Midlife Manifesto: A Woman's Guide to Thriving after Forty

By Jane Mathews

Conquer midlife crisis with this action plan and become the magnificent midlife woman you are!

It is never, ever, too late to change the course of your life... The world has underestimated what we midlife women are capable of.”

Have you ever looked at your life and wondered "is this it?" At the crucial halfway point, do you wish you had your very own manifesto to reassert your passion and place in the world? Hilarious, insightful, and encouraging, Midlife Manifesto throws the limelight on the untapped potential of midlife women instead of obsessing over the struggles and crises that come with the 40s and 50s. Whether it regards financial independence, personal style, relationships, health, spirituality, or making your home a sanctuary, this personal guide will inspire you to achieve the transformation you deserve and create the plan to make it happen.

Sharing her own ups and downs with candor and wit, Jane Mathews, who is still navigating but also rising above her own midlife crisis, provides a one-stop shop of ideas and resources to motivate you, guide you towards what really works, and supply you with a well-curated toolkit to write a blueprint for your future. With to-do-lists, tips, quotes, and pages for you to actively write on and piece together the real you, every reader will interpret the book differently, creating their own unique midlife action plan.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Skyhorse
• Release date: Mar 15, 2016
• ISBN: 9781510702936

Jane Mathews

Jane Mathews is a global brand expert, successfully guiding companies to brand everything from corn flakes to diamonds, before turning her skills upon herself.  Rather than take the well- trodden path to Italy, India and Indonesia, Jane’s journey of self-discovery and transformation took place in a red doored house in Paddington, Sydney which she shares with her teenage son and his Jeff Koon sized shoes, her naughty daughter, and Rory the farting Airedale.

Book preview

Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things you didn’t do than the ones you did do. So throw off your bowlines, sail away from the safe harbour. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.

Mark Twain

Preface

SO, does the Midlife Manifesto actually work? Yes. Just the process of thinking about and writing my Manifesto gave me precisely the impetus I needed at a confronting time, when many of us feel the urge to get rid of what is not working in our lives. I now have a purpose and energy about me, and feel a steely peace and confidence that the rest of my life will not just be played out, but will be truly lived.

This book was born out of my own search for meaning and direction, and a concrete, no-bullshit plan to get me there. I am just like you. I make no claim to have all the answers, or any of them come to that, but I do hope that I will be company for you in your journey and that my book—now your book—will provide you with inspiration along the way. It’s like a snowplow, clearing and sanding the road ahead.

Writing my own Manifesto has shown me that the answers to many of our questions already lie within us. It’s just a matter of sloughing off the outer layers of the onion to reveal them. It’s also about being galvanized, curating your life, and jettisoning excess baggage. We’re allowed to Etch A Sketch out parts of our past if we want to. It’s about the future, not the past. We’ll look at how you want to feel, how you want your future to be, and how to incorporate this vision into the warp and weft of your daily life to make it happen.

THE BOTTOM LINE

THESE ARE THE KEY THINGS I LEARNED FROM WRITING THIS BOOK:

1.   It is never, ever too late to change the course of your life.

2.   Act the way you want to feel.

3.   The importance of self-reliance and accepting total responsibility. Your life and happiness is in your hands, no one else’s. Blaming other people is giving it away.

4.   You can decide to be happy or not.

5.   Meditation works, but you’ve got to stick at it.

6.   You teach people how to treat you.

7.   It’s all about choices. Every choice leads you towards your vision, or away from it.

8.   What you put out comes back.

9.   Prioritize relationships, health, and finances.

10. It’s about creating a life based on how you want to feel every day. (Nancy Sherr)

You know you’ve reached midlife when . . . you can cough, fart, sneeze, pee, and blow your nose at the same time . . . remembering the name of an acquaintance is better than having an orgasm . . . you know all the answers, but nobody asks you the questions . . . you can remember thinking your parents were really, really old when they were younger than you are now . . . you favor comfort over style . . . you’re scared you’ll hurt your back on amusement park rides . . . you play potluck in a restaurant if you’ve forgotten your glasses . . . you can’t read your own handwriting . . . you make a little grunt when you get up out of a chair . . . you get cross when people ring after 8 p.m. at night . . . you go to bed before your children . . . all restaurants are too noisy . . . you feel stiff . . . you have a pedicure because you can’t reach your toes . . . you feel like the morning after and you haven’t been anywhere . . . you’re hot all of the time . . . your back goes out more than you do . . . you sing along with the elevator music . . . you know who Jonathan Livingston Seagull is . . . you stand in front of a mirror naked and can see your bottom without turning round . . . you’ve got a mind like a, . . . you know, that thing you sift flour in . . . you love the idea of a nap . . . you consider going on a cruise . . . you lose your car keys, then lose them again minutes later . . . you can’t remember the last time you lay on the floor to watch TV . . . you bend over and look for something else to do while you’re down there . . . you consider taking up golf or bridge . . . your idea of a holiday is for everyone to go away for a couple of days . . . belts have been phased out of your wardrobe . . . when the candles cost more than the cake . . . getting lucky means you find your car in the car park . . . you know the three signs of aging; the first one is loss of memory and . . . I forget the other two . . .

How about rewriting the script?

You know you’ve reached midlife when you are . . . strong, passionate, confident, independent, sexy, alive, courageous, patient, kind, loving, fearless, open-minded, proactive, adventurous, content, trusting, faithful, zestful, radiant, balanced, creative, spiritual, authentic, full of joy, loved, on fire, serene, accomplished, electrified, free, empowered, expressive, gentle, stylish, wise, powerful, well-read, generous, fulfilled, open, expansive, reliable, organized, humble, unconventional, active, exhilarated, inspired, proficient, unselfish, in control, excited, talented, purposeful, daring, funny, unpredictable, helpful, level-headed, intuitive, articulate, sensitive, efficient, diplomatic, charismatic, loyal, persistent, focused, revitalized, assured, healthy, successful, grounded, caring, bold, thankful, influential, connected, vital, accepted, validated, adored, innovative, inspirational, safe, unruffled, unflappable, self-possessed, honest, full of energy, gracious, dignified, special, peaceful, calm, relaxed, captivating, inventive, composed, sensual, beguiling, beautiful, spirited, formidable, informed, philanthropic, happy, unburdened, guided, enraptured, skillful, dynamic, enthusiastic, valuable, gutsy, in flow, true to yourself, exceptional, intrepid, fascinating, spellbinding, empathetic, magnificent, appreciative, brilliant, motivated, capable, original, vivacious, centered, self-reliant, optimistic, positive, a role model, thoughtful, poised, genuine, sparkling, grateful, unique, dazzling, unencumbered, determined, energized, appreciated, present, playful, sophisticated, educated, valued, fortunate, worthy, expert, gifted, intelligent, not intimidated, instinctive, knowledgeable, unstoppable.

An invitation to make your mark on this book, and commit to a new life plan.

This is

---------------------------------------------------’s

MIDLIFE MANIFESTO

She decided to start living the life she imagined.

Kobi Yamada

If we would only give the same amount of reflection to what we want out of life that we give to the question of what to do with two weeks’ vacation, we would be startled at our false standards and the aimless procession of our busy days.

Dorothy Canfield Fisher

The privilege of a lifetime is to become who you truly are.

Carl Jung

There is no passion to be found in settling for a life that is less than the one you are capable of living.

Nelson Mandela

It’s never too late to be who you might have been.

George Eliot

A good life is not lived by chance but by choice.

Kobi Yamada

Instead of a crisis, middle age should be thought of as a time for a new form of self-investment.

Patricia Reuter-Lorenz

Don’t settle for what life gives you. Make life better and build something.

Ashton Kutcher

Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.

Albert Einstein

Rewriting Your Midlife Story

In this chapter you’ll:

•   Realize that you are not alone in feeling how you do

•   Shift from automatic to manual

•   See how the Midlife Manifesto works

•   Do some open-your-mind-up exercises

That was then . . . Bagels face inwards

. . . was stamped on my toaster. How come the most mundane domestic appliance comes with instructions but midlife doesn’t? Midlife. A small but loaded word.

Look in the mirror right now. For a whole minute. Really look into your eyes. Are you the person you thought you would be? Are you the person you want to be? Am I the only one looking at my midlife reflection thinking, Is this it?

It can hit you with a smack or it can sneak up behind you. The catalyst that makes you realize things have irrevocably changed. You have reached midlife and there’s no going back. The boom gate is lowering! For me it was a perfect storm. The hurricane of finding myself lost in an increasingly toxic marriage followed by divorce and the death of my mother (my father and sister were already gone), while juggling two teenage children, getting back into the workforce and dealing with spiralling blood pressure—along with the gentle poke from the god of small things. Like letting the airplane seat belt out longer than I ever thought possible (there must have been a very, very small child sitting in the seat before me). And seeing a multi-chinned Shar Pei photo of myself. And having the words dementia light up, the size of the Hollywood sign, every time I forgot something. And being reduced to tears by the YouTube video of Christian the lion. And becoming a foul-mouthed harridan in traffic. And then there’s the hair thing. Chewbacca on a good day. Grey hair doubling as fuse wire. And not just on my head. In my eyebrows, on my chin. Marvelous. I have become The Bearded Lady.

But this is irrelevant as I am officially invisible. A whole generation of midlife women wearing Harry Potter’s invisibility cloak. (My personal best is being ignored by five, [five!], shop assistants at one counter in a Sydney department store.) Who’d have thought? Midlife has crept up on me like a body snatcher. Midlife at the oasis. I watch the top of my arms taking on a life of their own as I wave good-bye. A fruit bat in drag. Bits keep moving after I’ve stopped. I hear the siren call of elastic waists, of Birkenstocks, bifocals, naps, and Crocs. But I still feel thirty inside. I need to find a way out and back to myself.

I feel the best is behind me. I feel like I’m on the top of a roller coaster, going down and screaming ‘Aaaaarrrrgggghh!’ Kitty, 51

I see my forties as a decade of disappointment—things aren’t quite what I had expected or hoped for—in my marriage, with my children, in my life. Susan, 47

So now . . . Rewrite your midlife story

I did! I am writing this paragraph shortly after I completed the book—having written and lived my Manifesto for a few months, and the transformation is startling. I won’t say it has always been easy, but truly, if I have managed to wrest the steering wheel away from the twin forces of Habit and Inertia, anyone can. You can. Is every single part of my life sweetness, roses, and fluffy little kittens? No. Do I feel stronger, mentally and physically, more engaged with my body and with life, more productive and confident, and optimistic about the future? Absolutely. Stick with this. It works. Read on. You will see how the world has underestimated what we midlife women are capable of. They will continue to do so at their peril!

The most creative act you will ever undertake is the act of creating yourself.

Deepak Chopra

The Midlife Dip

The theoretical notion of a dip in midlife is well documented. Seven hundred years ago Dante wrote, In the middle of the journey of our life / I came to myself within a dark wood / where the way was lost. I know exactly how he felt. However, I don’t subscribe to the whole notion of being middle aged nor midlife crises. Both are lazy, simplistic phrases, bleached of their sense with overuse. Forget middle aged and midlife crisis, think midlife opportunity. Many midlife women, myself included, feel the need to rid their lives of the things that are no longer working and replace them with things that more accurately reflect the person we have become, or are growing into. Time for a bit of personal alchemy.

In modern paganism, the triple goddess of Maiden, Mother, and Crone is honored. I am a mother, but I guess by now I’ve slipped into the Crone category. I don’t know about you, but the word Crone conjures up the warty old hag, poisoned apple in hand, from Disney’s Snow White. It’s a shame, as historically midlife women—Crones—(who were considered old then, as most would die in their forties) were wise women, and highly regarded. Current society does not share this enlightened perspective, and I sometimes feel barely tolerated. Meh. Replete with battle scars and life lessons, I embrace my inner croniness. And it appears I am not alone. Croning ceremonies are now available to mark your midlife Coming-of-Wisdom. (Now there’s a great fiftieth birthday present for a friend. At least you can be pretty sure she won’t get two.)

Research shows that happiness over the span of our lives is a gentle smile shape, starting with a happy childhood and early adulthood, followed by a midlife dip and a climb out the other side towards old age. And that’s not just true for humans. Studies have shown that even apes have the midlife blues. On your behalf I went to the zoo to see with my own eyes if this was true. I tracked down the orangutan enclosure, and looked into Willow’s eyes. Oh, the ennui. Is this it? her eyes were saying. It was like looking in a mirror. Trust me, we are not alone!

My Turning Point

I blame the fridge magnet. I am sure the lady on some distant production line in China didn’t realize what magma she held in her hands. In my forties I bought a fridge magnet that said Destined to be an Old Woman with No Regrets. Rather than live on the fridge, it sat on my desk and stared reproachfully at me as I stared back at it, unsettled.

The more I looked at the wretched thing the more I began to admit to myself that on my existing trajectory there would be regrets. Those unsettling three words kept whirling round my head like the tigers who turn into butter in Little Black Sambo. Is this it? The flick of a wet towel. Is. Flick. This. Flick. It? Flick. Palms bruised from hitting the bottom of a ketchup bottle, I reviewed the detritus of another family meal with that question whirling, whirling. With a successful career, a nice husband, 2.4 children, good social life, and a house in Sydney’s answer to Wisteria Lane (not forgetting the banana-eating, farting dog) why did I feel so savagely unfulfilled? The unraveling was approaching faster than I thought. Unbeknownst to me, like a considerate executioner, the blade was already being sharpened.

The moment I realized my marriage was over, thoughts turned to an exquisite Assyrian frieze of a fatally wounded lioness in the British Museum. She has been struck by several arrows, but she roars and refuses to give up. Just looking at the image still affects me profoundly. I remember feeling intensely, keenly wounded, but fought to keep my head above water, even as I drowned. Smoldering embers burned in my belly. One day they would be fanned back into life. A wingbeat of future happiness.

Your life is speaking to you every day, all the time—and your job is to listen and find the clues.

Oprah Winfrey

As an aside, the stress of divorce can make you very, very thin. It can also make you very, very fat. Disappointingly, I galloped headfirst down the latter path, and ended up like a sumo Tweedledum. Because life is unfair, as I got fatter my ex-husband got fitter and slimmer, living on steamed dust and air, acquiring the requisite fast car (not quite menoporsche, but almost) and charming fishing-rod-thin girlfriend. Ex-husband and I continued to attend teacher-parent meetings together, with me feeling like I’d just stepped out of an old saucy seaside postcard as the huge wife with skinny husband. Embarrassing. Not I-need-to-move-to-Qatar-now embarrassing, but avoidable, humiliating. And totally my responsibility.

Post-divorce, wounds licked but not quite healed, I went back to a big job in advertising, traveling overseas all the time, piling on air miles, stress, and pounds in equal measure. I certainly gave the infamous Holmes and Rahe stress test a nudge. That’s the scale that rates 43 stressful life events that can lead to illness. It starts off with death of a spouse, then happily winds its way through divorce and death of a family member, past the corridors of illness and change in financial state through to Christmas. I don’t recall being actually incarcerated, but I think I ticked all of the other boxes, because we know that bad things don’t happen in ones, do they? They happen in twos, and threes, and sevens, and fifteens, and that’s what happened to me.

My mother, who had been suffering from dementia (so very cruel to witness but bizarrely benign to the sufferer), died alone in New Zealand after a pretty traumatic series of events (a stroke on the plane from London, hospitalization in Auckland, having to find a nursing home), culminating in her wedding ring being stolen from her corpse. The cremation and burial were a piece of cake after that. But I had never felt so alone. At the same time I moved house, renovated, juggled major work projects in several countries, a less-than-easy ex, two teenagers, and a dog. Woof. Oh yes, and sorting out my mother’s house and will in England, battling incompetent and expensive lawyers, warding off previously unheard-of relatives with a cattle prod, and shipping stuff back to Australia. When my job relocated overseas, I jumped off the carousel for a bit and decided to get my life on track. It was the best decision that I have ever made.

Shifting from automatic to manual

We live the first part of our lives on automatic. Childhood, university, job, marriage, and children all march in line like soldiers. This was vividly illustrated at my daughter’s school’s open day when she was seven. The children had to write the story of their lives. One of them caught my eye. It went along the lines of I’ll go to school, then to university, get married, have children, then die. Super. So I guess we’re in that sliver of time between having children and dying! Better make the most of it then, and I’m not sure if doing it on automatic will cut it.

If the first half of our lives is dictated to us, the beauty of the second half is that it is in our hands. To use a plane analogy, we finally get to have first dibs at the oxygen mask, putting ourselves first. We are in control of our destiny, not the other way round. We are the conductors, the ringmasters, the captains of our ship. The past is irrelevant and I just don’t see the point of pulling at the threads of it. Throw the bad stuff in the river, like Winnie the Pooh and his friends did with their Pooh sticks and watch them float away. The world has finished with your past—if you have. I know the past influences us, and we can’t change it, but we can influence the future.

Time to shift to manual, ladies.

Do more than just fill in the dash

We all will have a dash—the dash between when we’re born and when we die—for me, say, 1961–2043, assuming I live to be 82 (the average life expectancy for a woman in Australia). So it’s all about how you fill that dash, another 30-odd summers. Here’s a graphic way to demonstrate it. Get a piece of paper. Draw a line across the middle. The bottom half represents how much of our lives we have already lived, so shade it out. Then draw a line in the remaining section one third across. That represents how much time we will spend asleep, so shade that bit out too. Then draw another line a third across. That space represents how much time we will spend doing chores (driving, grocery shopping, cleaning, having a shower, waiting as your call to Virgin Mobile is put on hold, etc.). Now shade that bit out as well. That small empty rectangle is all that we have left.

On the one hand, it’s sobering. On the other hand, carpe-bloody-diem. I know that technically I’ve crested the arc, but I refuse to let the days slip by, pleating into one another, blotting up time. We still have a lot of living to do! (If you are one of the few people who haven’t heard of it, have a look at the Internet phenomenon that is The Dash poem by Linda Ellis at www.linda-ellis.com.)

Nan Shepherd, a Scottish novelist, wrote a book called The Living Mountain about the almost mystical experiences she had walking in her beloved Cairngorm Mountains. She talked about "living all the way through (life)." I want to live all the way through my life too. I felt I