I watched her from an upstairs window as she watched the dog doing its business, right in the middle of the road. When it was finished it looked up at her, and she smiled. I saw her reach down with a bright pink baggie and lift the mess. She tied it up tightly and then, with a light swing of her hand, tossed it blithely on to the crisp, golden sand of the beach beside the road, bent to pat the dear little dog and walked off.
My daughter, behind me, said quietly, “Oh God, Mum, please don’t.”
I threw open the window and bawled at that woman, so very loudly that the dog jumped and tucked its tail in, and the woman swung around. I can’t remember what I shouted, but the message was clear. Plastic bags take up to 500 years to degrade in the sea, and I didn’t agree with this woman’s waste disposal method. Other walkers on the coast road where I live glanced up at me and sniggered as I stood there at the open upstairs window in the bright light of the morning sun, resplendent in my Snoopy pyjamas, hair awry. The familiar scald of shame surged through me, the hot flush of being seen, being heard, but I stood where I was and kept watch as this woman made her reluctant way down on to the beach to retrieve the offending article, her face as red as mine.
I do this all the time, now, this taking of others to task. Total strangers, close acquaintances, I don’t discriminate. They get both barrels, often, and rarely the benefit of the doubt. But I can’t help it. Something happened to me in the menopause. Perhaps I’m broken. Perhaps I’m fixed. I have graduated, in my family’s eyes, from being merely embarrassing to being outright eccentric, but I find that, actually, I don’t care.
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There’s a growing realisation that the menopause is a powerful tool for change. More and more women are finding that it comes as a vital turning point – like it or not. It churns us up and spits us out the other end dishevelled and impatient, as I was that day at the window, and loud. Dammit, we are louder for sure, but we use this volume, this terrible new voice, in the protection of whatever we hold dear – and that’s vitally important – our role as the speakers of uncomfortable truths in this age of false news.
In this age of superficial niceness, when we smile without teeth at one another, and keep our eyes blank, there’s a lot to be said for a bit of explosion, now and again. We use platitudes and PC language with care in all our interactions, yet the incidence of cyberbullying from behind closed doors, and of hate crime under the cover of darkness, is epidemic. It’s like those really nice jeans you buy that are just a size too small – they keep the tummy squished in and flat, but by God does it squeeze out in other unsightly places instead.
The role of the older woman is not to “become quiet and diminish”, but to look us in the eye and tell us the truth as it is. But it’s a lonely thing at times, to use our voice to speak our truth, with a lifetime of moderating our language and biting our tongues behind us. It’s not acceptable to be openly negative any more, and it’s a frightening thing to be critical out loud, away from the defensive shield of social media. The fear of being judged is the greatest fear, and the dread of being outcast, the greatest dread.
Shedding an old skin is a painful business, for the person concerned and for those trapped with them, so I took myself off to a quiet corner and began to write about what I would like to be when the whole messy and painful process was complete
There is a wonderful Celtic archetype, the Cailleach, or Crone, who can give us the confidence to embrace this new voice, this new way of being that comes with the menopause, and she doesn’t give a hoot about being different, being outcast or being judged. An older woman, a shape-shifter, a storm-rider and hammer-wielder, she is responsible for the turning of the wheel of the year from golden summer into the restorative rest and regeneration of winter. She is the one-eyed old woman who takes us, every year without fail, where we do not wish to go.
No simpering female, the Cailleach is known across the Celtic world as the guardian of the world’s natural balance and is a forthright and forceful older woman who takes great exception to any action which harms the natural world. It is said that she created the mountains by dropping huge stones from her apron as she stomped around. Powerful and outspoken, she has no fear of shame, that putrid and poisonous emotion which rules our modern world and keeps us quiet and small. The Cailleach uses her magical powers to hold back the effect of humanity upon the natural world. Goddess of the storms, she knows the importance of anger in the scheme of things.
One of her many attributes is the ability to smack the earth with her staff and freeze the ground. In a world where forward movement is so celebrated and the word “progress” taken to be inarguably positive, the Cailleach forces pause in our lives on a regular basis, like that childhood game where the music stops and everyone must freeze in place. One such freeze occurred for us all in 2020 with the arrival of the coronavirus, when the music stopped for everyone. So many people found this to be a time of reflection, upheaval and change, as well as of profound loss. So many life directions were altered, so many things would never be the same again.
When the pandemic and menopause hit me simultaneously, I found myself in a place where I could no longer run away from myself. Shedding an old skin is a painful business, for the person concerned and for those trapped with them, so I took myself off to a quiet corner and began to write about what I would like to be when the whole messy and painful process was complete.
My novel Night Swimmers began as a daydream, its protagonist Grace the ideal older woman I would like to become – savvy, smart, fearless and outspoken, in tune with the earth, her sexuality and her innate creativity. Happy. A personification of the Cailleach, but a bit sexier and with both eyes, full of foresight, power and agency.
Of course, the story didn’t turn out that way at all. We don’t live in a vacuum, and other people and other circumstances will always intervene to shake us up, make us doubt ourselves, move us forward. In my story the arrival of the emotionally bruised Evan and his troubled son Lucas jolt Grace from her equilibrium and cause fracture and repair in the little coastal community of Ballybrady. As I wrote, I began to understand what I already knew. There is no end to our striving to be happy. There is no ultimate situation we can achieve where we will finally be complete. There will always, always be the Cailleach, with her fearsome staff and her wild storms and her piercing eye to tell us ‘no, not yet, peel back another layer, dearie’. She will always knock our knuckles from the ledge we cling to with that blasted staff of hers, because we must always change, always move, never rest. That’s why we’re here.
Nightswimmers by Roisin Maguire is published by Serpent’s Tail on February 1st, 2024.
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