Jody Day
I’d looked forward to turning sixty, considering it the beginning of my young elderhood, so much so that my Instagram handle had been @apprenticecrone since I was fifty-five! So, it came as quite a shock to discover that I had a rampant ‘inner ageist’.
Because, unlike other prejudices that others might direct at us, ageism is unique in that it targets our own current or future selves.
I first met my inner ageist (who sounds remarkably like my own hyper-critical mother) when she rocked up in the mirrored wall of a new Pilates studio a couple of years ago. I barely recognised myself. It wasn’t just that I was two dress sizes larger than my pre-menopause body but that, when I took in the reflection of the whole class together, I realised that even though I felt much younger than the sixty and seventy year old women around me, I looked just like them; one of a group of older woman, moving gingerly in the rehabilitation class on a weekday afternoon.
I was no longer the young or middle-aged woman looking at older women. I was the older woman.
I’d read, theoretically about meeting our inner ageist in Connie Zweig’s excellent book The Inner Work of Age: Moving from Role to Soul, but this was the first time I’d met my own.
I’ve found her easier to spot in other women, wincing at the often cruel and derogatory remarks they make about their own bodies, and underneath those comments I’ve felt a deep sadness. My own mother was judgemental and hyper-critical of her own and other women’s bodies (including my own), all her life, only letting it go when dementia gave that part of her psyche a break.
Sometimes, the best mirror for our own inner ageist is the things we think about others.
For most of my life, I’ve looked younger than my age due to inheriting my mother’s resilient, low-maintenance skin, but the menopause has caught me up, and a back injury combined with a long-covid type illness, on top of more than two decades of insomnia, have worn me down. Although I used to bat away compliments such as, ‘You don’t look your age!’ with a warm chuckle and Gloria Steinem’s rebuttal that, ‘Well, this is what [insert age] looks like!,’ I don’t get those comments any more, and I’m chagrinned to realise that I miss them. Turns out I don’t like looking my age, even though I love being my age!
But I don’t want to not want to look my age. It goes against everything I believe, and all the work I’ve done to reclaim my sense of worthiness from the dustbin of pronatalism.
But there she is, my inner ageist, squatting in the shadow of my psyche, waiting to teach me about the shaming stories I’ve internalised about inhabiting an ageing female body.
In my book, Living the Life Unexpected, there’s an exercise called ‘Saying Thank You’, which is a powerful practice I developed to befriend my body after the devastation of childlessness. I felt a deep hatred for my midlife body; the body that had ‘failed’ me during my thirties when I was trying to conceive, and had then done so again by running out of time during my mostly-single forties.
I have a horrible memory of some of the darkest days of my grief, standing in front of the mirror, pinching the fat on my belly and my thighs, those taunting markers of my femaleness, and wishing I could just slice them off, like meat on a butcher’s slab. It’s really hard to write now how disgusted I was with myself, and how much anger (which was part of grief, but I didn’t yet understand that) was being directed at my poor body. That very same body that had shown up for work every single day of my life to do its best for me.
Without my body, I could not exist. Yet I was treating my most loyal friend as an enemy.
Learning to be ‘grateful’ for my body, and for all that it had done--and continued to do for me-- every single day, instead of berating it for what it had not done and judging it for not looking younger and slimmer - that’s what the ‘Saying Thank You’ exercise was all about, and it changed my life.
Along with finding childless community, doing my grief work and developing self-compassion there was another component to my childless recovery, and that was, I realise, a form of consciousness raising. I put pronatalism and singlism under the microscope and examined the ‘beliefs’ that I had about being a single, childless, midlife woman and fact-checked them:
● Were these really my beliefs, or had I inhaled them unexamined from the overculture? (Doh).
● Who benefited from me believing these things about myself? (Clue: it wasn’t me).
● And did I think these awful, shaming things about other childless women? (No, never).
And so I experimented with choosing not to believe them about myself… playing whack-a-mole with these automatic thoughts when they popped up and, over time, I found that my sense of joy, freedom, expansiveness, hope, cheekiness and adventure opened up once more.
I realised that I wasn’t broken, and that I never had been.
I was just a heartbroken human who’d been looking for someone to blame, and had chosen myself. Because, let’s face it, that’s what we’re trained to do as women. It couldn’t possibly be the systems around us, surely?
I discovered that being a childless woman didn’t have to be a life sentence of misery, and that although there were undeniable challenges that came with the territory, that was just my part of the human condition to grapple with; mothers have theirs, I have mine.
However, what I chose to believe my childlessness said about me? That was under my control, and I could be utterly sovereign in my beliefs, regardless of what other people might think.
So here I am again. Facing down the barrel of ageism which, when combined with sexism and pronatalism, becomes quite the unholy trinity.
I think it was when I realised that there is only one term of respect for a woman over sixty - grandmother -- and that all the rest: hag, crone, harpy, cougar, etc -- are all insults, that I began to realise just how much our patriarchal culture despises old women. Is it thus any wonder that the global anti-aging market was estimated at almost 80 billion dollars in 2024? Making ageing women feel unworthy is big business.
And so, just as I had to uncover and rehabilitate my inner pronatalist to make peace with my childlessness, now I’m looking to befriend my inner ageist.
Much is written on how older women become ‘invisible’ to the culture and, after a lifetime of feeling like prey, there can be some relief in letting the male gaze slide on by. But what of becoming invisible to ourselves?
So what I’m doing now is noticing when I avoid looking in mirrors that I don’t know, and to turn back towards them with gentle and self-compassionate appraisal; learning to becoming aware of how I curate my photos, only sharing the ones that show me someone I recognise, and instead choosing the ‘unflattering’ ones, the ones that are probably truer to reality. I’m giving away all the clothes that don’t fit, and passing on the high-heeled London shoes that I’ll never wear again, living as I do now a very rural life, and caring too for the more fragile feet and ankles that my mother also gifted me. I’m settling into myself for the long haul.
And for every time that I wince at a new change to the texture of my skin, or the bizarre shenanigans of gravity on my body, or the eruptions of hair in some places whilst it recedes from others, I remind myself how very much I appreciate the internal steadiness, warm approachability and quiet confidence that has replaced my youthful body. That body was an accident of genetics, but my mature (and maturing) sensibility is all my own doing, and I’m proud of her. This peace was hard won.
We were all born childless and worthy, and my later childlessness did not take that worthiness away. And nor does my perfectly imperfect, sagging, fading, ageing, sixty-one year old body.
If my body is a temple, it’s a bit of a shambles, and I’m learning to be okay with that. I’ve always loved visiting ancient ruins; now I’m getting to live in one, and I’m determined to appreciate her as the work of art she is, until the day comes that I have to vacate my only home on this earth.
Just as I refused to let childlessness rob me of my worthiness, now I refuse to let ageism rob me of the miracle of growing older (and hopefully wiser) in a human body.
