The Queenager: Eleanor's Letter (May 5th 2024)

Dear Queenagers

cAll week they’ve been chasing each other around in a frenzy of mating (poor mummy duck being chased out of the reeds by four over-keen green headed male mallards…) Today as I was about to climb up the steps, a whole family of fluffy ducklings with proud mum and dad came paddling by. So close they almost brushed my arm. Touching in their fledgling newness and vulnerability, little floating balls of feathery life. For once I didn’t wish for my friend the heron to come soaring by; he has a nasty habit of eating baby ducklings. But it did make me think that all life is here: sex, birth, death, beauty… the full gamut.

I had a date of my own at the pond on Thursday morning- with an incredible Queenager, Jessica Hepburn. She is the author of a wonderful book called Save Me From the Waves; an account of how she climbed Everest, swam the channel and ran a marathon all the while listening to episodes of Desert Island Discs. The result is a beautiful memoir full of nuggets of wisdom from the radio castaways blended with her own moments of insight, loss and joy. She summited the roof of the world on her third attempt but broke her leg and nearly died on the way down. Joy and sorrow, triumph and disaster. Once again that sense of everything being in the mix, all being in play, the light and the dark. We talked about how often it is in our darkest times that the light brought by kindness or love or beauty shines brightest; how inversely the shadow on a sunny day makes the light feel even brighter.

I felt on my mettle swimming with such an athlete – but we breast-stroked gently round the green water of the sunlit pond, dried off and walked up to Kenwood House afterwards for brioche buns and coffee. Her adventures were embarked upon after a long struggle to come to terms with her child-free status after years of infertility and trying to have a baby; she talked about how from the outside motherhood can look so idyllic. I agreed there were wonderful bits and I adore my daughters, but there are tough times too – when they are sick or unhappy or stressed, for instance. How that old truism about how it is never possible to be happier than your least happy child is a cliché for a reason. Not all motherhood is giggles and hugs; I know many women who are struggling with self-harming teens – we have an epidemic of anxiety in GenZ. Having parented through four lots of GCSEs and A levels,  I feel for all the parents mopping up kids as they tackle the exam season – which is now upon us.

We talked about how whatever we have been doing between the ages of 25 and 50, once we hit this midpoint, the NOON time, everything changes. The kids if we’ve had them leave home. After 25 years in a profession it is time for a change. Marriages break up. Health issues arise (either with us or our friends). Many of the things we’ve been dampening down with busyness or distraction come back to bite us; particularly unresolved issues from childhood, with siblings, with parents as they die. Midlife is a time of reckoning, of shedding what we were, pruning ourselves sometimes painfully and becoming the Queenagers we always wanted to be… Jessica is a great exemplar of that.

I met another amazing Queenager last week, Melanie Cantor: she was a successful agent for 25 years, Ulrika Johnsson was one of her clients, we knew each other a bit in our past lives. Then at 50 she decided she was going to scratch her own massive creative itch: she had always wanted to write novels. It took her ten years to crack it but she has now published two books. I just finished reading her latest, The Fuck it List; all about a woman who decides to go it alone and get pregnant via a donor. It is a very modern kind of love story – all about a woman who falls in love with herself and her own agency, turning her back on a rich  Prince Charming to seek her own variety of personal and professional fufillment. A very modern kind of fairy tale and very funny and well observed. I couldn’t put it down. Seriously. It was one of those books that kept me turning the pages into the wee hours when I really should have gone to sleep!

Both of these women reminded me of the power of the midlife shift. That idea of Becoming. That it is never too late and we are never too old. That we are a pioneering generation of women writing our own scripts about what this next phase should look like. The first cohort of women to get to this point with health, agency, some wealth if we are lucky: choices. It is up to us to make a map of what Queenagerhood looks like for all the younger women coming up behind us.

One of the ways we construct that new map is by sharing our stories with each other and encouraging each other through the pinchpoints of midlife and into a new chapter. That is what Noon.org.uk is all about, and nowhere is that more powerfully brought to life than in our Noon Circles. So far, we have only held them in London and occasionally online. But now thanks to the immense generosity and enthusiasm of some of Noon’s pioneering Queenagers who live all around the UK, we will be launching Regional Noon Circles on May 20^th. They will follow the same pattern as the one in Soho, in fact we will all start together at 7pm with me on the Zoom setting out the discussion for that day and welcoming you all. But then you will be able to make new friends and meet some local Queenagers and enjoy each other like we do every month in London. Indeed, all the women holding the Circles are incredible women, most are therapists themselves, and they have all been part of the Noon Circle in Soho and many have also come on our Noon trips and retreats, so they are soaked in the ethos! I do hope lots of you who haven’t been able to come before will come to one of these new meet-ups in May. If you’d like to try one, there are groups in Yorkshire, Kent, Bristol, Devon, Surrey and Cheltenham and London of course. And for those of you who are part of our international cohort of Queenagers we will be doing an online Noon Circle for everyone else to be able to join on May 29^th at 6pm London time. Details next week!

Please remember that these circles are for our Paid Subscribers only – the Eventbrite links for the Circles are password protected, and the word to unlock them is below the pay wall. They are free for those who have subscribed!

I do hope many of you will join and I look forward to seeing lots of the rest of you in the online circle or at one of our future events. We have a great one coming up on May 14th online so open to everyone with Lucy Cavendish, a Queenager who was a journalist and became a psycholgist later in life and has written a great book about how we can all have better relationships. Check out her article here on Noon.

All the best and much love

Eleanor

The Password for joining a NOON Circle for Paid Subscribers is Queenager

Look forward to seeing you there!

By Eleanor Mills