letter #6
we're all making our own sense of things
Forgive me if I’ve already told you this story … but on the day I came home from my first school sports day in tears my mother said, ‘You know the good thing about being in this family? We’re in the race and we’re watching it too.’
It wasn’t especially helpful to me at the time. I have never forgotten the feeling that came with running in my first race at school. It wasn’t so much that I came last, it was the understanding that I had no choice in this. I would always be last. Watching the people in front of me (and it’s true, I really can watch any race I’m in such is the distance between me and everyone else) I couldn’t comprehend what it was they knew. How did they get so far ahead? Where did they learn to run? And although I was acutely aware of all of them, mostly they were oblivious to me. If they did notice me it was only to register that I was of no real consequence. I was nothing more than background noise.
Sitting at the stoplights the other day, I looked over at the car next to me, two people who weren’t exactly young, but younger than I am and I had exactly that same sensation. I watched them laughing, talking, reaching across to touch each other gently on the cheek. I knew that if either of them looked my way they would hardly register that I was there. And it seemed that mum’s strange advice was more relevant to me now that I’m 49 than it was when I was five. That I’m in the race and I’m watching it too. Only this time, although they’re oblivious to me, I understand them.
What I found most strange of all, however, was a feeling of how sudden this has been. I mean, this entire generation of people who aren’t children but aren’t as old as I am didn’t just appear fully-formed. But I feel like I somehow missed their coming. Maybe it’s because I spent most of my forties living in Abu Dhabi and I missed seeing people grow older. Maybe if I’d been here I would have been more aware of it as it was happening rather than only once it had happened. Or maybe I was too busy trying not to trip over while I was running my race and I wasn’t watching closely enough.
Women older than I am have told me about this cloak of invisibility that shrouds a woman in middle age, but I guess I thought that it would be more obvious when the time came to put it on. I see now that it’s been a gradual construction, something I’ve been stitching minute by minute, month by month. Like a caterpillar spinning a cocoon.
That’s a lot of metaphors, isn’t it? Like I’ve well and truly over-egged this pudding. Besides that, it’s no great revelation, it’s nothing more or less than women have been telling me for years. But I do like the way my mum’s advice weaves its way in and out of my life … even if she was barely thirty when she gave me that advice and she never knew what it was to feel middle-aged.
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I've been reading Olivia Laing's The Trip to Echo Spring and as I was reading I was thinking about how discovering Olivia Laing was a little like discovering Jenny Diski. How I'm reading my way through her work book by book, completely immersed. It's how I used to feel about reading when I was a child and teenager and very young adult. Like I was discovering if not a whole new world, a whole new way of looking at the world. It seems to happen less as an adult so when it does I savour it. So, anyway, I was just thinking about Olivia Laing and Jenny Diski which led me to do a little googling which led me to discover that very recently Olivia Laing married the man Jenny Diski was married to before she died. And now I'm even more captivated by the two of them. I think I might have said this in an earlier letter, but I do recommend Olivia Laing's The Lonely City.
Also this week I re-watched Gavin and Stacey and I won't lie to you, I think it's one of the best.
Thank you so much for reading tc xx