Hi there
This week has had that winding-down-for-summer feel: That sounds relaxing but the truth is that too often the scramble before holidays can be busier than any other time, as we cram in the stuff which HAS to be sorted before a break.
For many of us with more grown-up children (if we have them, I know about a third of you don’t.. but this is relevant to you too), it’s a time of renegotiating house rules (or laying some down) as they boomerang back after attending university or living away for a bit.
At our screening of the wonderful Pamela Anderson movie The Last Showgirl in Oxford last week, the Q&A beforehand was dominated by chat about how much we owe our adult children. What is the right balance between supporting them and helping them stand on their own feet? This debate seems especially prescient during a week when we’re talking about 16-year-olds getting the right to vote.
It’s a tricky one – exacerbated by larger generational shifts. The 100 Year-Life has a knock-on effect for the youngsters too; it’s unlikely they’ll get a milk round job out of college and still be working there at 60.
In fact so difficult is it these days to get on the first rung of a career ladder that many Gen Z’s aren’t bothering, delaying the day of full adulting by doing cash-work to fuel travel wanderlust. And why not? If they are going to live for a century it makes sense to explore the world, learn languages, form global networks and have some fun before strapping in for the long-career, family-forming, kid-raising haul…I get it.
Where does that leave us Queenagers?
We are a generation of helicopter parents who fussed over our offspring, in a way we were never parented ourselves by our ‘me-generation’ boomer mums and dads. At every turn we were told by another new study that if we didn’t do this or if we did do that we were damning our kids to a lifetime of woe.
But that makes this in-between time, when our kids are no longer children but not financially independent either, a new frontier to be negotiated. It is proving tricky for many!
We were talking in Oxford about boundaries. Queenagers hold up the sky for everyone. Caring for elders, and kids (and many of you I know still have school-age children…at the Wasing retreat on Friday 2 of the women aged 58 had a 13-year-old and a 16-year-old at home and elderly parents needing care).
Where then do our own Queenager needs fit into the equation? Where do our personal desires, dreams and ambitions find a place within the broader whole? What is the line between a female’s right to self-expression, to do the thing that makes us happy and fulfilled, against the needs of everyone else? When is it our turn?
Parenting in The Last Showgirl
This is one of the main themes of the film The Last Showgirl. Pamela Anderson and her 20something daughter are caught in a dance of resentment. The daughter not understanding how her mother gave up the chance to put her to bed every night, and even be around on Christmas Day, in favour of the demands of her life as a showgirl performer. The daughter can’t see how “shimmying around in rhinestones in a ‘nudie show’” was more important to her mother than, well, mothering.
Pamela’s character, by contrast, sees her career very differently – she feels part of an artistic tradition, has a sense of herself as an American icon, quite literally as she has been the poster girl for the show for 30 years.
This line we draw between motherhood and self-determination – or in a larger sense, the expectations of others versus what we want for ourselves and the sacrifices we make to do right by those we love – is a sharp edge for many of us.
How do our kids start being adults?
That was shown very clearly by one Queenager in Oxford who kicked off the pre-movie discussion by saying despairingly that she was getting only getting 3 hours sleep as she was caring for 2 kids (21 and 24 and paying their rent as they embarked on internships in London), working full time and caring for her own elderly mother with dementia.
Another woman pointed out that in their twenties the kids should be looking after themselves; another that for her, parental financial support was removed at 18. I remember being told after I left university that I’d been given the best education money could buy and it was now up to me to support myself. Fair enough.
It’s tough to start at the bottom of any profession. My first journalistic job was in an office overlooking the M4 writing about Tanks (containers, not the shooting variety). I bought lunch from the Esso garage (yeah), and the highlight of the day was writing about ‘gratings’ (the ladders on the side of tanks).
It was shit, but it was a job; it paid my rent and got me a start in life. My contemporaries who never got started in a profession (because their parents paid their rent so they didn’t have to) didn’t prosper.
I firmly believe it’s important for young people to start at the bottom, even if it is hard, so they can stand on their own two feet.
It really is harder for kids these days
It is more difficult for today’s twenty-somethings.
A survey last week showed that AI had removed 40 per cent of graduate entry jobs – the photocopying and donkey work can now be done by machines. But of course those base-level jobs aren’t about the tasks: they are about seeing how things are done, learning by osmosis by listening to the conversations and what happens around us. Understanding what’s important to businesses and learning “best practices”.
These days the only way into many professions (particularly creative ones and increasingly even things like banking) is through unpaid internships which involve being in London (expensive) and earning nothing. Getting onto that first independent rung, that first job, the first place to live, is increasingly fraught and competitive.
We’ve had a brilliant young son of some friends of ours living with us on and off over the last few years as he tries to make his way in the fashion industry. He’s got a first and works super hard. But it’s been tough. Even finding a flat to rent was a struggle involving being interviewed by endless possible flat shares (just a room in a house somewhere pretty far out in the capital costs more than £1,000 a month…and it took him 6 months to find something.)
Why the plight of 20somethings is important for us
The kind of ‘adulting’ we took for granted is now much harder. Those of us who are in jobs need to be aware of how hard it is for those entering our businesses and lobby on their behalf for proper payment and treatment; it’s not fair and moreover it’s not good for social mobility if the only kids who can access professions are those rich enough to be able to live rent-free in London and work for nothing.
But once again that puts the onus on parents and particularly Queenagers to hold up the sky and finances: 50% of us are the sole breadwinner in the family and we know all about the gendered-ageism that many midlife women are facing in the work place.
I see how many of you are yearning for a new phase, not to have to toil so hard, a chance to plough our own furrow and stop being pit ponies. I know so many Queenagers exhausting themselves to do the right thing by their families — no wonder rates of burnout are so high. If we ignore our body’s signals telling us to slow down, eventually we are forced to stop, through chronic fatigue or illness or our backs giving out (I’ve seen that twice in the last week).
The radical act that we can all do
I don’t have all the answers I’m afraid – but the crowd consensus from our Oxford event is that good boundaries are essential: Supporting our kidults but also insisting that they pull their weight. And the first piece of this is really asking ourselves what we need, what we really want…and doing something – even if it is small – every day to get ourselves to where we want to be.
That sounds simple but for so many midlife women it is a radical act even to ask ourselves the questions: What do I want? Or what is in that for me? (There was a big discussion about how important this is at the Wasing Retreat Circle on Friday).
A good place to start is by programming in some rest and relaxation for ourselves. It was so wonderful to see 25 of you at Wasing doing just that – checking in with ourselves, taking support from other’s in the same boat – laughing in the sunshine, feeling free, and seen and alive.
Here at NOON we’re here to help and would love for you to be part of the conversations we’re having when we gather in person. Come and join a Circle or event soon and get some Queenager R&R – your new tribe awaits!
Eleanor
P.S. Below are a couple of articles I wrote this week – about this new Instagram sensation We Do Not Care (I argued that we still have to Care a lot… and do lots of Caring in a column for The Telegraph on Friday, which they puffed on the front page).
The Mounjaro Midlife Crisis
I also wrote about the Mounjaro Midlife Crisis for The Independent on Saturday. Please don’t microdose with anti-fat jabs, meno-belly is part of ageing, and being half a stone lighter will mean you lose muscle and won’t make you healthier or happier in the long term…. You can read it on NOON here.
P.P.S. We have a couple of places left on the Welsh retreat in October – do come!
P.P.P.S. This is your last chance to book our Queenager trip to Egypt at a discounted rate. Four days from November 13th, led by me, with a private tour of the pyramids, a NOON Circle on a boat on the Nile and a Queenager Egyptologist and guided tour to the spectacular new Cairo Archaeological Museum. It is also going to be hilariously good fun — we have an amazing group of women coming. Why not give yourself a treat. When was the last time you laughed so hard your stomach hurt or made some great new mates? It’s a trip of a lifetime.
