Growing Old...

Middle age: The stranger in the mirror

Middle age, I think, having spent almost five of my own middle years writing about it, is rather like falling in love – though obviously nothing like as nice. It resembles love in the sense that when you think it might be about to happen, you spend an awful lot of time wondering what it will be like. When will it start? What will it look like? How can you tell if you’ve got it? Does it come like a change in the weather? Or can you mark a date on the calendar and rely on it to turn up on time?

And when it comes, what difference does it make? Are there things you should have done beforehand? Things you should no longer do afterwards? Are there guides on how to tackle it? Instruction manuals? Role models? Can you afford to ignore it altogether? Oh, tell me the truth about middle age.

At last it arrives and you discover two things: the first is that, like love, there is absolutely no mistaking it. And the second is that it’s nothing like you thought it would be.

Of course, one apprehends middle age on two quite distinct levels. With your conscious mind you begin preparing for it, if only subliminally, soon after your 30th birthday. At 35 you’ve reached the half-way marker of the Biblical three score and 10. At 40, you can definitely feel it closing on you. And by 50, most women (and it is female middle age that I’m considering here) will have begun experiencing the physical changes of the menopause. At that point you know the game is up. Your youth is over and you’d better start getting used to this perplexing next stage of life.

But actually feeling properly middle-aged in the sense of learning how to interpret and inhabit the state is a very different matter from blowing out 40 or 50 candles on a birthday cake. Around the age of 40 I began experimenting with the idea of being no longer young. “Now I’m middle-aged,” I’d say to my hairdresser, or to sales assistants in dress shops. Nonsense, they’d say. Of course you’re not. Nothing of the kind. And I would allow myself to believe them, because I didn’t feel middle-aged inside, just as I’d never consciously felt that I was young.

But youth is something you’re born with, whereas middle age has a nasty habit of ambushing you. That word hovering maddeningly just beyond your brain’s grasp – was it middle age that stole it? The unaccustomed stiffness of your joints in the morning – is that the sign that it has arrived? The haggard beldam advancing towards you in the department store, who turns out to be your own reflection in a full-length mirror – is that the person you must get used to being now?

The French have a term for this sudden grim apprehension of one’s own mortality: le reveil mortel, they call it, the fatal wake-up call. Mine came when I fell off a horse and hurt myself – not seriously, but badly enough to think that I’d never again inhabit my body with the blithe heedlessness that I had enjoyed until the moment before my fall.

In fact I was mistaken. My battered limbs healed up again as good as new, but in my mind the change was irreversible. I felt middle-aged. And having felt it, began to look around me to see what I could expect.

The answer was disconcerting. It is a truism to say that middle-aged women are invisible. But sometimes it is a shock to discover that truisms are true. All my life I had been accustomed to find myself – or rather, an idealised version of the self I would like to be – reflected in the culture: in magazines, in clothes shops, on television, in literature.

But now when I looked around, my contemporaries were nowhere to be seen. Like the children of Hamelin led away by the Pied Piper, we had all vanished. The only images of middle age that remained seemed like stock figures from the commedia dell’arte.

In newspapers, middle-aged celebrities were jeered at for looking old, or mocked for trying to look younger. Their sex lives and bodies were discussed with fascinated revulsion. On the television, middle-aged women humbly offered themselves as the subjects of make-over shows, often with startling – not to say alarming – results. The alternative voice of middle age was represented by television’s Grumpy Old Women who, in the comic guise of telling middle age like it really is – sluttish, surly, rueful, defeated – ably reinforced the grotesque caricature.

Having spent almost 50 years of my life not being a caricature, I didn’t see why I should start now. Literature before the 20th century is full of middle-aged women. Some are attractive, interesting and seductive; some are ugly and boring – just like the rest of the human race, in fact. Not until the mid-20th century, when HRT turned the menopause into a curable disease, do the resonant narratives of middle age, with their distinctive mixture of joy and melancholy, coarsen into caricature or vanish altogether.

I wondered if there might be an alternative to the sparse range of roles I was apparently being invited to inhabit for the rest of my life. Batty old dear, feisty crone, faux gamine – what women of 20 or 30 could imagine settling for such an impoverished version of herself in later life?

And so I began to think about what was happening to me; what had already happened in my life, and what might become of me in the future. And after thinking for a while, I began to write. When I started my book, I thought that a steady nerve and a good haircut would be sufficient protection against most of the challenges of middle age. Five years later, I know better. The experience has proved harder and more painful than I imagined: more full of confusion and loss (and I am still in the middle of it, so who knows what further surprises may yet be to come).

But among the losses of the middle years (grievous, some of them, and entirely irretrievable) I find some unexpected gains. I hoped that these years might be resonant and interesting, and so they are: the bitterness of loss sweetened by friendship, self-knowledge and an entirely unexpected gaiety.

All things must pass, and so shall this of mine, says the proverb. Which sounds a bit doomy, if you choose to view it in that light. But if you take it to mean that nothing endures, neither happiness nor – more importantly – sadness, it is a surprisingly hopeful maxim for this turbulent period of change.

• Jane Shilling’s The Stranger in the Mirror (Chatto & Windus, £15.99) is available for £13.99 plus £1.25 p&p from books.telegraph.co.uk/strangerinthemirror or call 0844 871 1515.