Role Models for the Second Half

As I get older, I'm working on embracing the process of aging. I admit that it terrifies me to deeply, thoroughly acknowledge that I'm going to die someday (I mean, how is one supposed to do that, exactly?). Sometimes I feel sad when I look in the mirror and read on my skin the results of a life spent in the Southern sunshine. My outdoorsy Florida girl persona remains more or less intact, but it takes a lot more effort to look "natural" these days, if I don't want to frighten people or embarrass myself.

Sharon Blackie's Hagitude: Reimagining the Second Half of Life provides the background on this process, surveying Western culture's myths and archetypes of old women down the ages. The Cailleach of the Gaelic, Grandmother Spider of the indigenous Americans, Baba Yaga of the Slavic peoples -- Blackie's exploration leaps across time and over oceans to identify correspondences and lessons on the knowledge, power, wisdom, and influence of aged women. 

Much of this was new to me, and I found it a little difficult to follow the cross-cultural currents. The chapters are organized by theme, which makes plenty of sense if you can keep up while jumping between cultures. Blackie also weaves in modern stories that recall these archetypes (Doris Lessing, Marilyn French, Margaret Atwood, et al.) and her own personal experiences during the writing of the book. 

There's a lot packed into these pages, and I'm sure I didn't get it all in this first reading. This is a book to keep and read again. It's good to have role models for the second half of the journey, as I hope to stay vibrant until I reach that hard stop at the end. 

Excerpt:

It can be hard to relinquish our identification with society's view of youth as the owner of beauty, hard to turn our backs on its cult of sexuality. But we must. No matter how long we try to postpone the inevitable, our body's ultimate trajectory leaves us no choice. Often, that necessary surrender to the inevitable gives rise to a time of deep grieving -- and it should. Because menopause is an ending of sorts, and it is natural to mourn an ending -- but it is also a new beginning. It is above all a transformation. The late author Ursula K. Le Guin expresses this idea beautifully: "The woman who is willing to make that change must become pregnant with herself, at last. She must bear herself, her third self, her old age." I love this idea, because to me transformation is everything: it's the purpose of life. We women do it all the time, and often in the most cataclysmic of ways. From puberty to pregnancy . . . and then, just when we think it's all over, along comes menopause, to shake us to the core again. . . . We shapeshift all the way up to the end, casting off certainties like a selkie casts off her sealskin.     

Note: This book counts toward the Color Coded Reading Challenge and the Mount TBR Reading Challenge.