Celebrating much more to come

If you’re a woman feeling a little despondent and facing ‘the midlife maelstrom’ – a combination of divorce, bereavement, job loss, caring responsibilities for children, teens or parents, health issues, the menopause and more – then a new book may be just what you need.

Much more to come by Eleanor Mills is a breath of positivity about life after crisis and about the possibility of change for the better.

It starts from Eleanor’s experience of sudden redundancy in midlife, which sent her into a spiral of questioning about who she was and what she wanted from life.  Eleanor was a successful columnist on a national newspaper. After losing her job, she felt written off and lost and says what she needed was a pathway to reinvention. So she set about creating one for herself, from founding a community of similar women through her organisation Noon – who she calls Queenagers – to writing the book. The book is a clarion call for a Queenager Revolution. Mills knows that there are many women like her and she wants to let them know that life doesn’t end in midlife and that there can be new beginnings.

Mills admits that change can be difficult and that the biggest hurdle is changing your own mindset and embracing something new as well as escaping other people’s ideas of who you should be and the dreaded people pleasing tendency that many girls grow up with. Changing your mindset comes from understanding who you are, all that you have to offer, building your confidence  and leaning into uncertainty, says Mills. While she recognises her own privilege as a middle class white woman, she shows how the journey of discovery she goes on involves a reckoning with everything in her life that has culminated in where she finds herself. 

Work and reinvention

The book is divided into different sections to do with relationships [including divorce], family [and the whole empty nest thing], spirituality, the body [Mills is energetically in favour of throwing off the whole eternal youth marketing and embracing ageing in a positive way] and more. There is a big section on work, with redundancy described as ‘like a death’, which perhaps it is for some, but death is final and job loss isn’t usually, as Mills proves by her own ‘reinvention’. It has come as a surprise to her that she has very transferable skills that are useful in many ways, including coaching other women.

She speaks about how so many women are ‘let go’ in their 50s. “I realised being exited as a senior woman wasn’t just personal,” she writes, “but systemic; that particularly in media, advertising and marketing there are vanishingly few older women left.” In fact, she cites figures showing less than 2 per cent of the advertising/marketing workforce are women over 50, even though they are some of the biggest consumers. That is surely a major oversight on the part of employers.

Mills talks about what leads those women who are not pushed to leave the workforce. Lack of prospects is definitely one, but also the lack of autonomy if they are beholden to the orders of a -usually younger, more inexperienced, male – boss. Maybe, says Mills, women don’t want to ‘kowtow anymore’.

She also cites how women get fed up with being treated as ‘the wives of the organisation’, doing all the extra things like mentoring and buying the staff birthday cakes, etc, and that they become disillusioned by seeing their experience – in work and in life – being overlooked continuously even though they have “the self-knowledge, experience, nous and confidence to be better employees than ever”. Employers should be doing much more to retain them, she says.

Mills also writes about the gender pension gap – the cumulative effect of being lower paid, in more flexible roles and having more breaks for caring responsibilities. She says women need to be more aware of their finances, better prepared for the longer lives that often await them and more prepared to support each other.

There is also a section on menopause, but, while welcoming our ability to talk about it more openly now, Mills makes the point that midlife women are much more than their hormones. “The whole point of feminism was for women to escape their biology,” she says, adding that the aim of the book is to change the narrative about older women to show them as coming into their own in midlife.

An awakened self

Mills ends with a return to the beginning – to the dark days when she lost her job when she sat with a friend and sobbed. She brings that up to date, conjuring up an image of her friend and her having been swimming in a frozen pond and feeling gloriously alive.

“We talk about how different we are, how reinvention really is possible. How even at fifty, or later, we can find a better self, an awakened self, a new life built out of the rubble of the old. That it takes courage, love, support, a new tribe and an openness to thinking differently, to trying new things – that shedding the old stuff hurts; particularly realising our trespasses and transgressions. But that with work it really is possible to feel truly that it is okay to be you, exactly as you are – right now.”

*Much more to come: Lessons on the mayhem and magnificence of midlife is published by Harper Collins.

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