Type the words “women and midlife” into a search engine and the scattershot articles and blog posts that appear on your screen might alternately amuse and disturb you.
Some of them counsel women to face middle age with humor and grace, a piece of advice that makes midlife sound like an insult to be politely deflected.
Other writers are more flip. They suggest we women make light of such indignities as hot flashes and the hairs that have begun to sprout from our chins. Still others say midlife is a time to bloom and get feisty. The same voices usually insist that menopause isn’t a bother for many women at all.
There are more gloomy commentators, too.
They say we’re depressed, bored and in crisis. Such writers tend to conclude with a recommendation that women begin using prescription drugs, rethink their careers or even leave their marriages to escape the tedium that has come to define their lives.
The idea in these seems to be that midlife is a time to focus exclusively on the self — especially while shrouded in a pleasant haze of medication.
Now that I’m in my 40s, as my own smile lines deepen, the gray at my temples spreads and my reliance on reading glasses grows, I wonder what to make of these divergent claims about women in midlife.
So I talked with Dale Hanson Bourke, author of “Embracing Your Second Calling: Find Passion and Purpose for the Rest of Your Life.”
Bourke neither sentimentalizes nor belittles the life changes women experience, both physically and emotionally, after about the age of 40. She said that this time is one of reflection and “tallying our wins and losses.”
“In the act of taking stock, we realize how much we have changed,” Bourke said. “We no longer abandon the past like a change of clothes. We pick it up, examine it and hold it a little closer.”
Bourke lives outside Washington, D.C., and is the president of the CIDRZ Foundation, which supports women’s health and education in Africa. Her work brings her into close relationship with women and girls in some of the most resource-poor places on earth.
“Too often our culture tells women to do everything in their power to hold on to their youth,” Bourke said. “The message is that middle-age women are ‘washed up,’ but actually we are needed by the world. We have purpose.”
This purpose, she said, most often stems from wounds we’ve suffered earlier in our lives. Years ago, Bourke lost a child. She said that loss connects her deeply to women she meets in Africa whose children have died as a result of AIDS, malnutrition and other tragedies.
“I can say to them that I understand, because I do,” Bourke said. “Our own pain can connect us to others.”
Bourke tells the story of a friend whose mother died. Missing her mother, the friend began to visit older women at an assisted care facility. As these relationships deepened, Bourke’s friend experienced emotional healing and was, concurrently, able to enhance the lives of women who are too often forgotten by those living elsewhere.
“There’s a pervasive message in the media that women in midlife are washed up,” Bourke said. “But actually, we have so much to give.”
