Stitching With Dropped Threads

Poppy picked up several thick books at the library on our last visit, so I helped myself to one of her choices the other day. It's called Dropped Threads, and it's a compilation of short essays and excerpts by Canadian women, professional writers and otherwise.

I didn't expect to like it. But I did. Not all of it, not every single piece, but as a whole it was a pleasant surprise. Lots of feminism from lots of perspectives, bits and pieces of women's lives, small truths and revelations that I needed to hear.

It's me, it's my age, it's the circumstances of my life, and I'm finding more and more as I creep up in years that I need to hear the voices of other women. Older women. Older women who aren't trying to feed me religious propaganda. I've heard so much of that, and seen so much of it, and continue to see it in a lot of my clients, hush-mouthed women speaking what they've been taught all their lives, and suffering for it. Not all of them, obviously, but enough that it's a worry to me from a health point of view as well as a frustration as a person who's messing her way through life and needs to hear what's real. Needs to speak what's real, not a superimposed "should".

And I found that. I read women talking about aging, and loneliness, and second-guessing. Talking about their bodies, relationships, ambivalence, regret, lack of regret. And spirituality too. Most of it seemed pretty real, their own stuff after peeling back the layers to find themselves underneath.

Getting older is something on my mind a lot these days. Because I am, I guess. But how do you do it? I don't expect a set of directions, but I want to hear other women's walks, and how they came to peace. I want to hear what it is to settle into your own wisdom, and stop chasing youth, how to sink into maturity of years and maturity of vision, and bless that settled-ness that isn't the hyperactive, performance-driven frenzy of the earlier decades.

Dignity. I think that's what I'm struggling for. Not apathy or resignation, but dignity in the fact that I'm a woman almost forty, and then almost eighty. Or ninety, if such things come to pass. Not to compare my greying hair or wrinkles to other folks my age and think how much older/younger I look than them, or how busy/not-busy, smart/not-smart, creative/dull, ambitious or staid or ... or any of those other things that I've measured myself against all my life.

I'm trying to come to terms with myself. A big part of that is being female, and not trying to win male approval by being willing and able to run with the boys. I don't want that. I know I've done it in the past, and I'm not happy about it anymore.

I want to be a person, a woman-person, an aging-woman-person who looks both directions and knows herself.

It's not really about gender, except that this is the gender that I am.

I want to be wise.

Yeah, I know. Don't ask much, do she?

How I Spent My Summer Vacation