Musings from Middle Age

By Kerre Woodham

A laugh-out-loud account of one woman's journey to the brink of middle age as she discovers her new place in the grand scheme of things
Is there an invisible line we cross at a certain age when we become 'un-chat-up-able' and become someone's mum? When do barmen and supermarket check-out operators start calling us 'madam' and why do some women have the unnatural urge to cut their own hair with nail scissors or run away to Buddhist retreats when they hit forty?In this hilarious collection of stories from the brink of middle age, Kerre shares her insights into what makes us tick as women 'of a certain age'. topics explored include: coping with the empty nest; shoes, shoes and other indulgences; when is it futile to dress to impress?; is there such a thing as a female mid-life crisis?; and many more.told in Kerre's frank and self-deprecating style, this is a hilarious account of living life to the fullest - no matter what your age.

• Language: English
• Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers Australia
• Release date: Apr 1, 2013
• ISBN: 9781775490340

Kerre Woodham

Successful, award-winning broadcaster, media darling and one of New Zealand's best-loved personalities. Kerre lives in Auckland.

Book preview

1

Well, hello there

To be honest, it wasn’t my idea to write this book. I’ve written books before that were my ideas — I wrote a couple of books on marathon running a few years back which I know a lot of women have read. I was delighted with the response to them. To date, I’ve received about 800 emails and letters from women — and four from men — who’ve told me that the books inspired them to run marathons, take up triathlons, give up smoking and in general do all sorts of amazing things, and that was really gratifying.

But these readers weren’t inspired because of the brilliance of my prose or the beauty of my composition. I’m not a dazzling writer. Oh, there was a time when I dreamed of writing a work of great literary and artistic merit. When I had my daughter, at twenty-four, I imagined that I’d take maternity leave from Fair Go, the television programme I was working on at the time, spend the day loving my beautiful girl and the nights writing the great New Zealand novel. I assumed that writing the great New Zealand novel would take me about six months, and after that I would resume my normal life, albeit with a gorgeous daughter and a couple of literary prizes to show for my six months off work.

Hah! I soon realised that if I got out of my dressing gown and had washed the sick out of my hair before dinner time (the baby’s sick, not mine), that was a good day. My daughter’s dad, who travelled away during the week on business, would return on Thursday night and I would greet him in an old pink velour dressing gown that my mum had passed on to me. I think she was terrified I was going to wear something slutty and black in the hospital when I turned up in the delivery suite to produce her first grandchild.

Alastair would look wide-eyed at the dirty plates and the soaking bottles and the piles of laundry in the lounge and would, quite legitimately, ask, ‘What on earth have you been doing?’

‘She’s alive and I’m alive,’ I would snap, shoving into his hand a pizza discount coupon that had been posted through the mailbox — my idea of a cooked dinner for the hunter and gatherer of the family. No wonder we didn’t make it as a couple; although, as parents of our daughter, we’ve done a pretty good job, even though I say so myself.

Needless to say, not a lot of writing was done during those first early gorgeous, sleep-deprived, life-transforming months, and since I’ve become a book reviewer, I’ve realised I will never be an award-winning seminal novelist. I would love to be, but I simply don’t have the talent. What I am is a storyteller — in the confessional genre — and that’s okay. I don’t pretend it’s art — and after the response I had to Short Fat Chick to Marathon Runner, I have realised I don’t care that I can’t write words of beauty that will resonate in the heart forever. I will leave that to true wordsmiths and I will love and appreciate them for doing so. What I can do, however, is tell a yarn. And hopefully that’s what happens in this book.

The gorgeous blondes at HarperCollins, Vicki and Alison, had been taking me out for lunch regularly, trying to get me to write another book. I wasn’t keen on writing a third one for so many reasons. For one thing, the first book was a fluke. It wasn’t particularly well written — I cringe when I reread it on the odd occasion — but it hit the market at the right time. Women like me were looking for a challenge, and although many women before me had trained harder and achieved better times in marathons, I was the first overweight booze hag to write about training for a marathon and finishing it — alive.

I wrote another one on marathons at their behest which did moderately well — but I really didn’t want to become the Edmonds Cookery Book of running manuals. On another more mercenary level, I didn’t want to put the long, lonely hours into writing a book when all an author gets in return is a percentage of the cover price. And the New Zealand market is so small that if you sell 5000 copies of a book, it’s considered to be a bestseller. And, besides, I hadn’t done anything of note. When Vicki and Alison were tossing ideas around at various cafés in Auckland, I was all ‘meh’ and ‘whatevs’. I didn’t feel passionate about any of the subject matter until one day, when we were sitting at yet another café, having yet another lunch, Vicki said in well-contained exasperation, ‘You must have done something recently!’

‘I’ve done nothing,’ I replied. ‘Well, nothing except grow older.’

With that Vicki and Alison both sat up, heads in the air, nostrils quivering like the very finest English pointers smelling game.

‘We’re all getting older,’ said Alison. ‘Why don’t you write about your experience of it?’

‘Oooh, yes,’ said Vicki, ‘why don’t you write about becoming an invisible woman?’

With that, we all started comparing notes about how the world and the men of the world in particular were passing us by and how difficult it was to gauge the exact moment to give in gracefully to the ageing process and whether we should succumb to the rigours of time or fight the process to the bitter end. We all had war stories and the more we shared, and laughed, the more the idea seemed to gain a life of its own.

I recounted the tale of a friend of mine who said she realised she knew it was all over when she was shopping one afternoon and came upon a sequined Tweety Bird T-shirt. She thought it was very funky and out there, but when she tried it on, she had a moment of doubt. ‘It’s a crazy T-shirt and it’s a bit of fun,’ she thought to herself, ‘but I don’t want to look ridiculous. Maybe I’m too old to get away with wearing it as an ironic fashion piece?’ So she took a photo of herself in the T-shirt and asked her (much younger) colleagues, her trusted friend and her partner what they thought. The reactions ranged from incredulous disbelief to pitying sympathy. A Tweety Bird T-shirt?! What on earth was she thinking? She needed, according to everyone she canvassed, something tailored and chic. Her days of fashionable fun and sartorial attention seeking were over. And she knew then that she was on the downhill slide.

It comes as a shock to most of us to discover that we have become invisible in the eyes of the world. And, for many women, ageing is something we fight against and battle with and laugh about hysterically with our girlfriends — before we bow to the inevitable and slide with good grace into old age. At the time of writing, I’m forty-seven. Past middle age, according to statistics; the average life expectancy of a woman in New Zealand is eighty-two. If I shuffle the deck a little bit, my grandmother on my maternal side lived to ninety-nine so I could, if you work with me on this, be considered to be just hitting my middle years.

Given that I squandered my youth, though, and, as so many young people do, never considered that one day I’d be old and boring, with a mortgage and a stiff back and grey hair, I didn’t really prepare for the middle years and I find it quite a shock to be here. This book is my story of dealing with grey hair (and not just on my head!), wrinkles and the empty nest syndrome. It’s my account of ageing and how I am working out how to spend the next thirty-five years happy, healthy and productive.

Some of you may well relate to my experiences; others may wonder what on earth I’m going on about. A number of women I know have breezed through the experience of children leaving home and the menopause and see their fifties and sixties as times of enormous opportunity. They are more fulfilled, professionally and personally, than they have ever been in their lives. Well, good on them. I’m envious but I wish them well. For me, these middle years have been tough. I’m not at the stage of embracing middle age yet — but I’m getting there.

This book should come with a warning. It is only intended for the eyes of women aged forty plus. And perhaps for the men who love women aged forty plus to give them an insight into how some of us — not all — are dealing with arriving at our midlife stage. If any woman under forty picks up this book, go no further. You don’t want to know what’s up ahead — really, you don’t. Just enjoy being young and healthy and gorgeous and kid yourself you’re going to be gorgeous forever. But keep this book on the shelf, because there will come a time when you will need it. If this helps you navigate your way through a very uncertain time in your life, I’ll be very happy. Even if you just get a few laughs out of it, that’s good too. In the meantime, I just want to thank you for picking up this book.

2

Becoming invisible

I can remember the exact day and time I became invisible. It was a Thursday afternoon, in the middle of winter, and my sixteen-year-old daughter and I were walking down the main street, heading towards a speciality fabric store to source material for her Year 12 ball gown.

My daughter was — and indeed still is — a tiny, perfectly proportioned, flame-haired package of gorgeousness. Kind people say we look alike but, really, it’s only our eyes — and some of our mannerisms. In every other respect, we look completely different. Strangers must think I’ve done an Angelina Jolie and travelled to a foreign land to find the prettiest baby in the orphanage to adopt. She has my eyes, yes, but mercifully she has her father’s physique and metabolism, which is that of a racing whitebait, as well as his auburn hair. She has a figure, but it’s like she’s been built to a smaller scale than ordinary mortal women.

I don’t take offence when people boggle at the idea of us being mother and daughter because, unlike my daughter, I am built like a raw-boned peasant. In a previous life, I would have been toiling in the fields, eking out a desperate existence before dying in childbirth in a smoke-filled hovel. Go back into my daughter’s past lives and I guarantee she would have been a princess, born to be showered with jewels and velvet gowns and to sleep on beds of finest silk. Suitors would have come from the four corners of the earth to seek her hand and she would have disdained them all with a haughty lift of her chin and a flick of her hair.

In the absence of princes to disdain and kingdoms to rule, during her childhood and teenage years she ruled our small suburban home and, for the most part, my Irishman and I were happy to serve. I had only ever seen her as my daughter. She had always been my child — a wilful, intelligent, magical, lovely child — until the day we were walking down Queen Street and suddenly I realised that she was more than my daughter. She was a gorgeous young woman. She was old enough to be looked at and appreciated by passersby.

And I was invisible. It was all in the look — or, in my case, the lack of the look. You’ll know the look. The look that passes between men and women. It’s a look that says, ‘I see you. You look great. You look like fun. In another time, in another place, it would be great to get to know you.’ Well, that’s the look women give men when they find them attractive. The translation of the look men give women is: ‘Great tits’, ‘Great legs’, ‘Great arse’. Men are somewhat more direct. It’s only a fleeting look, but when two pairs of eyes connect and the two of you smile, it’s one of those moments in time when you know you’re alive and you’re present and you’re visible to the world.

But on this day, as the two of us walked down the street side by side, every man we passed aged between sixteen and fifty-six had eyes only for Kate. They looked at her and they didn’t see a child. They saw a lovely young woman and there were smiles and winks and the occasional wistful backward glance as older men realised that the girl they were looking at was the same age as their own daughter. As for me, I wasn’t there. Like, I really wasn’t there. It wasn’t as if they looked at me, found me wanting and discarded me. They simply didn’t see me. They stepped around me as if I were a lamppost or a rubbish bin. I had been consigned to the ranks of the invisible women. And it was a slap in the face.

I have always loved male attention, but I have never thought I was defined by it. I’m a hopeless flirt — as in, I’m rubbish at it. I say what I think and I say what I want and I argue and I go for quick one-liners, and that’s not really what men find attractive.

I have a beautiful friend, who is incredibly smart, quick-witted and highly regarded within her profession, and yet when she meets a man she finds interesting, she morphs into the epitome of the seductive flirt. She crosses her impossibly long legs and positions them away from the object of her desire, while at the same time swivelling and leaning her torso towards the bloke. Her legs, crossed and away, show she’s not going to be easy; her torso and cleavage tilted towards him say it’s worth him having a try. She listens to everything he has to say, doesn’t try to impress him by who and what she knows, then, at the right time, she comes in with a clever observation or a wry comment that lets the man know she is not only gorgeous and ripe for the plucking if he’s the man for the job, she’s also really, really clever.

I’ve seen her in operation and it’s extraordinary to watch. I’d never thought about trying to attract male attention. It just happened — often enough to make me feel attractive and alive; not so often that it was annoying. And then, one day, it was gone. I had become invisible.

Over the next few years, the message that I was getting old was reinforced in a myriad of ways. The boss who hired me to work at Newstalk ZB resigned and his replacement was so young I could have given birth to him — if I’d got out of the blocks early. At the very least I could have babysat him. I’ve been asked — twice — by a weight-loss company if I’ll endorse their product because, they said, they were trying to appeal to those middle-aged women who find it hard to shift that annoying excess ten kilos. I went from receiving invitations to trendy bar openings and VIP nightclub events to receiving requests asking me to advertise a feminine hygiene product. I was accustomed to cosmetic companies sending me their latest nail polishes and lipsticks; now they send me anti-ageing products. Where once companies used to want me to lend my name to clothing ranges and vineyards, I was now being asked to give testimonials for bust-firming and vaginal-tightening creams. I kid you not.

How on earth are you supposed to deliver a ringing endorsement of a vaginal-tightening cream without coming across as the most decrepit old ewe in the history of prolapsed wombs? ‘Hi. I’m Kerre Woodham. I once had a fanny the size of the Hataitai Tunnel. My pelvic girdle could have harnessed a team of Clydesdales. Now, however, after just a few short months of using the miracle VaJayJay Cream, I’m as tight as a guppy’s bum and my girdle is so slim it could barely slip over the nose of a finely bred filly. Hubby and I couldn’t be happier.’

Really? Thanks, but no thanks. Clearly, though, advertisers and PR companies have shifted me from their list of movers and groovers to ageing hag in dire need of help. I am now pitiable as well as invisible.

Men have a wonderful gift for choosing not to see things they’d rather not see. I first noticed that when I was training for a marathon. Women would drive past me and see a frizzy-haired middle-aged woman wombling along, bits and pieces jiggling and looking for all the world like eighteen puppies were drowning in a sack. The mouths of my fellow females would drop open, aghast — ‘Doesn’t she have any idea what she looks like? Good lord, some people simply shouldn’t exercise! Doesn’t she know that shirt is riding up, exposing her stomach?’ — before their faces would soften into a pitying, condescending visage and you could see them thinking, ‘Ah well. At least she’s out there, trying. Good on her.’

Men, on the other hand, are highly selective in what they choose to see. They would have noticed, and enjoyed noticing, a pert young jogger, bouncing along with the curve of her ripe round buttocks slyly showing from her shorts with every stride. They would have seen, and appreciated seeing, a lovely young woman out running, ponytail swinging, long limbed and lithe, luminous with a light sheen of perspiration. But if they drove by and saw me pounding the pavements, when all the perpetual motion on the footpath caught their attention, they would look and, almost instantly, they would look away again and go to their happy place.

They did not choose to see a flushed, frizzy-haired, crêpe-skinned lump of lard, lumbering along the street on what was clearly a Mission Impossible and, therefore, they did not see it. Men are quite remarkable for their singularity of vision. They do not see that the baby has exploded all over her stretch and grow. When the dog gets into the rubbish and scatters chicken bones, greasy paper and vacuum bag detritus all over the floor, it takes you to point it out to them even when they’ve been stepping over it all day. And the mountain of washing waiting to be folded and put away could build to the stage of needing crampons and climbing ropes to scale and they would still be genuinely stunned and surprised when you ask them if they’ve seen it.

This is not a criticism of men, you understand. It’s simply the way many of them operate. They see what they want to see. And, at a certain stage in life, men don’t want to see middle-aged women. Even when happily married to middle-aged women, men don’t see the wrinkles and the flab and the emerging grey hair. They remember the gorgeous slip of a thing they fell in love with and that’s the vision they stick with.

One night I had to emcee a glittering black-tie event at Sky City, the premier venue for fabulous functions. I had really made an effort because this was a biggie. More than a thousand people, all of whom had paid an eye-watering amount to be there, for the purpose of raising money for a worthwhile charity. My hair was shiny, blow-waved and curled. My skin was bronzed and dusted with a shimmering powder. I had been lent a gorgeous strapless gown by a top designer. My eyelashes had been artfully extended, you could have hung coats off my cheekbones and my mouth was a perfect Cupid’s bow. I could look no better.

‘Would you mind dropping me off?’ I asked the Irishman. Reluctantly, he turned off the telly and whistled for the dog.

‘I suppose I can give the dog a walk on the way home,’ he said.

We made our way out to his reliable but decidedly un-glamorous purple Toyota Corolla hatchback, which also doubles as his office and storeroom and occasional kennel. I moved a drink bottle, the dog lead and a couple of folders and rearranged the skirts of my dress so they didn’t come into contact with a dubious-looking sneaker. We pulled up at the venue and he asked tentatively if I wanted to be picked up at the end of the night and then relaxed when I said