until we drop dead of exhaustion or old age,
whichever comes first.
There is an estate-agents’ just down the road from where I live and every day I
pass it on my way to and from work. A woman works in there. I see her sometimes through
the window. She has lots of blonde curls and looks like she irons her clothes and paints
her nails; she aims for perfect. She looks glamorous, professional, groomed, and grown-up,
and she fascinates me - in a transitory way - because I don’t ever want to be like
her.
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