How to Get Over Being Young E-Book

Charlotte Bauer

• Herausgeber: Atlantic Books
• Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 431

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2021

Beschreibung

A deliciously funny and sage guide to midlife - an unscientific, flaws-and-all account of one woman's adventures and misadventures through the dark comedy of the wilderness years. Through her own experiences as a fifty-something woman, and those of her three sisters, her indomitable mum and rebellious auntie, Charlotte tackles the big questions every woman seeks answers to at this time of our lives - chiefly: How the hell am I going to get over being young in a world obsessed with youth? Written with warmth, wisdom and irreverence this guide to midlife is perfect for readers of Nora Ephron, Caitlin Moran and India Knight.

Leseprobe

Charlotte Bauer is a prize-winning journalist and Nieman Fellow at Harvard University. UK-born, she and her family moved to South Africa in the 1970s. She lives between Johannesburg and south-west France.

Published in hardback and trade paperback in Great Britain in 2021 byAtlantic Books, an imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd.

Copyright © Charlotte Bauer, 2021

The moral right of Charlotte Bauer to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright,Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

Excerpt on page 59: © Germaine Greer, 2018, The Change: Women,Ageing and the Menopause, Bloomsbury Publishing Plc.

Every effort has been made to trace or contact all copyright holders. The publishers will be pleased to make good any omissions or rectify any mistakes brought to their attention at the earliest opportunity.

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Hardback ISBN: 978 1 83895 197 9Trade paperback ISBN: 978 1 83895 198 6E-book ISBN: 978 1 83895 199 3

Printed in Great Britain

Atlantic BooksAn imprint of Atlantic Books LtdOrmond House26–27 Boswell StreetLondonWC1N 3JZ

www.atlantic-books.co.uk

For Clive Cope, who never let go of my hand.

In ever loving memory of Vicki Wright, my country gal.

November 28 1952 – May 7 2019

Contents

Preface

Fifty

Mental!

Mortal!

Face Time

Hair Is Not for Sissies

Drugs Used to Be Fun

Lifestyle Choices

Big Swinging Chicks

Fashion Forward

The Silence of the Wolves

Womance

Old Married Couples

New Romantics

In the Family Way

Living the Dream

Sixty

Epiphanies

The Fuck-It List

Acknowledgements

Preface

The bulk of this book was written BC – Before Covid.

Reading through the final draft a year after the pandemic flipped our world upside down, I could see how certain themes might now appear utterly beside the point. How could I care about what was happening to my face in the shadow of far graver events? Never mind my flailing hormones and flagging influence, my quest to find the meaning of life after youth, unrealised dreams and restless ambitions, and hovering fears about how I’d handle being really old – ancient old. Growing old suddenly seemed a priceless gift, one that not all of us would get. Would my loved ones survive? Would I ever get to hug my mother again? In less noble but no less anxious moments I’d wonder whether I’d ever see my hairdresser again.

Yet even as priorities shifted with the ground beneath our feet and choices I’d assumed were mine to make fell away, I knew that the questions I set out to explore in this book remained real and legitimate: life goes on, relationships go on, changes to our hearts and minds and bodies do not come to a grinding halt, regardless of earthshattering events beyond our control. It stands to human nature, if not to reason, that we will carry on arguing and laughing and loving and renewing our vows to mad diets and age-defying elixirs as our big fat funny scary odyssey through the unchartered territory of midlife continues.

One day at a time, by any means necessary.

Fifty

‘Looking fifty is great if you’re sixty.’

— JOAN RIVERS

‘There is only one question to be answered in this room,’ said the couples counsellor. ‘Do you want this marriage or not?’

We’d heard he was a fast worker.

‘Either way,’ he continued, ‘I can help.’

The counsellor’s consulting room was in a tree-houselike extension at the bottom of his garden. It perched on top of a steep and perilous flight of steps, and I wondered if they’d been made that way on purpose.

Now that he had our full attention, the counsellor said we were going to start off with a quiz. This sounded more fun.

‘Ready? Here goes. When you attend a social function do you:

a. stick together;

b. split up and do your own thing?’

‘Split up and do our own thing!’ we shouted in unison.

‘OK,’ said the counsellor, ‘if there was a buffet at this function would you:

a. help yourselves;

b. find your partner and offer to fetch them a plate of food?’

‘Help ourselves!’

This was almost disappointingly easy.

‘Right,’ said the counsellor, ‘last question. If one of you wanted to leave the function early and the other one wanted to stay, would you:

a. agree on a time and leave together;

b. tell the one who wanted to leave to call a cab?’

Our hands shot up. ‘B!’

Husband and I looked at each other and grinned. It had been a while since we’d agreed on anything much, let alone three things in a row.

The counsellor took off his glasses and pinched his eyes. ‘You’re both what we’d call Selfish A-Types. Now, let’s talk about why you’re here, shall we?’

A less entertaining hour-and-a-half later, we gingerly descended the steep and perilous steps.

‘Be careful going down,’ the counsellor called after us. ‘They’re slippery after the rain.’

As we got into our separate cars to go back to work, Husband said, ‘I always knew you were a Selfish A-Type.’

We’d made it out of the tree-house, but we weren’t out of the woods.

*

Around the time I turned fifty, I got the feeling the universe was trying to tell me something: certain changes I’d started to notice with mild concern seemed to be taking on a life of their own.

Being the oldest person in meetings told me so, the way my grown-up children bossed me around told me so, my moods told everybody.

Relationships that had been good suddenly soured and my once rock-solid marriage seemed to be cracking faster than my face.

I was hot, but not in the way I used to be: the only men who looked at me that way any more had hair coming out of their ears or were young enough to be dismissed as perverts.

At first these changes were subtle, erratic and wily enough to make me shake my head and think I’d imagined them. It was like being in a scene in one of those crime thrillers where the woman comes home late at night, alone, and notices the bedroom window she locked that morning is open and the curtain is gently swaying – except there is no breeze. Every tingling bone in her body is telling her to grab the nearest heavy object and get the hell out of there. But when, a moment later, the cat jumps out from behind the curtain, she chides herself for being silly and takes off her make-up instead. We know something bad is about to happen, but despite all the alarm bells going off, she can’t seem to see it coming.

I didn’t see middle age coming. Who does? The indignation! The outrage! The disbelief. It began with a series of little jolts and surface wounds, before it got into its stride. The big jolt came when I realised, not so much that I wasn’t young any more, but that as far as the rest of the world was concerned, I was old. I had to face facts: youth was a passing phase and I’d passed it.

On a scale of One to Dead, I’d reached the tipping point. There must be things I could do to stop it. It was time for action.

I made an appointment to see Dr Z, to check if I had any hormones left.

Dr Z was French and had a sense of humour that had won him fans and ex-patients alike. He’d told a friend (honestly, a friend) who went to see him because she’d gone off sex that his wife had the same problem. Another time he told me when he came flying into the surgery late for our appointment that he was sorry, but he’d overslept and had a hangover.

I trusted Dr Z with my life.

He looked at the results of my blood tests and tutted that I needed an emergency infusion of oestrogen and progesterone. When I asked him to talk me through the pros and cons of hormone replacement therapy, he said there weren’t any cons. When I asked about the increased risk of breast cancer, he made a sound like blowing into a paper bag and said that’s why we have mammograms.

Dr Z put his elbows on the desk and laced his fingers. ‘Do you know Jen Funda?’

‘Excuse me?’

He made two air balloons over his jumper. ‘Barbarella?’

Ah, Jane Fonda.

None the wiser as to where this was headed, I nodded.

‘She is eighty and still very attractive.’ He gave one of those big French shrugs. ‘OK, she is also doing some exercises, but how do you think she got to look like that at her age?’

Apparently not just by doing some exercises.

‘Are you saying if I take hormone replacements I’ll look like Jane Fonda?’

‘Let me put it another way,’ said Dr Z. ‘When you are a young woman, your body is producing a lot of hormones to make you look a certain way, to attract a mate to make babies with. The hormones keep coming – very good for the baby when you are pregnant and also during breastfeeding.’

Dr Z clamped an air-baby on his left balloon.

‘The hormones keep coming while your children are growing up, until you are too old to make babies any more. After that, they start to disappear, and then, one day, they will be finished. Kaput!’

His voice dropped to a dramatic whisper. ‘And do you know why?’

I held my breath. He waggled his biro.

‘Because your job is finished! You can die now!’

He slumped back in his swivel chair, seemingly exhausted by his performance.

By this primal biological clock, I’d be popping out kids at twelve years old and have reached my sell-by date by, what, thirty-six? My life’s purpose would be served and there’d be nothing left to look forward to except being clubbed to death by my favourite son as a mark of the esteem in which I’d been held by the tribe after producing fourteen live children before my uterus fell out.

I hastily agreed to take every patch and pill Dr Z recommended and wobbled to my feet.

‘One more thing,’ he said, handing me the script. ‘You might inflate.’

‘Excuse me?’

Dr Z put down his biro and made the Jane Fonda balloons. ‘If you don’t like them, come back and we’ll try a different dose. But many women, they are happy when this happens, very happy!’

And that, to the best of my fraying short-term memory, was when it officially began: my big fat funny scary odyssey through the dark comedy of midlife.

Striking out through terra incognita, I stumbled on a quest: I would search for the meaning of life after youth. Youth, after all, is fleeting, and by the time most of us notice we’ve got it, it’s gone. Then there’s the rest of our lives. The rest of my life had arrived, and deep down I knew there had to be more to look forward to than the children confiscating my car keys.

In truth, I didn’t precisely know what the definition of an existential crisis was, but I felt sure I must be having one – or turning into one of those raging, weeping case studies that menopause gurus with suspiciously white teeth write runaway bestsellers about.

Big questions I hadn’t known existed started clamouring for my attention – questions every woman seeks answers to as they transition to an older female, answers we hope will lead to, well, more … hope.

How would I know when I’d arrived safely on the other side? Who said we’d get wiser as we got older? What if I found myself and wished I hadn’t?

In a world obsessed with youth, how was I going to get over being young?

In pursuit of this question, if not the answer, I’d start conversations with my equally destabilised girlfriends as we lost influence, equilibrium and teeth. I would accost colleagues and strangers at parties and pump them for information about their experiences, doubts and desires on the journey into our older selves. Looking ahead to proper old age, I would stalk my mother and aunt and see that the next stage wasn’t necessarily going to be all about bed baths and baby food. Mum and Auntie were happy to talk on the record about sex and death and their cosmetic surgeries: my mother gaily shared the details of her own sex life after sixty – a double-edged gift for me – and Auntie still wore thongs. I warned them that everything they said could be taken down and used against them, and kept the voice-recorder rolling.

As the clock ticked, I would track the changes that were happening to me, changes whose significance I had perhaps not yet fully grasped, and others I couldn’t yet imagine but which surely lurked in the wings. I resolved to do this as honestly, as unflinchingly, as I could without embarrassing my children any more than I’d have to. My observations would be wholly unscientific and probably deeply flawed, but they would be faithful to my experiences and whatever I learned along the way. Or didn’t learn. It would be my truth.

It was time for a reboot; time to unearth buried passions, discover new purpose, make new connections and find a different way to engage with a world that was starting to engage somewhat differently with me.

Whatever the challenges – ugh, I hated that word – that lay ahead, this much I knew: if I didn’t make my story now, I might never.

Like every woman old enough to be ageless, I would need to cut my losses and look to my gains – keeping an open mind to the possibility that there would be any gains. I was going to have to get comfortable in my skin, the skin that no longer fit quite like a glove.

By any means necessary.

Mental!

‘Sometimes it’s just better to lie on the floor anddo nothing.’

— ANON

To celebrate her eightieth birthday, Sister Four and I took Mum on holiday to Nice. One broiling afternoon, siesta time for the sane, we caught a bus to Monte Carlo, that ritzy Riviera playpen of high rollers, minor royalty and good-looking rich people who somehow managed not to look stupid in boat shoes. Yachts and helicopters were the main form of transport in Monte Carlo – nobody who was anybody would be caught dead on a bus; buses were for day trippers and flunkeys, the busy little elves who swabbed decks, mixed drinks and generally maintained the life of luxury that billionaires seemed to believe they deserved.

The bus – I must say it was a very nice bus – wound up the charming cobbled streets, depositing us high above the fairy-tale city from where we could see the glittering harbour bobbing with super yachts. We licked our pistachio gelatos and admired the view. Sister Four took selfies. The sun beat down. Mum said it was the best birthday treat ever. But once we’d been suitably dazzled by how the one-per-centers lived, there wasn’t a lot to do and it was too hot to walk very far, so we headed back to the bus stop.

There was only one other person waiting, a middleaged woman with whom Mum immediately struck up a conversation in pidgin French: it emerged from this conversation that the woman was a cleaner, originally from Mali, who was on her way into town to work the night shift at one of the fancy casino hotels. She and Mum, who’d been a hotel cleaner on and off for years, compared notes on how the richest clients were usually the ones who made the most disgusting mess, left the meanest tips and stole the bathrobes. By the time the bus arrived, the queue had swelled to about thirty people, and as the doors hissed open, order collapsed in a savage jostle to board. Everyone surged forward as if it was the last helicopter out of Saigon, elbowing past us and knocking my mother’s new friend out of pole position. For a moment Mum was too stunned to move – the British are the world champions of queueing and my mother is no exception. Knowing your place in the line was part of her national heritage, a hat-doffing dance of after you. She never thought she’d live to see the day when grown men shoved women and children aside to get on a bus. Her sense of fair play had been violated, and there would be consequences. I recognised the signs: her flame-red hair practically combusting, she pressed her palms against her new friend’s substantial bottom and launched her up the steps, shouting, ‘Excuse me, this lady was first!’ In English, which had absolutely no effect. Having made it onto the bus, my mother’s new friend was now peering anxiously through the window, waving at her encouragingly.

But it was too late.

‘I’m not getting on this fucking bus!’ Mum screamed, attempting to land a slap on the last of the passengers still squeezing on. Sister Four and I definitely weren’t getting on the bus: as our mother ramped up, we scuttled behind a lamp post and pretended we didn’t know her.

As the bus pulled away from the kerb, Mum shook her fist and yelled, ‘You’re all cunts!’

I could have told her French people don’t do queues.

In the end we took a taxi back to Nice after Mum beat the driver down to a price she considered fair. As her hair was still on fire, the driver had rapidly dropped his saw-you-coming-tourist smirk and agreed.

Back at our modest hotel, I put the kettle on while Mum cooled off in the shower.

Later that night, she said she regretted her behaviour, but it wasn’t her fault – she’d forgotten to bring her oestrogen on holiday. On top of this terrible news, she told us she’d also had a steroid shot for her arthritis before we left.

‘Thank you, my darlings,’ she said sleepily as we tucked her up with a bottle of Rescue Remedy. ‘I’m sure those French people didn’t understand what cunts meant.’

Once she was softly snoring away, Sister Four and I got stuck into the minibar and reviewed the day’s events. We had to admire her spunk. At eighty there was still fire in her belly; her sparks still flew. She was never going to shut up and subside into an armchair with a Bourbon biscuit or stop standing up for what she believed to be right, even when she went about it all wrong. She was still our Tiger Mum. She was holding the line.

*

The female side of my family has always been excitable.

I’d certainly done my share of door slamming and huffing out of restaurants, but I didn’t think it was my fault: the tantrum gene must have gone back several generations, as unaccountable and unavoidable as our blue eyes and fear of clowns. It just couldn’t be helped, and anyhow, our lightning tempers usually passed as quickly as they came. We didn’t hold grudges and we always said sorry. We were amazed when outsiders – i.e. anyone who got caught in the crossfire – seemed to take longer to recover their good humour than we did. After an indecently short interval, all but our most shameful episodes (we buried those) could be spun into comedy gold, providing hours of entertainment for the whole family – victims, perpetrators and helpless bystanders alike.

There was the time my sisters and I drove from Washington DC to New York City on an eagerly anticipated road trip reunion. It would be the first time I’d seen my sisters in more than two years, and, almost as excitingly, it would be my first visit to the US. It was a shame that Sister Three couldn’t be there to complete the circle – I no longer remember why – but the rest of us were in a tizzy of excitement at the prospect of being together again, and in such exotic surroundings. Plans were laid, pennies were saved. I was counting down the sleeps.

Around this time, we were all leading very different lives on a variety of different continents. Sister Four, the youngest, was living in Maryland, Virginia, with her brand-new American husband. Sister Three was couch-surfing around France with her artist friends, and Sister Two had recently moved to Wales, where she acquired a job with prospects and a moulting sheepdog. I had no idea if they were happy. I was the oldest (hence Sister One status) and had settled in South Africa – the furthest away from anyone. In the dark ages before mobile phones and Skype calls, or even affordable air travel for the masses, this meant I was always the last to know anything about anyone. No one exactly hopped on a plane to South Africa – in those days it took two flights and eighteen hours to reach London from Johannesburg. Passengers used to change into their pyjamas.

I missed my sisters terribly. We hadn’t all lived under the same roof, or even in the same country, since our parents’ marriage fell apart while we were living in South Africa. We’d emigrated from England several years earlier when our South African father had announced that, after years of having to wear a raincoat to the beach, he was homesick for the sunny land of his birth, which also happened to be the universally reviled home of apartheid. But to my thirteen-year-old eyes, already clouded by misery at having been torn away from my home and school friends and beloved grandmother, South Africa mostly just struck me as a deeply weird backwater, stuck in a time warp – they didn’t even have television – an end-of-the-earth kind of place into which I had been abruptly, unjustly dumped. It was not a happy move.

I was eighteen and Sister Four was five years old when our parents got divorced, an event that dramatically changed the course of all our lives in ways we could not yet begin to imagine. Like all divorces where children are involved, when a couple breaks up a family breaks up, and no one escapes unscathed. Our father moved to the other side of the country to start his new life with New Wife. Not long afterwards, my mother scooped up my younger sisters and moved back to the UK to be closer to her mother and extended family.

Having recently flunked out of journalism school (apparently you had to attend classes in order to graduate), I was all set to move back with them. But then I hit the jackpot: in the space of a single day, I found a job and a boyfriend with prospects.

I chose to stay.

Decades went by in an energetic blur of husbands, children and friends, and a career in journalism that overcame its pathetic beginnings. I missed my English family – my mother and sisters, my grandmother, aunts and cousins. I missed them being around to see my children grow up, to trade the everyday news and gossip, the shared experiences and internecine bitching we reserve exclusively for those nearest and dearest to us, offset by fierce loyalty and unbending support when the chips were down. All the wonderful, terrible things that make families go round: Christmases and birthdays, school plays and holidays and heartaches. Memories I had excluded myself from making with the rest of my big, boisterous clan.

Still, we seized every chance to be together, which in the early years when everyone was hard up took serious effort. When Daughter was born, my mother moved to Johannesburg for a year to help me out, paying her way by getting a job in a bar in a seedy downtown hotel, with room and board. A few years later, on a dark and stormy night when I was heavily pregnant with Son and couldn’t sleep, the doorbell rang, giving me such a fright I almost went into labour. Gingerly tiptoeing up to the spyhole, I saw Sister Three standing outside, dripping wet and carrying only a backpack. From London. She wanted it to be a surprise, she said. There were many times when I felt alone and bereft, but at times like these, I knew that I was blessed.

1990 was a good year, not only because of my sister reunion road trip: it was the year Son was born, Nelson Mandela was released from jail, and I had just turned thirty – a nice round number, I thought. And now, here we were, Sisters Two and Four and I, bowling along the Interstate 95 from Maryland to Manhattan, passing signs to places whose names we recognised from movies and TV that turned out to actually exist. Baltimore! Philadelphia! New Jersey! We were having so much fun we overshot the New Jersey Turnpike and were soon lost in a maze of grubby streets sagging with car washes, pawn shops and betting joints. New Jersey: stomping ground of the Sopranos. I kept a lookout for bulky men with bouffant hair chewing toothpicks, while Sister Two (who was navigating) and Sister Four (who was driving) tried to get us out of there. After an hour or so, the temperature in the car had risen significantly, despite the air-con blasting away. Sister Four started blaming Sister Two for not being able to read a map; Sister Two blamed Sister Four for shit driving. I sat – blamelessly for once – in the backseat, wondering if the man with the bulging jacket who’d been hovering around giving us funny looks was packing or just had big love handles. Suddenly, Sister Four leaned across the backseat grabbed Sister Two’s new camera – the one she was going to use to stalk Robert de Niro when we got to Manhattan – and threw it out of the window. After a moment’s shocked silence, Sister Two got out of the car, calmly walked around to the driver’s side and picked up the camera, which, thankfully, was still in one piece. Then, in a lightning move, she reached in through the window, grabbed Sister Four by the hair and proceeded to bang her head against the frame. As I sat sniffling in the backseat, begging them to stop, I noticed that the man with the bulging jacket had vanished.

No one in New Jersey ever saw anything.

The thing is, by the time we saw the Manhattan skyline, everyone was friends again. Once we’d checked into our midtown hotel, we were even making jokes about it, all adding our tuppence to the story, polishing it up for future airings.

Menopause only exacerbated our natural inclination to violence.

*

Auntie was forty-eight when she hit Uncle over the head with a frying pan. Uncle was a gentleman of the old school; he wrote books on cricket and wore cravats and a pinkie ring. Hearing he’d been hit on the head by Auntie with a frying pan was like hearing Lord Grantham was going to be in EastEnders.

That, said Auntie, was when she knew she needed help. The very next day she went to the doctor and was informed that she’d embarked on the perimenopausal stage of the female life cycle. In Auntie’s defence, perimenopause feels a bit like being hit over the head with a frying pan. It comes as a terrible shock to the system, flagging the onset of multiple undesirable losses – fertility, sleep, teeth – and multiple undesirable gains – hot flushes, night sweats and a growing feeling that you’ve left yourself somewhere, like an umbrella on a bus, except you can’t remember which bus. Perimenopause is a nightmare.

Luckily, Auntie got on the HRT wagon and never looked back, and Uncle was not a man to hold a grudge.

I was agog to discover that both Mum and Auntie were still on HRT. I’d imagined that one of the upsides of being old (if indeed there were any) would be that the symptoms of menopause – the furies, the sweats, the swings – would go away. Yet here they were, Mum at eighty and Auntie four years younger, still knocking back the oestrogen.

My mother went into menopause at fifty-one after a hysterectomy. Everything instantly changed for the worse: she felt awful, she felt old. Eventually someone said, ‘Try HRT.’

‘Darling, it was like the sun coming out.’

She’d been taking it ever since and had never even had a mammogram. ‘Why go looking for trouble?’ she reasoned.

In her seventies, my mother’s doctor had insisted she stop the treatments and refused to renew her script – the cancer risks outweighed the benefits of feeling like Jane Fonda, et cetera et cetera.

My mother was having none of it. ‘I went absolutely mad after he took me off HRT. I went back and told him, “Now listen here, I know my body better than you do, and at my age I frankly don’t care about getting cancer so just give me back my hormones!”

‘How could he possibly know what I felt like? He was a man.’ This, said Mum, who had enthusiastically taken to her role as my menopause mentor, was a good example of one of the upsides of getting old: not giving a fuck what anyone else thought.

Auntie’s doctor – also a man – had tried the same stunt, so Auntie picked up her frying pan and walked, replacing him with a ‘nice lady doctor’ who was more sympathetic and gave her a lifetime prescription for Evorel.

HRT, Mum and Auntie agreed, made them feel normal and prevented them from having homicidal thoughts. Well, enough of the time to give their victims a fighting chance, anyway.

As I began to lose equilibrium and general esprit, I pondered whether my own increasingly erratic behaviour could be blamed on the onset of menopause or just flammable genes.

Could I help it? Did I need to own it?

The hormones Dr Z prescribed seemed a wise investment in the future, but I couldn’t honestly say they made me feel fantastic. Though the hot flushes and night sweats had subsided, there were other factors at play. Neurological evidence pointed to the fact that the brain cells of women my age were drying up faster than my fairy. I ricocheted between bouts of self-pity interspersed with stabs of selfloathing and a rumbling, nameless fear that could not be pinned down and would not abate. I had also fallen out of love with the country I’d lived in for most of my adult life: a country that, actually, I doubted I’d ever been much in love with in the first place.

South Africa remained a place of extremes that in some ways had changed little since the end of apartheid. Racism, homophobia, sexism … these things were no longer institutionalised, but breeding them out of our hearts and minds was going to take more than a dazzling new constitution. Johannesburg, my home town, was a simmering cauldron of poverty and wealth, glitter and decay, fun and murder. Always on the verge of some or other catastrophe, always just managing to pull back from the brink of chaos. In Johannesburg we partied like there was no tomorrow, because sometimes there wasn’t. I felt guilty – for being white, for having chosen to live there even during the years when my race gave me opportunities and privileges I took without thinking twice (actually, sometimes I had thought twice, and I still took them). I was scared – of getting hurt, of someone I loved getting hurt, in what was still one of the most violent cities on earth.

I put on blinkers and shrank my world view to a size I found manageable. It was easier to look away, clap my hands over my ears, protect myself from the knowledge of things I was powerless to change. I felt my moral centre slipping.

When the news didn’t depress me, it irritated me: the cult of wellness, billionaire boy racers and their rockets to the moon, celebrity butt implants. The most piffling hiccups in my day would leave me feeling overwhelmed and resentful – last-minute guests, someone being late for a meeting, me being late for a meeting; anything that didn’t go according to plan and the lists I made that gave me a slippery sense of control. When I achieved something that hadn’t been on my list – tidying the cutlery drawer, remembering to call pest control – I’d write it down and cross it off afterwards. Bewildered, befuddled, I felt, as one friend had described her own state of mind, like a little old lady on the side of a main road wondering, ‘Shall I cross? When should I cross?’

I picked fights with Husband, who refused to fight back: arguing with him was like kicking the tyre when the car wouldn’t start – pointless and painful. With infuriating calm, he would say I was being irrational, impractical, that I’d lost perspective; that I would come around to seeing things his way if I thought logically for a moment. Then he’d sit back and simply wait for me to blow over. Gaslighting hadn’t been invented yet, but sometimes it felt like that was what he was doing. Somehow, he was always right, which I knew couldn’t always be right, but they who kept a firm rein on their temper invariably won most arguments in the end. Unlike me, Husband never shouted: he just persisted like the tortoise who beat the hare.

‘Mum’s kicking off again,’ Son would sigh, and I would slide another notch down the family totem pole.

As I drifted further and further away from the people and things I cared about, I saw my family through a scrim of cheesecloth; I strained to hear them. The further away I floated, the smaller they got. Soon I’d be a little speck in the sky and surely it would only be a matter of time before I burst in a small fart of shrivelled rubber. If I wasn’t careful, I’d become a self-fulfilling prophecy.

As my fuse got shorter, curiously, my memory seemed to be going the other way. I could remember the dress I’d worn to my tenth birthday party but I forgot my wedding anniversary.

I was out of town on a work trip when I checked my messages in the tea break and saw two from Husband.

The first one said, ‘Happy Anniversary!!!!’

The second one said, ‘Happy Anniversary????’

Later, I would wonder if this had been a Freudian slip on my part.

*

Being the eldest of my four sisters, I was curious to see how they were coping with the M-word. Half-Sister Five was still too young to merit a seat on the midlife-crisis rollercoaster, but the rest of them were definitely on the verge.

Sister Two was the Dr Doolittle of the family; she and I couldn’t have been more different. She tinkered with cars, talked back to horses and let dogs lick her face. She’d watched Jaws fifty-three times. In her forties, Sister Two had retreated from society-at-large and moved to the countryside, where she spent happy hours in conversation with her pet chameleon who, she said, made more sense than most people.

But recently I’d noticed that she too had become more … strident in her view that humans needed to be phased out, men first, and the planet returned to its rightful rulers in the animal kingdom. The only sensible solution, she proposed, was mass sterilisation, failing which the government would need to implement a one-child policy while working with all possible speed towards banning children altogether. Sister Two had a remarkably cheerful disposition for someone who believed humanity would end in her lifetime and the stragglers be picked off by lions stalking the aisles in Boots. She could not have been a more affectionate, more thoughtful, more fun aunt to her nieces and nephew, but if they hadn’t existed, it’s doubtful she would have missed them.

Hmmm, I thought as she banged on about overpopulation and dug up her apocalypse-sized potatoes. But I thought this quietly to myself, eyeing the rifle she used to shoot the rats that had invaded her garden to scavenge from the bird feeders, strung like lanterns in the trees, to save the birds – which, thanks to climate change, apparently had fewer menu options – from starvation. Rats were among the few four-legged creatures that would not inherit the earth if she had anything to do with it. Sister Two had no truck with menopause – she just wasn’t having it. Anyhow, her diary was already full. I envied her in a way; unlike me, she didn’t seem to be in any doubt about who she was and what she was for, not only what she was against.

Sister Three was the artist and activist of the family, a sort of cross between Marina Abramović and the Baader–Meinhof Gang: she was born stylish and could paint, sculpt, write, compose brilliant music and agitate all at the same time. People still talked about the night she gatecrashed a black-tie dinner in a spangled flyingtrapeze onesie; she always stood out from the crowd, often in the lace thrift-store wedding dress she wore to nightclubs. Sister Three tirelessly plotted the overthrow of the rich, the royals and anyone who shopped at Tesco. As she entered the perimenopausal twilight zone, her beliefs seemed to intensify, her readiness to agree to disagree with anyone who disagreed with her less … ready. She was restless, she chased change – in her life, not only in the wider society. I understood perfectly – I was feeling increasingly like bolting myself. Sister Three and I had always been close; we’d shared friends and gone to the same parties. I wondered if her train was about to leave the station too.

Sister Four was the Shirley Temple of the family, skipping through life in imaginary tap shoes and dimples, keeping everyone entertained. She even had ringlets, though these got straightened out in adulthood with hot irons. But from the far shores of my fifties – a significant twelve years ahead of her – I detected that even she, the consummate people-pleaser, the one who went out of her way to make sure everyone was happy, was starting to go off like a Nokia ringtone.

Sister Four and I had many heart-to-hearts about our dodgy state and status at our respective points on the crisis continuum. We compared notes and timelines and reviewed the empirical evidence.

‘It’s bewildering,’ she told me during one raging, weeping phone call, ‘I just don’t recognise myself any more.’

Innocently, inescapably, she was about to tap-dance smack into a lamp post, otherwise known as perimenopause. My sweet-tempered sister, the funny girl, was turning into a human hand grenade. She called her explosions the red mist. And when the red mist rolled in, it felt as if she was having an out-of-body experience.

‘You look down at yourself and you see the fire and scorched earth and people running for cover all around you, but you can’t stop.’

I didn’t like to tell Sister Four it was probably going to get worse before it got better. She tried HRT for a while but put on seven pounds and decided she’d rather be miserable for the rest of her life than get fat. Ditching the hormone replacements, she resorted to other methods – dabbling in yoga, bathing in camomile tea and rubbing yams on her thighs.

We swopped inspirational self-help literature, which, occasionally, I read all the way to the end. There was certainly no shortage of advice being peddled out there: science and pseudo-science, academic tomes, ageless goddesses, wellness gurus, preachers, teachers and flakes of every stripe. There was upbeat literature that made middle age sound like an exclusive club that women had to put their names down for at birth (Mindful Members Only). There were pally in-jokes on greeting cards (‘Miranda could no longer stand the sight of her husband and wondered what was wrong with him’); there were the Flat Earthers (‘age is just a number’), the Middle Earthers (‘magnesium can be found in clay deposits’) and the Conspiracy Theorists (‘they put it in the water’). Everyone had their little catchphrases, their USPs, but the messaging was essentially the same: we would emerge from the chrysalis of crisis like beautiful butterflies, with brilliant wings, wisdom and inner radiance (outer radiance no longer being possible, whatever it said on the jar). Jolts on the Trans-Menopause Express that might send us stumbling into the wrong carriage and mystery detours en route were only to be expected. The rewards at the end of the journey would make it all worthwhile, as long as we embraced the ride and didn’t lean too far out of the window between stations.

One thing the scientists and shamans all agreed on was that a carefully curated approach to health was key to our transition from young to ageless. Mind, body and spirit were symbiotically linked. Like triplets, they could never be truly happy apart. This holistic trinity was called self-care and could be achieved by taking up a brisk physical activity, following your dreams and doing crossword puzzles to ward off early-onset dementia.

I pictured myself running down the road with knickers on my head.

Yes, dementia would definitely need to be warded off, though I was startled to hear how much effort this mission would require on my part, even though menopause wasn’t my fault! Apparently, I was the only person who could change things, flip the tables, rearrange the stack on a loaded deck. Being the best new version of myself I could be was entirely my responsibility, which didn’t seem quite fair. I stopped reading self-help books; there was too much self-help involved.

Perhaps I was depressed?

Mum and Auntie didn’t believe in depression. In the war it had all been stiffened spines and sing-a-longs in air-raid shelters. Everyone just got on with it. ‘Your grandmother didn’t have time to be depressed,’ said my mother. ‘She was too busy picking glass out of the dining-room table and trying to excavate Auntie from her cot after the ceiling fell in on it.’

Going on HRT had helped to alleviate some of the physical symptoms of menopause, but they didn’t seem to have brought Jane Fonda and me much closer together.

A multipronged approach was called for. I booked appointments with a GP, a gynaecologist, a menopause management consultant, a cognitive therapist and a psychiatrist. Then I booked second opinions. Perhaps I could medicate my way through menopause and have someone wake me up when it was over.

Dr R, our family doctor, was a tonic all by himself. He sat on the same side of the desk as his patients, settling into his chair as if he had all the time in the world and that syringing your ear wax was the high point of his day. Twenty minutes with Dr R could bring down my blood pressure and I almost looked forward to getting sick just so I could make another appointment to check my vital signs.

But today the troubles I tipped on his desk were all in my head: the moods, the generalised anxiety, the broken nights during which I’d imagine terrible things happening to my children that I was helpless to prevent.

I wanted it to stop. I wanted the sun to come out. I wanted drugs.

Instead of pulling out his script pad, Dr R put down his pen and said, yes, this was a difficult time of life – confusing, confounding and not always a pretty sight. He tapped a deep crease running the length of his cheek. ‘This isn’t a wrinkle,’ he laughed, ‘it’s a crevasse. But you know,’ he went on, ‘there just isn’t a pill for everything, and anyway, we shouldn’t try to numb our feelings, even painful ones – especially painful ones – because it won’t help in the end.’

We all had to grope our way through the same tunnel with its unexpected twists and hair-raising turns. We would need to stay sharp, keep our wits about us as we prepared to meet whatever awaited us on the other side, over the hill no longer so far away.

Dr R was somewhere in his fifties too, but until then I hadn’t imagined that men had midlife crises, at least not such thoughtful ones.

At the end of this conversation he suggested that I see a psychiatrist: being in touch with our painful, if potentially cathartic, feelings was one thing, but being in pain was another. Sometimes, we needed to get by with a little help from our allopathic friends. ‘Let me know how it goes,’ he said, throwing in a mercy pack of diazepam and a lollipop.

Dr S, the psychiatrist, was of Eastern European origin and had an old-country feel about her – china-white skin unblemished by direct sunlight, a thrilling accent and a faintly melancholic air that made me think of Cold War era socialism and samizdat books stuffed into overcoats. It made her seem older and wiser, though she had only just turned forty (I asked her). Dr S still had menopause to look forward to.

She asked me lots of questions that I tried to answer as honestly as I could. Did I have violent dreams? Problems at home? Problems with relationships? How much did I drink? How well did I sleep? Had I ever had a panic attack?

Two hours later she said she didn’t think my anxiety issues were related to menopause or that I was clinically depressed; she prescribed a medication shown to be extremely effective in the treatment of bipolar patients. Not, she added, seeing my face, that she thought I was bipolar – she just didn’t want me to get a fright when I read the insert. Dr S decided I had a mood-destabilising disorder and that I must have caused myself and my family much misery that could have been avoided if only I’d come to see her sooner. Echoing Dr R, she warned me that there wasn’t a pill for everything and recommended that I see a cognitive therapist.

I’d never been in therapy before, unlike a friend who’d been dragged there by her mother when she was fifteen and diagnosed with acute adolescence. Once, when we were waiting outside the school gate for her mother to fetch her for an appointment, she said, ‘Have you had any interesting dreams lately? I’ve run out.’

My friend said therapy was a lot of pressure: having to look smarter than the therapist, entertaining the therapist, bullshitting the therapist. I wondered if it would feel grown-up and glamorous saying things like ‘My therapist said’ or merely self-absorbed and pretentious.

Dr E was another brilliant younger woman with whom I felt instantly at home. She made us mugs of tea and steered me to an armchair in her office sliced with late-afternoon sunlight. I couldn’t see a fainting couch, but there was a box of what used to be called man-size tissues on the coffee table, which men were only ever supposed to use to blow their nose. We talked about my childhood. We talked about my children’s childhood. We talked about Husband and me. We talked about me and me. I unravelled so fast, gave up classified information so quickly, I knew I’d never stand up under torture. I dribbled and leaked, I blurted and blabbed and begged.

Dr E said she thought I had anger issues. She said that when I was done being angry, I’d be sad, and when I was done being sad I’d start to feel better about myself, more optimistic about the future. And that slowly, many tissues later, I would begin to feel.

Leaving no chia seed unturned on the path to wellness (a new word in my vocabulary and one I would never get fully comfortable with), my final call was to a self-styled menopause-management consultant who, despite having suspiciously white teeth, came highly recommended. The MMC made me get on a scale. The last time I’d stood on one of these ghastly instruments was at my six-week check-up after Son was born. I shed three grams worth of shoes and closed my eyes, but I could practically hear the digits climbing. This immediately set me against her. She spoke about bioidenticals – apparently a plant-based alternative to old-fashioned HRT with a squirt of pregnant horse urine thrown in. Considering what was in the Botox and fillers I had, the thought of ingesting a bit of horse pee didn’t bother me unduly. The MMC printed out a long list of vitamins and mineral supplements. She raised the delicate subject of diet and exercise. I left clutching my report card and assured her that I would give up sugar and walk further than the fridge: once emptied of everything worth eating, it would, hopefully, be easier to walk past.

The MMC said, ‘When you feel you’re about to lose your cool, take a deep breath and count to ten.’ She said it would take practice.

*

One Saturday afternoon, Mum and I were on a bargain hunt in TK Maxx when I got an opportunity to practise the count-to-ten anti-meltdown method. She had followed me into the change room under a pile of clothes. I wasn’t sure I wanted her there: I hadn’t taken my clothes off in front of anyone since 2009. In any case, TK Maxx’s famous end-of-line designer-range bargains had been made to fit dainty Spanish women and tended to get stuck over my head and leave my arms flailing helplessly in the air like Winnie-the-Pooh trapped half-in half-out of Rabbit’s front door after a honey binge. This was the change-room surrender position and the reason I preferred to go clothes shopping alone these days. I told Mum she could wait outside and I’d call her if I got into difficulties.

‘Don’t be so silly, darling,’ she said. ‘Trust me, I’m your mother.’

I took off my top.

‘Goodness!’ she gasped. ‘That French doctor was right – your boobs have got bigger since you went on the HRT!’

Since going to see Dr Z and Dr R and Dr S and Dr E and the MMC, I can’t tell you how much more hopeful I was feeling about the future – more in control of my emotions, more tolerant; tethered. No more hot flushes, no more drenched nights. The holistic trinity of my body, mind and spirit seemed to be coming together nicely.

I took a deep breath and managed to count to two-and-a-half.

‘If you don’t turn around and face the wall right now, you can just get out!’

Without another word, my mother obediently turned to face the wall. I checked on her in the mirror before trying on the next top. She looked so small standing in the corner with her arms meekly at her sides. Her rowdy red hair had gone very quiet. In a contrite little voice, she said, ‘I think your boobs look nice bigger.’

Afterwards, I felt deeply ashamed.

Sister Two, who’d claimed to be breezing through an asymptomatic menopause, said that lately she’d started to feel strange and unsettled, not only because the end of the world hadn’t happened yet. She spoke of a sort of brain fog that would leave her staring at her laptop, wondering what she was supposed to be doing; she had road rage and terrible dreams; she’d even gone off overpopulation, her favourite subject.

She and Boyfriend, who was in the direct line of fire, decided they needed a safe word – a code they could use before minor disagreements reached boiling point, while there was still time to turn off the gas. Apparently, he’d suggested ‘Calm down, dear’. Luckily Sister Two hadn’t yet lost her sense of humour and chose to take this as a joke. Their safe word, she said, had been 78.9 per cent effective. She suggested that Husband and I get one for ourselves.

‘Make it something silly,’ she advised, ‘a word that’ll defuse the situation and make you both laugh – a private couple’s in-joke.’ Sister Two revealed that her and Boyfriend’s safe word was ‘emu’.

‘That’s ridiculous,’ I said.

‘That’s the point,’ she said.

Husband and I played around with safe words and finally settled on a safe phrase, which was ‘nice knowing you’. There would come a time when our safe words wouldn’t seem quite so hilarious, and we would find ourselves having to make far-reaching decisions about our future.

But not before I’d kicked a few more tyres.