Where are the women?

Lately I've been finding that as I age, I'm starting to look toward my future (and my inevitable aging itself) not with fear, but with reverence. I find myself honored by the privilege of being deeply centered in adulthood; I actually really like it here. I certainly want to take my time, but I don't dread getting older the way I think people collectively used to.

Except for one thing: I desperately hope and pray that I never live to see myself transform into a bitter old woman.

This scares me because I see them everywhere; I interact with them daily. They pass obvious judgement on other women for their choices, especially for those that appear to make them happy. They're almost never available for plans or gatherings because they're too worried about higher priorities - their families, their work, their decades-long routines. They can't show up for anyone outside their households because they've devoted far too much time and energy to them already, and they're left with nothing. They seem to have nothing nice to say.

I'm almost 30, but I have colleagues who still smirk when I don't get their references and say things along the lines of "It's because you're like, twelve." They've rolled their eyes when I tell them I was still with my high school sweetheart and under their breath muttered "we'll see how long that lasts."

I know they've lived longer than me, experienced far more than me. I know they've felt real heartbreak. Some of their husbands have left. Some of their kids have left, or are at the very least pent up in their rooms all the time they're home. I know their parents have passed, or they've lost their lifelong friends. They hate their bodies, maybe they even hate the job they're choosing to stay in. But I'm tired of the weight of those losses being thrown on me and on other younger women. I'm tired of this future being sold to us as guarantee, like this is the only possible reality we have to look forward to, because I know it isn't.

I'm just having a really hard time finding the women who haven't subscribed to it.

Who are we supposed to look to for proof that we don't have to disappear into obligation and jadedness by the time we hit the mid mark? I'm looking for the woman who can show me. She has a partner she still loves and makes love to, or at the very least, she and her ex are coparenting beautifully. She doesn't care all that much that her hair is graying or thinning. She doesn't mind the stretching or sagging of her skin; she still wears clothes that she likes and feels genuinely good in them. Her kids' lives never absorbed her own. Her home still looks like she spends a little time on it. She has a robust social life, but doesn't let the obligation to others drain her life force. She knows what she's good at outside of work or mothering and pursues it with confidence. Yes - that's the woman I'm looking for. 

And this isn't to shame the women who lost some, or all, of those things. I might be young and therefore naive; I might not "know what I'm talking about," but I do know that life gets in the way of our plans to be perfectly put together. I know that tragedy makes things fall apart, and that it can take a very long time to build back up. I know that some people never get there again. 

Women have this especially hard. Whether we think the tides are changing or not, we still have a general timeline expected of us and our lives. You know the drill: Stable job by 25, married by 27, kids by 30. That gives us somewhere between 50-70 years more to uphold it all as best as we can until we inevitably start losing it bit by bit. And in all that time, while the gains fall away, we're still expected to be kind and agreeable and soft. We're supposed to smile at everyone and serve everyone and appear content while our world slowly disappears somewhere else. For us, it's not socially acceptable to crash out over loss. So for many women, that anger and sadness that desperately wants to go somewhere turns into bitterness and resentment, and then it calcifies. It's not fair, and it makes perfect sense.

When I frame it in this way, I understand why the woman whose husband cheated on her has nasty things to say about my healthy partnership. The woman who has kids with severe disabilities is valid for hating that I get to spend my summers going to concerts and taking international trips with friends. The woman who's struggled with her health for the last decade has some justification in commenting on how late I eat dinner, how she'd "get so fat" if she did the same. The woman who hates her 60-year-old body feels righteous in judging what I wear to work as "showing off." They have lost so much along the way. I understand how painful it would be to watch on as younger women still have whatever it is.

But I refuse to believe that's the only way to be an older woman in the aftermath of heartbreak. I refuse. Because there are women I know who would never look down on me for wearing shorts in my classroom or eating pasta at 10 pm. They would genuinely listen to my indecisive rant over whether to have kids, rather than resent me for my audacity to choose. They would invite me over for a glass of wine to talk about it more. I could invite them downtown and expect them to actually come and stay a while. I do, fortunately, know a woman or two like this - but I'm still left wondering what it means that role models like them are so hard to find in real life.  

I'll keep looking for these women. And in the meantime, I'm choosing to pay attention to this pattern early enough to resist it as much as I can. In doing so, I'm trying to notice how I respond to my own heartbreaks and losses, as well as the kinds of behavior I tend to resent in others. I want to look for the best in every woman and celebrate their wins in every corner of life - even those who have judged me.

If you're an older woman reading this and something in it stings a little, I want you to know that's not an accident, but it's also not an indictment. I don't think you woke up one day and decided to become someone who makes younger women feel small. I think maybe you woke up one day and realized you'd been made small yourself, gradually, over years, and nobody had the language for it, least of all you. I think somewhere between the career that didn't reward you the way it should have, the relationship that asked more than it gave, the decades you spent making sure everyone else was okay first, you lost the thread back to yourself. And I think that loss is real and worth grieving. I hope you really spend time in that grief, because it heals.

I also think the women you're hardest on - the ones who are still loud, still trying things, still openly wanting more - I think they scare you a little. Consider that they're showing you something you're not sure you're allowed to want back.

And as the almost-30-something you may not want wisdom from, at least hear me when I say this: You are. I promise. You are still allowed to want it back.