Fay Weldon, seventies
I had a baby “out of wedlock” when I was 22, married at 26, then at 33, and
again at 63. It has not exactly been a steady life, maritally speaking, but
I don’t regret any of it. All experience is valuable — and I am a writer.
Though I do wish, looking back, I'd learnt earlier that men have emotions,
too. I was brought up in an all-female family and went to all-girl schools,
so I grew up thinking men were strange, alien, exotic creatures without
feelings. I must, when young, have been a monster. At the same time, to be
married and sleep with a man in the same bed seemed a great luxury, and one
I always sought. Put it down to my generation and my upbringing.
But you live, you learn, you do come to conclusions. And if I were to offer
advice to the daughter I never had — I have four sons — it would be along
these lines: since the things you regret most are the things you didn’t do,
not the things you did, be bold. Have the baby, go to the Galapagos, get
your boobs enhanced, sleep with your boss, move in with the postman —
whatever. Don’t spend an old age moaning, “If only I had”. The less you play
safe, the richer your life — and for all you know, the postman will win the
pools anyway. There’s never any knowing what’s going to happen next.
Be bold, be bold, as the fairy tale says, but not too bold. Get as much sex as
you decently can. It’s good for you. But look after your reputation. People
do notice. When you’re young and in love and in the car park with your best
friend’s boyfriend, you think you are invisible. You’re not.
If you are going to marry, do it for love, not money. Don’t move in with
someone just to share the rent and the bills or, like as not, you’ll end up
hurt, alone, without a roof and pregnant, while he runs off with the
computer. Nobody’s rational, let alone you. And always remember, babies need
fathers. If you don’t provide one, the babies grow up to complain. Children
complain anyway, but give them as little cause as you can.
Try not to marry someone from work. They’ll be too like you, and one of you
will get promotion and one of you won’t. Then there’ll be trouble.
Conventional wisdom suggests you should marry someone as like yourself as
possible, but if you do, you’ll only get bored and want a change. Nature
suggests you go for your opposite, seeking, as it does, the optimum
shuffling of the genes. Let nature have its way: the babies are better.
Of course you don’t have to get married or have babies, but when women get to
their fifties and sixties, they tend to wish they had. They go into “if
only” mode, regret the men they turned away, the babies they didn’t have, in
their twenties. So don’t be too picky, too prudent. And if it all goes
wrong, you still have your friends. Cultivate them and cherish them.
Warning: try to end up on good terms with your mother. She did the best she
could for you. She loved you dearly when you were born. If she dies when
you’re still quarrelling, you’ll have a real problem with remorse.
I took no more notice of my mother’s advice than you’ll accept from me. So let
me leave you with this one understanding: that if you put a single dark
garment in with the white wash, everything comes out grey. That’s always
true.
Sally Brampton, fifties
The best piece of advice I was ever given, although it did not seem so at the
time, is that shyness is a form of arrogance. I read it in a magazine. I was
16 at the time and so crippled by shyness that I came close to paralysis. I
remember my furious indignation when I read those words. How dare they call
poor, suffering me arrogant? I lost much of that shyness, partly because
arrogance seemed so much worse. Instead, I became adept at putting on a
shiny, confident front. Looking back, it was fear that governed me, an
overriding concern that I might not match up. I let nobody in. And what do
we need to be happy? Why, other people. I think we all put up that front,
and it’s the greatest barrier to freedom and happiness that I can think of.
It took a severe breakdown to teach me how to really open up. During that
time, I sat in psychiatric hospitals, listening to people express their
deepest fears, and began to lose the fear of my own — and others’ —
vulnerabilities. In fact, vulnerability came to me to seem a wondrous thing.
When we allow it in ourselves, it gives us a chance to connect intimately
with somebody else. Once you get over yourself enough really to listen, you
begin to understand that you are not alone. Perversely, it is the fear of
being alone (of being rejected) that keeps us so alone. Fear feeds fear.
I discovered another truth. When we begin to find compassion for other people,
we find it for ourselves. When I turned 50, I think I finally understood the
truth in those words I had read when I was 16: I had made myself too
important. In that way, shyness, or acute self-consciousness, becomes a form
of arrogance because it blinds us to the suffering of others.
Everybody suffers. We all feel unacceptable, although we disguise that fear in
different ways: using anger or bullying, with drinking too much or eating
too little, by buying handbags we can’t afford or — a peculiarly modern
speciality — by pretending that we don’t need other people, that we are
emotionally bulletproof.
Curiously, the things I learnt to make myself well have made me happier than I
have ever been. Here, in no particular order, are a few of them. I took
responsibility for my own feelings — so I stopped pushing them away or
dumping them on other people. My feelings belong to me, and it’s up to me to
deal with them with as much grace and intelligence as I can muster. Other
people may have an opinion about me, and they are entitled to that. If I
examine my own behaviour honestly, and it is lacking, I can apologise. If I
can’t see my part, it probably has nothing to do with me. Above all, I have
come to understand that I cannot change other people. The only person over
whom I have any control is me. I try to accept people as they are: part
good, part bad. Just like me, in fact.
Acceptance is not the same as indifference, although many people fear it is.
Acceptance is allowing you to be you — and me to be me. Which is why, if
there’s one phrase I overuse with my teenage daughter, it is this: “What’s
the fastest way to unhappiness?” She always rolls her eyes at her mother’s
irritating ways, but she always gets it right. “Comparing ourselves to
others.”
Shane Watson, forties
Where to begin? I’d say, wear the obscenely short skirt, for pity’s sake,
while you can: you are not fat. Be kind to the work experience — she could
be your boss one day. And then I’d quickly turn to the subject of men.
This advice may be hard to take, but what I wish I’d known when I was younger
is: don’t leave it too late to have children. You get to your late thirties,
and you find that older women at parties start quizzing you on your
relationship status, with mildly anxious expressions, and then, at some
point, they tell you not to leave it too late. At the time you think: what
are they talking about? As if I’m deliberately delaying meeting the One and
having babies. Don’t these women remember that it’s all in the hands of
fate?
But the truth is, these women remember very clearly, and the difference
between their generation and ours is that they accepted their biological
limitations and understood that you can’t hurry love, but you should hurry
up and look for it and bag it and set up house with it if you want to have
kids. I met my husband after 40, when my chances of conceiving were minuscule,
so I’m no advertisement for getting on with it. I’m not saying grab any old
sperm donor and get cracking. Or that there is no life without children. I’m
saying don’t put it off for the sake of pursuing the fabulous extended youth
that you think is your birthright, as some of my generation have, and then
get to 40 and ask: “Why did nobody tell me that it’s not that easy?”
I have a friend — 41, happily living with a man, busy, busy, busy — who I hit
with the statistics one night over supper, just to see if she’d thought it
through. She went white at the gills. Like I’d told her drinking coffee
shrank your breasts or investing all your money in Iceland was a good idea.
She said, “You make it sound so final.” This intelligent, informed woman was
simply not used to being told her options were limited.
I am lucky enough to be part of a generation of women who feel free of
conventional expectations and confident that they can do anything they want.
But I am aware that we were given permission to believe life was so
different for us that all those rules — including the ones to do with
fertility — didn’t really apply any more. (Besides the fiction that we will
be young for ever, there is the whole false cushion of IVF lurking in the
subconscious of every woman.) Nobody wants to advertise the truth, because
that feels like saying we are hostages to finding a man; it’s like turning
back the clock and reducing us to a sell-by date. But information is power,
and denial is just that. Was I in denial? Probably. I thought that as long
as I could shop in Topshop and felt pretty much the same as I did 10 years
previously, I could probably beat the system.
There is another aspect to this. If you accept that babies are the goal sooner
rather than later, then maybe you wouldn’t spend those extra years trailing
after the good-looking heartbreakers with the fidelity problems and the
employment issues. Maybe you’d think, a) I am worth more, and b) I am going
to stop falling in love with spoilt boys and fall in love with someone
brilliant and trustworthy. And maybe that would be killing two birds with
one stone.
Tiffanie Darke, thirties
Your twenties, I can see now, are all about ticking boxes. It’s finding a
home, working out your career, having an unsuitable affair, being naughty,
travelling the Third World, taking off to weird European capitals, staying
up until dawn, pitching for a promotion, discovering what a repayment
mortgage is, blowing an unseemly amount of money on your first proper
handbag, travelling some more — in short, indulging yourself in every way
possible, but always with the angst that you’ve got to get things done.
Then suddenly you hit 30 and . . . all that angst disappears.
You just relax. And you understand that all those missions were just a way of
finding out who you are — and that what makes you happy is not worrying
about that and treating life as the great responsibility-free act of
self-indulgence it can, at its most glorious, be. You have your career by
now, or at least you’ve tried; you’ve found somewhere to live; you may
even have had your heart broken — and learnt from all the pain that brings.
There’s only one thing that stops it being the best decade ever . . tick,
tock, tick, tock.
For all the thirtysomething women I know, this decade is a huge game of
brinkmanship, of enjoying the independence and financial freedom that all
those travails in your twenties have brought you, while waiting for that big
biological alarm clock to go off and ruin the party.
We all know the numbers — 35, when it can no longer be pushed to the back of
the mind, and 38, when everyone tells you “your fertility falls off a cliff”
(thanks). Our generation was brought up to enjoy the fruits of our mothers’
bra-burning — they fought so we could operate on a level playing field and have
everything that we wanted if we worked for it and desired it. And aren’t we
lucky, because, in our thirties, it can all come true. This generation has
carved out a whole new social demographic, one that invented scented-candle,
bare-floorboard, fairy-light living; that allowed us to dress in Prada,
breakfast at the Wolseley and tap furiously on BlackBerries while booking a
spa trip in Sri Lanka; that let us call the shots, own properties, have
opinions — and all without taking our heels off.
And then come the kids, and the whole thing stops, and suddenly it’s all very
hard work again, with broken nights, crappy clothes, crabby husbands and
nappies bloody everywhere. But it doesn’t matter, because along with all of
that, a light has turned on in a room of your life that you never even knew was
there.
And now I look at the fortysomethings, and you know what? It looks so hard.
Every time I glance up, the stakes have got higher. They all have to look so
goddamn young and beautiful, and we already know, from the emerging crow’s
feet, the increasing effects of gravity, the slight breathlessness at the
top of the stairs, that it’s going to be so much harder to achieve it all in
five, let alone 10 years’ time. And they all look so frighteningly confident
and sorted, and like they know what life is about. In your thirties, you can
still kid yourself that you’re young, still just about get into nightclubs,
still rock a miniskirt, still wear your iPod on the bus, still . . . oh, I
love my thirties. I don’t want to leave.
Mary Meyer, twenties
A night out with my twentysomething friends always starts and ends in the same
way. We begin by striding over to the bar to order our first bottle of house
white discussing boys, booze and shoes. We end unsteady, Marlboro lights
dangling from our lips as we wait in the cold for a night bus at 4am. Such
wanton abandonment is almost an everyday occurrence for many of us. Whether
we are conscious of it or not, it’s all about living in the moment.
We look at the thirtysomething Sex and the City girls and we think we are like
them, but we are merely playing at being them. We are still living at home,
spending our parents’ or our student loan money and, frankly, merely
dressing up at being women.
However, when the lights go out and the music stops, things get difficult.
Sometimes having no responsibilities can be the most scary thing of all. My
generation, the Facebook generation, feels rootless and isolated. The
constant whirr of the mobile and the chuntering of wall posts mean nothing
when you wake up at 3am and have no idea what to do with the rest of your
life.
I wish that someone had told me that you are allowed to take time out if you
want to and you can always change your mind.
At the dawn of my twenties, I had my whole life mapped out. I was going to go
to Ghana in my gap year, head to university, then start my career. Then I
realised that I had chosen those things for other people rather than myself.
In an attempt to establish a sense of self, I changed my mind, an attempt
that makes this decade both so exciting and so frightening.
There is an underlying fear that you are not cool or pretty or thin enough,
which I understand abates in time. I’m just starting to share these
insecurities with my peers, something I am discovering is invaluable, since
such conversations reinforce the futility of comparing yourself with others.
We are all trying to stay afloat in one way or another. I hope that, in
time, my friends will become better friends, friends that care and listen to
what I say like Carrie, Miranda, Charlotte and Samantha do.
I believe that the selfishness of insecurity will pass when we find direction.
Right now, we are a generation of behavioural extremes, and Amy Winehouse is
an apt poster-girl for this apocalyptic time. We have grown up in the age of
celebrity and under the shadow of the size-zero debate. It isn’t surprising
that part of us ultimately craves stability. Most of my friends yearn for
the fairy-tale knight in shining armour and 2.4 children. The last time I
saw my friend Alice, she told me that she felt really old and was as worried
as Bridget Jones that she would die alone with only cats for company. She is
22.
The other part of us wants to keep drinking, keep dancing, keep moving before
it’s too late. Because being at the precipice of adulthood is a pretty
thrilling place to be.
