Speaker 1: You're listening to a mother Mia podcast.
Speaker 2: Mamma Mere acknowledges the traditional owners of land and waters
Speaker 2: that this podcast is recorded.
Speaker 1: On What do you want?
Speaker 2: No, really, not for lunch or those sushi would be nice,
Speaker 2: not for your birthday, or to buy with that tax
Speaker 2: return or to add to cart. Tonight, Mid Doom scroll No,
Speaker 2: if you stopped.
Speaker 1: Like now.
Speaker 2: And set somewhere quiet for a moment and let yourself
Speaker 2: really think about that question, what do you want? What
Speaker 2: words would come? Our guest today on mid thinks that
Speaker 2: doing that, claiming the time to stop and truly ask
Speaker 2: yourself that question is one of the most radical things
Speaker 2: a woman in the middle of her life can do,
Speaker 2: because it's likely, by this point, somewhere roughly in the middle,
Speaker 2: that you've been spending a lot of time lately making
Speaker 2: sure that other people get they want partners, parents, bosses, children, cats,
Speaker 2: so much so that the question itself seems indulgent, selfish.
Speaker 2: But maybe if you can stand to sit with it,
Speaker 2: a word or two will come. Freedom is one of
Speaker 2: my big ones. Peace might come up more.
Speaker 1: You might say, we'll allow it.
Speaker 2: Yours might be Love, might be security, might be family,
Speaker 2: maybe purpose, And from there if you started to build
Speaker 2: out a life anchored to that word, what would it be?
Speaker 2: What difference would it make to the very next thing
Speaker 2: you do and the next I know all this sounds
Speaker 2: a bit like an inspirational quote on a tea towel
Speaker 2: or something you saw in cursive fon over a picture
Speaker 2: of a sunset on Instagram in twenty fifteen. But the
Speaker 2: truth is mits if we don't ask this question, no
Speaker 2: one else is going to. And it's the best possible
Speaker 2: time to ask it, better even than when we were
Speaker 2: finishing school or studies, or we were in our first jobs,
Speaker 2: or we were in our first relationships, because you might
Speaker 2: actually be in with a chance of getting it. The
Speaker 2: world underestimates midwomen. We're no longer of interest to a
Speaker 2: system that values women's youth and beauty above all else
Speaker 2: we can feel discarded and unseen. That sounds shit, and
Speaker 2: it is, but it comes with a surprising upside. It's
Speaker 2: that if nobody cares what you want now, really, then we,
Speaker 2: using our invisibility superpowers and our hard won smarts, are
Speaker 2: in the perfect position to take it. It's amazing what you
Speaker 2: can do when no one's looking. It's most likely, though,
Speaker 2: that if we ask ourselves this question at all, it's
Speaker 2: from a moment of crash, of devastation, of redundancy, of divorce,
Speaker 2: a health crisis, a burnout episode, an upending grief. For me,
Speaker 2: it was a breakdown, a brain rattling, overwhelmed that my
Speaker 2: guest today would call a midlife collision. And it felt
Speaker 2: like that shattering. But from the debris we are rebuilders.
Speaker 2: So what is it that you really really want? Zigaziga? Hello, Hello,
Speaker 2: I am Holly Wainwright, and I am mid midlife, mid family,
Speaker 2: mid midlife collision. Eleanor Mills didn't know she was about
Speaker 2: to get fired. She had a very fancy, high status,
Speaker 2: deeply demanding job that she had built her life and
Speaker 2: identity around for decades, and then one day she was
Speaker 2: asked to come up and have a chat with her boss,
Speaker 2: that old thing, and it was over.
Speaker 1: She was fifty.
Speaker 2: It was a moment of devastation for Eleanor, one that
Speaker 2: called for a significant rebuild after the prerequisite period of
Speaker 2: rocking in a corner. Obviously, and you won't be surprised
Speaker 2: to hear this, being middle and everything, that what Eleanor
Speaker 2: did next was completely transformative. But before you think that
Speaker 2: this is just a story about super successful ad types
Speaker 2: tweaking their dreams. I want to assure you this is
Speaker 2: actually an extraordinary story about a very ordinary thing, what
Speaker 2: you do when everything you thought you wanted is taken
Speaker 2: away and you have to figure out what the hell
Speaker 2: you really want. Now, let's call it the mid life rebuild.
Speaker 2: Eleanor's story takes in magic, mushroom trips in Jamaica, the
Speaker 2: epiphany that busy is an addiction, freezing cold daily swims,
Speaker 2: and the decision to hang her second act from the
Speaker 2: understanding that midwomen are one of the world's great untapped resources.
Speaker 2: You can find out more about that and Eleanor's community
Speaker 2: of queen ages by clicking on the links in our
Speaker 2: show notes. But please take a deep breath, pop this
Speaker 2: conversation under your tongue and enjoy the trip. Eleanor, you
Speaker 2: are a bit of a mid icon for me. You've
Speaker 2: had an amazing career in magazines, London journalism, that sort
Speaker 2: of mixture of glamorous and hard slog that is media.
Speaker 2: And then, as you write in your book Much More
Speaker 2: to Come, you changed direction at fifty. You were made
Speaker 2: redundant and you reinvented yourself before we get into the
Speaker 2: meat of this conversation. I know there are lots of
Speaker 2: women who are listening to this of a similar age
Speaker 2: to us, who are at a career crossroads, either one
Speaker 2: that they chose or one that was chosen for them,
Speaker 2: and are worried that they are too old for the
Speaker 2: thing they've always wanted to do. So tell me a
Speaker 2: bit about that moment of everything shifting for you.
Speaker 3: Well, I think the first thing that's really crucial to say,
Speaker 3: and hello everybody from London, is that you're never too
Speaker 3: old and it's never too late to become the woman
Speaker 3: that you always wanted to be. And in fact, I
Speaker 3: would say that it's a kind of fifty plus that
Speaker 3: we really get an opportunity to start digging it into
Speaker 3: what that might be. And certainly in my own experience,
Speaker 3: I had been a journalist very kind of high up
Speaker 3: poncho on the Sunday Times for twenty five years and
Speaker 3: I was suddenly made redundant out of the blue.
Speaker 1: It was a massive shock.
Speaker 3: I'd kind of gone up there with all my files
Speaker 3: and my or my forward planning for the next few
Speaker 3: months to talk to the new editor, and I walked
Speaker 3: into the.
Speaker 1: Room, and I suddenly realized it was.
Speaker 3: That meeting tissues on the table, and it was the
Speaker 3: head of HR and the editor and they started talking
Speaker 3: about you know, and it's just one of those really
Speaker 3: surreal things, a bit like being in a car crashed,
Speaker 3: or when you are talking to someone and you realize
Speaker 3: they're trying to break up with you, or you know,
Speaker 3: with something really massive shifts in your life, or if
Speaker 3: you get a terrible diagnosis.
Speaker 1: It was a bit like that.
Speaker 3: It was really weird. Everything just stopped. I wrote about
Speaker 3: it in my book that I could hear these voices
Speaker 3: talking and all I could see was the tugboat chugging
Speaker 3: very slowly up the Thames, and these birds, kind of
Speaker 3: pigeons flying around the kind of roof of the cathedral
Speaker 3: in the middle of London. And it's a very weird
Speaker 3: thing that you suddenly feel like you're not there in
Speaker 3: your own life, and everything that I thought I was
Speaker 3: and everything that I thought my life was suddenly stopped.
Speaker 3: I was forty nine, it was just before the pandemic,
Speaker 3: and I really had that feeling of having been pushed
Speaker 3: off a roof, having no idea what I was going
Speaker 3: to do next. I'd always been the main breadwinner, so
Speaker 3: I was terrified about kind of money and my life.
Speaker 1: In that way. And I also realized that this.
Speaker 3: Incredible wave that i'd caught, this kind of journalistic wave
Speaker 3: that i'd caught as an early woman in my early twenties,
Speaker 3: the kind of twenty five years on, had come to
Speaker 3: an end, and I've been spat off it and it
Speaker 3: was like, Wow, what am I going to do next?
Speaker 2: For our Australian listeners. The Sunday Times is a very
Speaker 2: prestigious newspaper, so this is a very impressive job that
Speaker 2: I'm sure was very much part of your identity. You'd
Speaker 2: been there for such a long time. You right in
Speaker 2: your book about how not that long before that happened
Speaker 2: to you, you'd gone on a trip with a friend
Speaker 2: for a story where you did a guided psilocybin trip,
Speaker 2: a mushroom trip, and you had a vision during that
Speaker 2: for what was going to be your next stage, but
Speaker 2: at the time you didn't know that. So tell me
Speaker 2: a bit about that, the idea of Noon coming to
Speaker 2: you then, and how you didn't just go, oh, sort
Speaker 2: of dismiss it as like I was off my face,
Speaker 2: or you know, did you know immediately after the redundancy that, oh,
Speaker 2: the time for that idea has come.
Speaker 1: I think I did. I think it was very weird.
Speaker 3: I mean, life unfolds in strange ways, doesn't it. So
Speaker 3: just to rewinder it, I'm not really a kind of
Speaker 3: psychedelic psychedelic ninja.
Speaker 1: Really.
Speaker 3: I went to Jamaica to take a whole load of
Speaker 3: magic mushrooms with one of my colleagues at the Sunday
Speaker 3: Time is an incredible journalist called Decker Achenhead. If any
Speaker 3: of you want to know more about it, that she
Speaker 3: actually won the BBC's Best Article of the Year for
Speaker 3: the journalistic article that she wrote about our mushroom trip.
Speaker 3: And we went to Jamaica, where it's legal to take
Speaker 3: psilocybin magic mushrooms, and we did three heroic doses in
Speaker 3: a week. So this isn't microdosing. This is like the fault.
Speaker 2: I was feeling a bit wobbly when I read those paraclops.
Speaker 1: When I read that chapter. She went because she had
Speaker 1: really bad PTSD.
Speaker 3: Her husband had died in front of us about ten
Speaker 3: years before, and she just felt like she couldn't really
Speaker 3: feel anything. And I went with her, partly because she's
Speaker 3: my great mate. I was her editor, and I thought
Speaker 3: I had a guty of care, but I was also
Speaker 3: something very deep in me was called to go to
Speaker 3: Jamaica and take the magic mushrooms.
Speaker 1: And it's one of those things.
Speaker 3: I'm sure people listening to this will have had times
Speaker 3: where somebody suggested that you do something and it's quite
Speaker 3: out of character or not something that you would normally do,
Speaker 3: but something very deep within you just goes yes this now.
Speaker 3: And I just had this really overwhelming sense that I
Speaker 3: was supposed to go to Jamaica with her a hard life,
Speaker 3: you'd say, and go to the Caribbean and take a
Speaker 3: shedload of magic mushroom. But actually it was actually quite
Speaker 3: scary because I don't I've never really taken psychedelics. When
Speaker 3: I was younger, I'd read the Michael Poland book How
Speaker 3: to Change Your Mind, so I was interested in the
Speaker 3: science of the psychedelics and what they can dead your mind.
Speaker 3: I've always been quite interested in Timothy Leary and all
Speaker 3: of that kind of phase of psychedelic experimentation. But to
Speaker 3: actually go and do it was quite something. And I
Speaker 3: did have this incredible experience while I was there.
Speaker 1: Of just everything kind of melting.
Speaker 3: They call it ego dissolution, and it was basically as
Speaker 3: if I had dissolved into a vat of kind of
Speaker 3: yellow cream. This would be the best way to describe it.
Speaker 3: I was just flooded with the sense of kind of
Speaker 3: golden light and connection to all things, and also just
Speaker 3: suddenly everything being possible, and I almost had the sense.
Speaker 1: That I was moving into a new phase.
Speaker 3: And that I was being shown kind of shown something new,
Speaker 3: which was the power of connection and also the power
Speaker 3: of a massive shift and a change in how we
Speaker 3: thought about everything. At this point of kind of being
Speaker 3: in my being in my fiftieth year, I was there
Speaker 3: actually when I turned forty nine. It was the kind
Speaker 3: of a few months before I left the Sunday Times.
Speaker 3: So when this terrible thing happened and I was made
Speaker 3: redundant very suddenly, it's like I had this golden thread
Speaker 3: to hang on to that I'd been shown something else.
Speaker 3: And I think also a lot of us, when we've
Speaker 3: been doing something for a very long time, get quite stale,
Speaker 3: and so I don't think I would have had the
Speaker 3: courage to jump out of my big job, my big
Speaker 3: black cloak, this very massive, powerful role that had defined
Speaker 3: me for a very long time. But I also did
Speaker 3: know that I was stale and that maybe I needed
Speaker 3: to do something else in another part of my mind,
Speaker 3: so I had this very exciting sense of a new
Speaker 3: golden opening kind of coming for me really, and that
Speaker 3: I could really positively change the people kind of around
Speaker 3: me through I just said, don't know, through some kind
Speaker 3: of shift or through bringing people together, and that this
Speaker 3: is all what I really wanted to do. And then
Speaker 3: of course I went back and did my kind of
Speaker 3: normal journalistic life and then I was suddenly made redundant.
Speaker 3: But in the back of my mind was always this
Speaker 3: sense of what I've been shown in Jamaica, was this
Speaker 3: really strong sense of a kind of golden connection and a.
Speaker 1: Possibility of moving into a new act.
Speaker 3: It was really really powerful, and I felt that I'd
Speaker 3: been shown that somehow as a guiding.
Speaker 1: Light through what was to come.
Speaker 2: Do you think I've heard you say that you know
Speaker 2: this is at this sort of transitional point, particularly if
Speaker 2: for transition that was already happening, then was kind of
Speaker 2: given a shove for you that this is a really
Speaker 2: important time for women of our age to go what
Speaker 2: is it that I really want? And you. Yes, it
Speaker 2: sounds like in your story the part of your job
Speaker 2: that you particularly loved helping people building connection, you know,
Speaker 2: perhaps building community. I don't want to speak for you,
Speaker 2: but when you were asking yourself that question, those things
Speaker 2: were clear. Do you have any wisdom about how people
Speaker 2: can answer that question for themselves though, if they are feeling,
Speaker 2: as you say, stale and like I've always done this,
Speaker 2: or I have to always do this, or I've got
Speaker 2: the responsibility of earning the money or having the job
Speaker 2: that allows my partner to go out and do his job,
Speaker 2: or whatever it might be. How do you think you
Speaker 2: can tap into that question of what do I really want?
Speaker 3: I think a lot of women don't even allow themselves
Speaker 3: to ask it. I remember going to see a ratherwise
Speaker 3: teacher and she said, no, she said to me, really
Speaker 3: is a good exercise for your ladies queen ages as
Speaker 3: I call them queen agers. I would suggest line a
Speaker 3: bath or wherever it is that you feel kind of
Speaker 3: happy and relaxed, maybe on your sofa or on your
Speaker 3: sundown jeting with it in summer in Australia, ild it
Speaker 3: and really ask yourself what it is. If you kind
Speaker 3: of really tune into kind of into your heart and
Speaker 3: ask yourself, really, what is it that you truly want?
Speaker 1: And it's very funny when you try and do that
Speaker 1: As a woman. I found when I was.
Speaker 3: Laid there trying to think about what I really wanted,
Speaker 3: my brain cut in. Before I'd even been able to
Speaker 3: articulate what it was that I might actually truly want.
Speaker 3: My my brain had kind of cut in to go,
Speaker 3: that's ridiculous. Shut up, don't be you know, don't be
Speaker 3: don't be proposed.
Speaker 2: Be selfish, greedy, Yeah, don't be really, don't don't be unrealistic.
Speaker 3: And I think that women are very good at not
Speaker 3: allowing themselves to dream big or to even tap into
Speaker 3: what that desire might be or might kind of even
Speaker 3: look like in their wildest dreams. And I think you're
Speaker 3: never going to get to that place of kind of
Speaker 3: not just success in a kind of world achievement sense,
Speaker 3: but more kind of fulfillment be on your wildest dreams
Speaker 3: if you won't even allow yourself to contemplate what that
Speaker 3: might be. So I think the first thing is that
Speaker 3: really kind of sinking deep into yourself and really asking
Speaker 3: yourself and being prepared to listen to the answer of
Speaker 3: what it is that you really want. And I think
Speaker 3: that we're so conditioned to think about what everybody else
Speaker 3: wants or what everybody else wants from us, that we
Speaker 3: don't even begin to allow ourselves to articulate what that
Speaker 3: precious special thing might be that we might do with
Speaker 3: our one, wild and precious life and ask ourselves that question.
Speaker 1: It's quite a scary one.
Speaker 3: So I write in my book about I think what
Speaker 3: I talk about is the capacity to.
Speaker 1: Shape shift at this point in life.
Speaker 3: And I think that for a lot of women, there
Speaker 3: are so many expectations, particularly of our age, about what
Speaker 3: we were supposed to do or what kind of good
Speaker 3: look like, that we've never actually allowed ourselves to kind
Speaker 3: of form our own organic shape. So like if you
Speaker 3: were kind of pouring some kind of wax or something
Speaker 3: into a mold and you were going to let it,
Speaker 3: let it completely settle into what it wanted to become,
Speaker 3: you know, essence of essence of you, kind of essence
Speaker 3: of holy essence of Eleanor. And I think men are
Speaker 3: much more allowed to kind of flow into whatever that's
Speaker 3: allowed to be, whereas women are kind of flow into
Speaker 3: a preordained shape, the shape that's useful for everybody around them,
Speaker 3: that fits society that I think for they're certainly from
Speaker 3: that bit from kind of.
Speaker 1: Twenty five to fifty.
Speaker 3: Women are often ticking the boxes that other people have
Speaker 3: given them, all the things that we were supposed to do,
Speaker 3: you know, be a good wife, a good mother, a
Speaker 3: good a good daughter, a good employee. You know, we're
Speaker 3: trying to be kind of good and fit into all
Speaker 3: the things that society is telling us we're supposed to do.
Speaker 3: And I don't think we're ever really encouraged to ask
Speaker 3: ourselves what is it that we really want? You know,
Speaker 3: what I want what really matters. And I had this
Speaker 3: very long journal career, which you know, which I really
Speaker 3: loved in lots of ways. But I also think that
Speaker 3: what kept me going from a very long time was
Speaker 3: a really huge parental expectation of achievement. That what had
Speaker 3: set me up kind of from my family constellation was
Speaker 3: this sense that achievement was all that was kind of
Speaker 3: valued or mattered, and so that that was kind of
Speaker 3: what I became. Whereas I think if I really truly
Speaker 3: asked myself what I would have become, I probably would
Speaker 3: have been called to this kind of work of community,
Speaker 3: building of thought, leadership, of kind of setting off in
Speaker 3: a slightly more radical direction earlier on in life. That
Speaker 3: it's taken me really till I was fifty to have
Speaker 3: the confidence to really walk my own path rather than
Speaker 3: a path that had been laid down for me.
Speaker 2: I'm going to be back with more from Eleanor Mills
Speaker 2: right after this quick break. You have built a community
Speaker 2: called Noon of your ages, as you call them, which
Speaker 2: is us wonderful women in midlife. I've heard you say too,
Speaker 2: to follow on from what we were just talking about,
Speaker 2: that you feel like this age and reclaiming it is
Speaker 2: almost the last frontier of feminism because the patriarchy kind
Speaker 2: of has no use for us anymore in a way,
Speaker 2: and so we're free to draw our own maps, is
Speaker 2: how I've heard you describe it. What do those maps
Speaker 2: look like?
Speaker 3: Yes, yeah, okay, So I would say that patriarchy, which
Speaker 3: is basically the and that this is not to kind
Speaker 3: of slag off kind of all individual men, many of
Speaker 3: whom are lovely, but patriarchy is the system which has
Speaker 3: definitely kind of groomed us, if you like, kind of
Speaker 3: programmed us to women to behave in certain ways and
Speaker 3: We've been living within patriarchy for you know, several thousand years,
Speaker 3: and basically what patriarchy values women for is being you know, young. Second.
Speaker 3: I won't swear on your podcast, but I'm kind of
Speaker 3: basically fertile. Second, kind of young attractive to you know,
Speaker 3: a male mate. So when you get to a point
Speaker 3: where you're kind of fifty and your biology means that
Speaker 3: you're not having babies anymore, and when certainly not looking
Speaker 3: like the kind of youthful ideal that's on every billboard
Speaker 3: within our culture, basically patriarchy doesn't really feel like it's
Speaker 3: got much use for us anymore.
Speaker 1: Maybe we're a bit useful as Grandma's.
Speaker 2: Still a bit of caring left in the.
Speaker 3: Still a bit of useful care and left in us.
Speaker 3: But the reality is that thirty percent of women my
Speaker 3: queen ages certainly here in the UK are child free,
Speaker 3: and about forty percent of those who don't have kids
Speaker 3: have actively chosen not to have children. So that's quite
Speaker 3: a big cohort of our generation. So if the only
Speaker 3: definition of possibility of what you are as you get
Speaker 3: older is being a granny and about a third of
Speaker 3: women don't have.
Speaker 1: Children, that's a huge number of queen.
Speaker 3: Agers who don't fit into the kind of you know,
Speaker 3: the what my society might see as a norm. I
Speaker 3: wouldn't say it's a normal. I think it's almost as
Speaker 3: normal now not to have kids. So what I'm interested
Speaker 3: in is that we're talking about this map. There's this
Speaker 3: sense that the current paradigm about what women in midlife
Speaker 3: are four is massively norm fit for purpose, and kind of.
Speaker 1: Out of days.
Speaker 3: And when I talk about creating a new map, I
Speaker 3: think what we're trying to do is to create new
Speaker 3: signposts and a new map, a sense of what this
Speaker 3: bit from fifty to seventy five or you know, we're
Speaker 3: quite a lot of us likely to live into our
Speaker 3: nineties or till we're one hundred.
Speaker 1: What does that next half of our life look like.
Speaker 3: I called my community noon as in the middle of
Speaker 3: the day, because in the one hundred year life, fifty
Speaker 3: is only halfway through.
Speaker 1: It's like we're only at lunchtime. We've got the whole
Speaker 1: of the afternoon in the evening to come.
Speaker 3: You know.
Speaker 1: It's partly why I called my book much More to Come.
Speaker 3: So I just think we need to reframe this bit
Speaker 3: of our life, and for me, the possibility of the possibility,
Speaker 3: and I've actually shown it in what I've done myself,
Speaker 3: is that at fifty we can massively pivot, reinvent, and
Speaker 3: become something different. And actually, if we're going to live
Speaker 3: that long, it's preposterous to think that you would start
Speaker 3: doing something in your twenties and still be doing it
Speaker 3: at fifty. In fact, when I was made redundant from
Speaker 3: the Saenter times later, my friends were.
Speaker 1: Like, well, what do you mean else?
Speaker 3: You know, I've been through like five jobs in the
Speaker 3: time that you've been there. That sense that you would
Speaker 3: go and work somewhere and you would be there for
Speaker 3: the whole of your career just doesn't really stack up anymore.
Speaker 3: So my book is also and what we do at
Speaker 3: Noon is a kind of a real call to people
Speaker 3: to say, don't get stuck in kind of old thinking
Speaker 3: of this three stage life that you kind of get educated,
Speaker 3: you work, you retire. I'm really interested in what I
Speaker 3: call the you know in one hundred year life, the
Speaker 3: kind of four quarters, So a sense that there's this
Speaker 3: whole new possibility between fifty and seventy five, where we're
Speaker 3: still active, we can pivot into something maybe a bit
Speaker 3: more purposeful, ask those big questions, ask what we might
Speaker 3: really want to do, what our kind of awakened self
Speaker 3: might look like. I mean, I think that this bit
Speaker 3: from fifty to seventy five is an enormous opportunity, and
Speaker 3: yet it's never presented to us in that way. And
Speaker 3: what I see in my community at noon, we've now
Speaker 3: got a community of seventeen thousand women who read my
Speaker 3: Queen Age and newsletter every week and probably getting on
Speaker 3: for about seventy five thousand, one hundred thousand on social media,
Speaker 3: is just this sense of becoming and the possibility of
Speaker 3: becoming at fifty and what that.
Speaker 1: Looks like for loads of different women.
Speaker 3: Because it's also really important, I think not to get
Speaker 3: too prescriptive about what that has to be. No more
Speaker 3: shoulds that The point is at fifty you get a
Speaker 3: chance to become the woman that you always wanted to be,
Speaker 3: and that looks differently for everyone. So what I'm encouraging
Speaker 3: is that voyage of in a discovery or purpose within
Speaker 3: the world or just whatever it is that you came
Speaker 3: into the world thinking that you wanted to do, and
Speaker 3: really giving yourself a chance to do that before it's
Speaker 3: too late.
Speaker 2: The women that you are, that are in that community,
Speaker 2: and it's an amazing thing to have built that bad
Speaker 2: just I'm so in all it is a time of
Speaker 2: immense possibility and change, and we know ourselves well and
Speaker 2: I couldn't agree with you more that it's the time
Speaker 2: when in a way we're told that we should be
Speaker 2: feeling a little bit ashamed of ourselves and a little
Speaker 2: bit sad and embarrassing. But actually, as I always say,
Speaker 2: we're at our most powerful in many ways. But there's
Speaker 2: no question that it's also often a time of life
Speaker 2: that comes with a lot of responsibility, challenges, hormonal craziness,
Speaker 2: all the things, and also loss. I want to talk
Speaker 2: a little bit about that for our stage of life,
Speaker 2: about caring for losing family men and losing family members,
Speaker 2: because it's a real I find this time is a
Speaker 2: real mixed bag of like feeling as I say, powerful
Speaker 2: and strong and like I know what I want to
Speaker 2: do with this next part, but also a lot is changing,
Speaker 2: like a lot is changing with my parents, with everyone
Speaker 2: around me. You know, this sort of sandwich generation is
Speaker 2: a real thing. I read a beautiful story that you
Speaker 2: wrote about loss of your mother in law, Maureen. Do
Speaker 2: you mind if I read a little.
Speaker 1: Bit of it.
Speaker 2: No, No, for sure you talked about sitting with her
Speaker 2: in her last days, and you wrote it is such
Speaker 2: a typical midlife experience, this sitting with someone beloved who
Speaker 2: is leaving us, but doing it has made me realize
Speaker 2: something important, That this is the real grit of life,
Speaker 2: being there in the preciousness of these final times, that
Speaker 2: ultimately we are all each other, interconnected into woven. It
Speaker 2: is at these massive times of transition that the bones
Speaker 2: of life itself become clear. That the once so important
Speaker 2: party you need to get back for, or deadline you
Speaker 2: can't possibly miss, is suddenly revealed as truly not consequential
Speaker 2: at all. We popped out for some lunch. I think
Speaker 2: you're talking about yourself and your husband, and the next
Speaker 2: table were a young couple, the dad holding their newborn,
Speaker 2: shushing and rocking it, walking around the pub, proud in
Speaker 2: his care life at its beginnings. When we were driving
Speaker 2: the country lanes, the yellows and gold of the leaves
Speaker 2: against the blue sky felt hyper real. Back home, I
Speaker 2: went for a swim in my beloved lake, where the
Speaker 2: water's surface was littered with red and golden leaves. The
Speaker 2: water was down at thirteen degrees, the shiver of winter
Speaker 2: darkness descending earlier, the year fading away. We all have
Speaker 2: our allotted time. Sitting so close to death reminds us
Speaker 2: of what is really important, makes us relish life itself
Speaker 2: and those we love. It's so beautiful, Eleanor, and I
Speaker 2: wanted to ask you that as we transition into this
Speaker 2: next phase, how do we sort of stop ourselves from
Speaker 2: being swallowed up by some of the sadness that comes
Speaker 2: with this time of life.
Speaker 3: I think at this time of life, what is incredibly
Speaker 3: important to remember is just that sense of ying, the
Speaker 3: kind of ying yang the light and the darkness, the
Speaker 3: darkness and the light, that wherever we are in our lives, every.
Speaker 1: Thing is present.
Speaker 3: I think it was one of the things that I
Speaker 3: learned most from the mushroom retreat I did, actually, which
Speaker 3: was that in the kind of greatest kind of the
Speaker 3: greatest light, that great sense of kind of golden connection,
Speaker 3: there's also always the possibility of the darkness. And I
Speaker 3: think something about midlife is being becoming more comfortable was
Speaker 3: sitting with both and realizing, certainly sitting with my mother
Speaker 3: in law when she was dying, I was very fond
Speaker 3: of her. Was just this amazing sense of the privilege
Speaker 3: of the hugeness of those moments, both the sadness of
Speaker 3: it deep sorrow, particularly in supporting my husband through the
Speaker 3: loss of somebody who'd been so important to him. I mean,
Speaker 3: he really felt, like he said to me that he
Speaker 3: felt like a gener you know, and you played Junger
Speaker 3: and he felt like somebody had like really taken out
Speaker 3: one of those bottom pieces, that everything in this life
Speaker 3: had kind of gone rocky.
Speaker 1: And then what you.
Speaker 3: Realize is that, you know, we've been together for nearly
Speaker 3: thirty years, we've got two daughters, but.
Speaker 1: We have it's always that we've taken on the mantle.
Speaker 3: From his mum to kind of look after him, and
Speaker 3: that that real adulting is the kind of you know,
Speaker 3: the business of midlife is that really kind of moving
Speaker 3: into our power.
Speaker 1: But also part of that power is.
Speaker 3: The power to support people really when they really need it,
Speaker 3: whether that's a kind of adolescent who's having a kind
Speaker 3: of been a massive anxiety crisis or self harming or
Speaker 3: something like that. Seen so many friends go through that,
Speaker 3: so many women or people kind of in the astral
Speaker 3: portal at the other end, when they're dying, and really
Speaker 3: what we what we do at this point is we
Speaker 3: come into our power to be able to manage not
Speaker 3: just ourselves but the people around us as they go
Speaker 3: through these huge kind of life portals. And I think
Speaker 3: what we need to do to get through that is
Speaker 3: to be very is to be confident in our capacity
Speaker 3: to endure and to be able to deal and to
Speaker 3: show up with love and to be very present in
Speaker 3: those moments, but also to kind of know what we
Speaker 3: need in order to be able to show up for others,
Speaker 3: and that means showing up for ourselves.
Speaker 2: When we come back after the break, ellenor Mills tells
Speaker 2: us exactly how she's looking after herself and look, it's freezing,
Speaker 2: but we'll be right back.
Speaker 3: One of the things I always do now in midlife
Speaker 3: is I swim every day and I get in the
Speaker 3: cold water, and I love that kind of rush, the
Speaker 3: kind of immediacy of this here now, the birds, that
Speaker 3: kind of light on the water, noticing the leaves every day,
Speaker 3: that kind of being plunged into nature.
Speaker 1: I live in the briddle of a city, so that's
Speaker 1: really important to me.
Speaker 3: And I wake up in the morning and I meditate
Speaker 3: for twenty minutes or half an hour, and I try
Speaker 3: and make sure that I do some pilates or something
Speaker 3: twice a week so I don't seize up, and I
Speaker 3: go for walks. And so it's also about putting some
Speaker 3: good stuff and some proper time back into our cells,
Speaker 3: eating properly, you know, getting enough. It's a bit of
Speaker 3: kind of priority about what we need to keep ourselves
Speaker 3: on the road for four other people, and also acknowledging
Speaker 3: that this is a huge time of change and of
Speaker 3: loss and of many things that have been very central
Speaker 3: to us in our lives falling away. So we did
Speaker 3: a big piece of research at noon, and we found
Speaker 3: that by fifty over half of women have been through
Speaker 3: at least five massive life events divorce, bereavement, redundancy, elderly
Speaker 3: parents kind of coming to bits and needing to be
Speaker 3: kind of nurse through their last hours or.
Speaker 1: You know, just caring for them.
Speaker 3: Also this thing about the gen Z's epidemic of anxiety
Speaker 3: in our gen Z kids and having to look after them,
Speaker 3: and then you know, other health staff, a bit of menopause,
Speaker 3: all of those things. There's kind of massive shifts that happen.
Speaker 1: In life at this point. But I think that we
Speaker 1: have to.
Speaker 3: Certainly, what I realized for myself was in that massive shedding,
Speaker 3: that sense of what had been at the same of
Speaker 3: my life disappearing in that loss, in that space is
Speaker 3: actually the possibility of something else being able to grow
Speaker 3: if we can.
Speaker 1: See it in that way.
Speaker 3: So rather than feeling all the time the loss, the loss,
Speaker 3: the shedding, how can I bear it, it's kind of
Speaker 3: also seeing it as a bit of a clearing out,
Speaker 3: so clearing a space where you might plant something new,
Speaker 3: which you know, if you're lucky, might actually be better.
Speaker 3: That's the kind of hope that I'm trying to hold.
Speaker 3: I mean, the map that we're talking about of how
Speaker 3: we paint a new map for women at midlife, because
Speaker 3: in our culture, because women's youth and fecundity is so
Speaker 3: kind of glorified, nobody thinks about actually what we bring
Speaker 3: to the table as we get older.
Speaker 1: But I think we bring this huge wisdom.
Speaker 3: This capacity for love, for connection to be there to
Speaker 3: kind of hold the ring, but also for this self
Speaker 3: actualization of you know, who you know, what is it
Speaker 3: that you really want to do? You know in this
Speaker 3: your one world and precious life. This is the thing
Speaker 3: that you are here to do only you and that's
Speaker 3: not necessarily just looking after other people. You know, what's
Speaker 3: the what's the kind of special bit of magic that
Speaker 3: you want? Is it a book that you've always wanted
Speaker 3: to write, or do you paint or do you have
Speaker 3: to be outside and walk. It's I think one of
Speaker 3: the things of sittings kind of with my lovely grandma
Speaker 3: or Grandma Marian and seeing her die or actually I've
Speaker 3: seen quite a few contemporaries of mine die in the
Speaker 3: last few months. It's just that sense of the preciousness
Speaker 3: of being here now and not wasting it.
Speaker 2: This might be a silly question, but when you were working,
Speaker 2: when you were working, I mean you're working. You're probably
Speaker 2: working harder than ever running your own thing. Like, let's
Speaker 2: be honest, when you had your other job, your big job,
Speaker 2: the big Sunday Times job, were you meditating, swimming in
Speaker 2: the lake realizing these things for it? Like were you no?
Speaker 1: No?
Speaker 2: Soh my god, so big the transformation you've been through
Speaker 2: in these last few years, and this is this is
Speaker 2: this right putting yourself at the front.
Speaker 1: Yeah, is completely huge.
Speaker 3: So so this is what I mean by finding the
Speaker 3: kind of the silver lining, as it were in the
Speaker 3: in the loss is that when I was missus, you know,
Speaker 3: Super Hauncher of the Sunday Times, editorial director, editor of
Speaker 3: the magazine Share of Women in Journalism, I was so busy.
Speaker 3: I was I think I was addicted actually to the
Speaker 3: to the business of it. So I was one of
Speaker 3: those people who had every time I went back to
Speaker 3: my phone there were probably like fifty emails that I
Speaker 3: hadn't seen. Every second of my day was you know,
Speaker 3: there was people I was meant to be see or
Speaker 3: people I want to be talking. I was so so round,
Speaker 3: so just packed in and I can remember just that
Speaker 3: they're just being no there was never any time for anything.
Speaker 3: I often used to feel like a ping pong ball
Speaker 3: that was just kind of ricocheting off the wall. And
Speaker 3: by the end of the day I'd have done so
Speaker 3: many meetings that I just kind of felt completely battered,
Speaker 3: and I was always you know, running, kind of running
Speaker 3: on empty running on adrenaline, you know, running really fast.
Speaker 3: And actually, I think one of the big lessons of
Speaker 3: this time, although I mean I still work rug because
Speaker 3: I run two businesses and I've written a book and
Speaker 3: as but it's a different kind of thing. It's not
Speaker 3: always being on somebody else's kind of clock, as it were.
Speaker 3: So there's nobody in my life now that I answer
Speaker 3: to you other than myself or my family or my husband.
Speaker 3: I don't have any kind of boss. And having spent
Speaker 3: twenty five years literally where kind of chained to your phone,
Speaker 3: where that when the big bosses kind of number came through,
Speaker 3: you would get a kind of adrenaline spike of criky,
Speaker 3: you know what's happened next. And also, you know, being
Speaker 3: a journalist, which you know, and I was, you know,
Speaker 3: I was covering the wars and kind of you know,
Speaker 3: big stuff. So he was also having to be really
Speaker 3: on top of the US agenda all the time. So
Speaker 3: I think it's a huge relief to step back a
Speaker 3: bit from that and to have some time. I think
Speaker 3: it's it's a really hard transition I write about in
Speaker 3: the book. I felt a bit like one of those
Speaker 3: like Asian Indian deities with kind of sixteen arms and
Speaker 3: you know, nothing to do with any of them. It
Speaker 3: was a really big it was a big transition for me,
Speaker 3: and I would say that I'm still it's quite easy.
Speaker 1: To swap one very kind of massively busy job.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's what I was going to ask. Do you
Speaker 2: have to watch your addiction to work like, because obviously
Speaker 2: you are incredibly busy running two businesses and writing books,
Speaker 2: but you now obviously have realized the how essential it
Speaker 2: is to you to build in the time for the
Speaker 2: things that keep you sane and running. Yeah, And I think, so,
Speaker 2: do you have to watch your work addictions or do.
Speaker 1: You have to watch my workaholism?
Speaker 3: But I also it's just a different thing, you know.
Speaker 3: I set up my life now so every day at twelve,
Speaker 3: I go up to the pond and I swim. You know,
Speaker 3: I make sure that whatever.
Speaker 2: Do you do that even now?
Speaker 1: Yeah? Yeah, are you in London. Temperature in the pond where.
Speaker 3: I saw of every day at the moment is five
Speaker 3: or six degrees. You were saying the shivering winter at thirteen.
Speaker 3: That's why I was smiling to herself. I was thinking,
Speaker 3: oh that that was early in the autumn. Yeah, it's
Speaker 3: five or six degrees. Sometimes it's kind of frozen.
Speaker 1: But there's something.
Speaker 3: About going into that cold water which absolutely makes you
Speaker 3: have to focus on them.
Speaker 1: Now.
Speaker 3: And I think that when you're doing those very busy
Speaker 3: jobs or you're kind of running on business all the time,
Speaker 3: You're always thinking about something else, you're always distracted from
Speaker 3: actually kind of where you are and the reality of that.
Speaker 3: And so I try now to be much more in
Speaker 3: that present. And I also spend a lot of time
Speaker 3: sitting in big circles of queen ages, listening to them
Speaker 3: and hearing their stories and hearing their own way that
Speaker 3: how they've kind of been wayfinders through this time. And
Speaker 3: what we see is that by in fact, I have
Speaker 3: an Australian Aboriginal painting my sitting room, which is one
Speaker 3: of the ones of the women. It's all the dots,
Speaker 3: and it's all the kind of it's all the kind
Speaker 3: of big events of their lives and the women sitting
Speaker 3: in a circle. And often what I think of when
Speaker 3: I'm with my queen agers is that all they are
Speaker 3: creating those dots for.
Speaker 1: All those other women. So you come in and someone
Speaker 1: will have say, just got divorced.
Speaker 3: I was in a terrible circle last week where a
Speaker 3: woman said she literally just found out that her husband
Speaker 3: of thirty years had been having an affair and she
Speaker 3: just didn't know what to do. And one of the
Speaker 3: other women in the in the circle had been in
Speaker 3: that situation eighteen months ago, and so there's this amazing
Speaker 3: sense it almost like that we're all kind of going
Speaker 3: around the spiral, and some of the women are a
Speaker 3: bit further along the journey, some are just beginning it.
Speaker 1: But as we sit together and the.
Speaker 3: Story is unfold, the woman who feels like she's just been,
Speaker 3: you know, not pushed off a cliff, can see that
Speaker 3: there is a way through, and maybe several different ways through.
Speaker 3: So one woman had decided that she was going to
Speaker 3: be in a kind of more open marriage because she
Speaker 3: didn't want to spit up with her husband. Another had
Speaker 3: sent him packing and had kind of moved into a
Speaker 3: different kind of life. So I think that what we're
Speaker 3: modeling for each other in these circles, or in the
Speaker 3: things that I write about, is the different ways that
Speaker 3: we might move through those losses or that shedding of
Speaker 3: midlife and what it might look like afterwards. So what
Speaker 3: we also found in our research that was that the
Speaker 3: women who'd been through the most, so that there are
Speaker 3: these five big things and often they all come together
Speaker 3: and what we call a midlife collision or a midlife
Speaker 3: cluster rude word.
Speaker 1: The women who've been through the most end up the happiest.
Speaker 3: That there's a sense of the shedding, kind of clearing
Speaker 3: out space for what they really want to do, and
Speaker 3: they end up happiest because they have created a life
Speaker 3: which is resonant for them. And for what I mean
Speaker 3: by that is that you create a life for yourself
Speaker 3: which looks on the outside how you feel on the inside.
Speaker 3: So lovely woman in my book who I met actually
Speaker 3: in Jamaica, when after I'd been made redundant, I went
Speaker 3: out there again and I went I was in a
Speaker 3: state of high anxiety. I read about it in the book,
Speaker 3: and I was sitting in this hammock looking out at
Speaker 3: the sea and completely unable to relax in any way.
Speaker 3: So I went for a swim. I went out round
Speaker 3: this boat and I met this woman, and she summoned
Speaker 3: me up onto her boat for a chat, and she
Speaker 3: told me that she'd had a terrible divorce. She'd also
Speaker 3: had a psychotic breakdown, and then she'd ended up going
Speaker 3: out with her high school sweetheart again, and they bought
Speaker 3: a boat, and they were traveling around the Caribbean, and
Speaker 3: that were not not luxury. They kind of bought a
Speaker 3: boat for about fifteen thousand dollars in Costa Rica and
Speaker 3: fitted it up and were sailing around. But there was
Speaker 3: something so joyous about this woman, and I remember her
Speaker 3: saying to me, I finally found a life which fits
Speaker 3: on the outside, how I.
Speaker 1: Feel on the inside.
Speaker 3: That they kept kind of moving on, and you know,
Speaker 3: they'd made loads of friends and they were exploring, and
Speaker 3: she said, this is what I've always wanted to do.
Speaker 3: And there was something for me that lit a spark
Speaker 3: for me, this sense that you really could completely change
Speaker 3: everything and have a completely different, new kind of life
Speaker 3: at this point, that there really was the opportunity of
Speaker 3: embracing somebody that you'd never really known was inside you.
Speaker 3: I met another woman who was working on the Mushroom
Speaker 3: Retreat who had been as psychotherapist and in New York
Speaker 3: for years and at fifty five, had gone to work
Speaker 3: on the Psaloicyber Retreat. You turned up in Jamaica with
Speaker 3: kind of a couple of suitcases living with all these
Speaker 3: young kids. So it was just the kind of sense
Speaker 3: of Wow, when things really fall away in your life,
Speaker 3: there really is a possibility to do something completely different.
Speaker 1: And that's what that's really.
Speaker 3: My call to all queen ages is kind of you know,
Speaker 3: if you really could do anything, what might that be
Speaker 3: and what is your awakened self calling you to do?
Speaker 3: Because I do think that there's a sense that we
Speaker 3: know somewhere deep within us that we might be something else.
Speaker 1: It's just allowing ourselves to tune into that and to dream.
Speaker 2: Oh, I love it. I was about I was going
Speaker 2: to ask you what was the most wonderful thing about
Speaker 2: being in circles with all the queen ages, But it
Speaker 2: sounds like it's wisdom and experience.
Speaker 1: It's wisdom. Experience is huge humor.
Speaker 3: One of the things that we do on some of
Speaker 3: our retreats, because I run a lot of retreats, as
Speaker 3: I make them do or make them do, the invitation
Speaker 3: is to come and do some drumming, and we do
Speaker 3: these this crazy kind of samba drumming and it's.
Speaker 1: Like we did it. We did it earlier this year
Speaker 1: we had.
Speaker 3: Forty women all like banging drums and banging their triangles
Speaker 3: and things.
Speaker 1: It was like being in a kindergarten class. I've never
Speaker 1: seen such total joy and kind of manias. And they
Speaker 1: couldn't believe how much noise we'd made. They could hear
Speaker 1: us about two miles away in the village, and it.
Speaker 3: Said, it's a real sense of again getting into the moment,
Speaker 3: being you know, really tapping back into some joy, kind.
Speaker 1: Of saying that we're allowed to kind of have fun
Speaker 1: and some silliness. I get them to get into. It's
Speaker 1: quite a bit of a cold water theme here.
Speaker 3: We do a bit of ice baths and swimming in
Speaker 3: the cord pond on the top of the Yorkshire Malls
Speaker 3: and then going into a sauna.
Speaker 1: But what I also.
Speaker 3: Find is really important at this point is to get
Speaker 3: the women slightly out of their comfort zone because I
Speaker 3: think if you realize that if you do something that
Speaker 3: you've never done before, kind of at fifty or sixty
Speaker 3: or whenever it is, you know, you get yourself on
Speaker 3: an ice bath, or you you know, you climb up
Speaker 3: a mountain, we do incredible trips as well, then you
Speaker 3: suddenly realize that actually you're not done yet, that there's
Speaker 3: still quite a lot of stuff that you can do.
Speaker 3: And that experience of having tried something new and kind
Speaker 3: of you know, loved it or felt the exhilaration of that,
Speaker 3: or doing something that you never thought you'd be able
Speaker 3: to is actually a wonderful setup for realizing that you
Speaker 3: can actually move into a new phase of life.
Speaker 2: Another big transition for a lot of queen ages or
Speaker 2: mids is if you do have children, them growing older.
Speaker 2: I actually had my kids late, so I'm still dealing
Speaker 2: with nits and school bags even though I'm back.
Speaker 3: Exactly.
Speaker 2: But I think one of your daughters has just graduated
Speaker 2: UNI and your other one is at UNI, and you've
Speaker 2: written a little bit about empty nesting and about the
Speaker 2: end of this massive phase of your and your husband's
Speaker 2: life of always having practical jobs on the go, always
Speaker 2: having to tend to their needs, making food, doing all
Speaker 2: the things. And I know that older children still need
Speaker 2: a lot of you, but it's a different it's a
Speaker 2: different kind of need. Right, How are you finding that shift,
Speaker 2: this latest kind of shift of being empty nesters.
Speaker 1: Well, when it.
Speaker 3: First happened, it was absolutely agonizing. I'm writing the book,
Speaker 3: and it's actually one of the book where I had
Speaker 3: I had to read the audio version of the book,
Speaker 3: and actually the bit where my little one goes off
Speaker 3: to university, I can't It was about the only bit
Speaker 3: in the book that really made me cry. And there's
Speaker 3: there's quite a lot of bits in the book which
Speaker 3: are quite emotional, but there's something visceral about you know,
Speaker 3: being in her bedroom and packing up her apans and
Speaker 3: you know her not just them not being around. And
Speaker 3: I think in that same way as when you become
Speaker 3: a parent for the first time, you're suddenly plunged into
Speaker 3: that kind of twenty four hour care. You know, this,
Speaker 3: this tiny thing is dependent on me for everything. It's
Speaker 3: kind of almost as big a shift again when suddenly
Speaker 3: that kind of twenty four to.
Speaker 1: Seven, you know, just look at where are they? Are
Speaker 1: they here? Are they fed? Are they in the house? Stops?
Speaker 1: And they go off and you're not responsible for them
Speaker 1: in that way.
Speaker 3: But I so I felt, really, really felt the loss
Speaker 3: of that, felt very very sad about it.
Speaker 1: But that passes.
Speaker 3: And what I would also say is there's a huge opportunity.
Speaker 3: You know, there's a huge opportunity in this. You suddenly
Speaker 3: get all this space which is not being touched kind
Speaker 3: of you know, taken up with swimming things and school
Speaker 3: runs and you know, the pta and all that stuff
Speaker 3: which you can. So I think what we see with
Speaker 3: a lot of the women is that actually seventy percent
Speaker 3: of the women when they hit fifty want to power
Speaker 3: up their careers, partly because the kids have gone.
Speaker 1: And suddenly you've got all this time.
Speaker 3: You know, all those years of having to run back
Speaker 3: and be there for bedtime or feeling really guilty.
Speaker 1: That you weren't there. Suddenly they're not there anyway, so
Speaker 1: you know, you can do whatever you like. So that's why.
Speaker 2: And you've got all this experience, you've experience you know
Speaker 2: a lot exactly.
Speaker 3: But the problem is is that because of the gender
Speaker 3: and agism in our culture, and we've got all these
Speaker 3: women who want to power up, I've got all the
Speaker 3: experience and now got all this time. But that's not
Speaker 3: the way the organizations see us. Right, So one of
Speaker 3: the other big pieces of work that we're doing at
Speaker 3: noon with the you also with the UK government is.
Speaker 1: To really talk about this sense of elongating.
Speaker 3: Thinking about women's careers so that employers understand that attually
Speaker 3: it fifty we might want to power up, that we've
Speaker 3: been doing all this kind of caring for the last
Speaker 3: twenty five years.
Speaker 1: But and so this might be an opportunity where we
Speaker 1: really move into leadership. You know, we finally break.
Speaker 3: Those glass ceilings, we finally get enough you know, more women,
Speaker 3: you know, running stuff, because we move into our wisdom
Speaker 3: and our power in our fifties. But the culture doesn't
Speaker 3: see that. They would rather corporate world would much rather
Speaker 3: have rather pleasing, you know, young women who are a
Speaker 3: bit pliable and say yes, you know, and look pretty,
Speaker 3: whereas actually queen ages are the masters of managing complex change,
Speaker 3: really interesting review and the Harvard business with you so
Speaker 3: you know all of that stuff. So I think the
Speaker 3: emptiness can be a real opportunity. I think personally, I've
Speaker 3: also had a lovely time with my husband since children left,
Speaker 3: we've been together for a really long time. It feels
Speaker 3: a bit like it did before we had the kids,
Speaker 3: that we're kind of back in that kind of six years.
Speaker 1: That we had together before we had children.
Speaker 3: We can go traveling where we look after each other
Speaker 3: quite a lot, we have there's so much time, you know,
Speaker 3: we have.
Speaker 1: We have a really lovely time together. So I think
Speaker 1: that that's.
Speaker 3: Also a kind of bonus that nobody kind of ever
Speaker 3: really talks about. And then the parenting challenges of older
Speaker 3: children are really different. So I'll give you an example.
Speaker 3: I suddenly had my daughter who's in Paris. She graduated
Speaker 3: from Oxford this summer. She's in Paris working as a
Speaker 3: no parent like out her French and doing a translation
Speaker 3: courts and stuffs, having a lovely time. But I suddenly
Speaker 3: got all from her very very late on a Sunday evening, going,
Speaker 3: oh crikey. You know, some like total disasters happened and
Speaker 3: you have to give very quick kind of immediate kind
Speaker 3: of you have they need you very very intensely, you know,
Speaker 3: for an hour while you work out some massive crisis
Speaker 3: on a long distance phone call and nobody else will do,
Speaker 3: so it's a kind of very intensive.
Speaker 1: You suddenly get.
Speaker 3: A call going, you know, I've lost my cash point
Speaker 3: card in I've lost my bank card in Laos or
Speaker 3: you know, or.
Speaker 1: Up up in Manchester.
Speaker 3: All the all the smoke alarms are going off and
Speaker 3: I don't know what to do or kind of how
Speaker 3: do I get in touch with my landlord?
Speaker 1: Or so you get.
Speaker 3: Something very you get very very intense incoming like crikee,
Speaker 3: how do I sort out how do I find her
Speaker 3: a new bank card when she's in Cambodia and I'm
Speaker 3: sitting in London. That kind of those kind of logistical
Speaker 3: things and a lot of kind of emotional backup, but it's.
Speaker 1: A different thing.
Speaker 3: And I also think that there's something around being confident
Speaker 3: in the way that we've created these new humans that
Speaker 3: they can stand on their own feet. I love that
Speaker 3: the gilbron the Prophet's poem about our children are the
Speaker 3: arrows that we shoot into the future. That we don't
Speaker 3: own them, we can't control them, we can't control their minds.
Speaker 3: Our job is to stand firm like the archer with
Speaker 3: the bow and shoot them forward and let them do
Speaker 3: their thing. And I think that that's really important. And
Speaker 3: you know, not to try and live vicariously through them,
Speaker 3: not to try and make them have be us, but
Speaker 3: hopefully we have instilled in them enough of the kind
Speaker 3: of real values, you know, caring about other people, love,
Speaker 3: hopefully caring about the planet, you know, wanting to be
Speaker 3: kind of good humans, that you've instilled enough of that
Speaker 3: in the first twenty years that that's.
Speaker 1: There in essence, and then you have to let them
Speaker 1: get on with it.
Speaker 2: This is what I find. My daughter is about to
Speaker 2: be fifteen, and she yeah right, and she is not me,
Speaker 2: and that is my I always say that's my biggest
Speaker 2: parenting lesson that I learn every day. Is that she's
Speaker 2: not me. I find there's so much joy in watching
Speaker 2: her become this person. You know, yes, but it's it's
Speaker 2: but but I ask you for reassurance because one minute
Speaker 2: she's like she needs mommy, don't go away for work, Mum,
Speaker 2: I need you here, And then the next day it's
Speaker 2: like door clothes, Yeah, how are you fine? Like it's
Speaker 2: very like, yeah, it's a real roller, it really is.
Speaker 3: But I think what you have to remember is it
Speaker 3: does it comes round. So I had such a it's
Speaker 3: my birthday last week and I was lying in bed
Speaker 3: and the doorbell rang and there was a man with
Speaker 3: an enormous bunch of lilies. My daughter's called Alice Lily,
Speaker 3: and she'd sent me lilies from Paris with this beautiful
Speaker 3: card of me and her when she was a baby, going,
Speaker 3: you know, love you, you know, love you, marm from
Speaker 3: your and she used her baby nickname on this card,
Speaker 3: and I.
Speaker 1: Just burst into tears. It was so sweet. So so
Speaker 1: you do get you.
Speaker 3: Know, we've definitely had our moments kind of during her adolescence,
Speaker 3: but I think that there's this kind of great sweetness
Speaker 3: that it kind of comes full circle if you let
Speaker 3: them go and there's this thing when their adolescent of
Speaker 3: they need you terribly when they need you, but then
Speaker 3: they don't want you anywhere near near them. So the
Speaker 3: trick is to try and be available in the moments
Speaker 3: when they need you, and that is hard, particularly once
Speaker 3: a kind.
Speaker 1: Of working, working women.
Speaker 3: And I think one of the other sweetnesses of what
Speaker 3: happened to me was it was just before the pandemic
Speaker 3: that I was made redundant. So I had these three
Speaker 3: very special years when I was very much at home.
Speaker 1: You know, we were we were kind of all hanging
Speaker 1: out together.
Speaker 3: We did a lot of baking, We did a lot
Speaker 3: of sitting around kind of you know, watching watching kind
Speaker 3: of you know, Emily.
Speaker 1: In Paris or Lasso or whatever.
Speaker 3: Altogether, that was a real kind of sweetness, an extra
Speaker 3: kind of bonus that I hadn't really hadn't really expected
Speaker 3: because it was that last bit before they went off
Speaker 3: to university. So I also think, like really kind of
Speaker 3: hug them close kind of while they're there, and try
Speaker 3: and set up just a kind of sense that you're
Speaker 3: I just think that you're you're always there for them,
Speaker 3: that you love them, whatever, that their lover is really unconditional.
Speaker 1: A lovely.
Speaker 3: Jamaican friend said to me that as parents, you know
Speaker 3: that you can't accept the love is the love that
Speaker 3: you give as a parent is not conditional. It's just
Speaker 3: you know you you love them, that you give them,
Speaker 3: that you don't expect anything back from it. And I
Speaker 3: think that that's quite important. That's not necessarily how I
Speaker 3: felt about my own parents. And I try and stay
Speaker 3: very strongly to my children all the time. I just
Speaker 3: want you to be exactly what you want to be.
Speaker 3: And one of the things that gives me great pleasure
Speaker 3: and pride. And my elder daughter, she's in parison. She's
Speaker 3: obsessed by going to like, oh, galleries or particular movies
Speaker 3: or and when I talk about the sense of the wax.
Speaker 1: Pouring into the mold and who is it that you
Speaker 1: want to be.
Speaker 3: I really feel with my daughters that they are able
Speaker 3: to kind of take the shape that they want to take,
Speaker 3: that they've got a kind of a real investment in that,
Speaker 3: Whereas for me, I felt very much that I was
Speaker 3: being poured into asking mold that my parents wanted me
Speaker 3: to be in, whereas I think for them, their mold
Speaker 3: is more free form, I hope, so I'm always saying
Speaker 3: to them that I'd like that to be the case.
Speaker 3: And I think that that's one of the things we
Speaker 3: can do as pioneering queen agers for our daughters is say,
Speaker 3: you know, when you talk to men that they do
Speaker 3: kind of take their own path, and I think for
Speaker 3: women we can go that you can do whatever you
Speaker 3: want to do and really mean it.
Speaker 2: One last question for you, Eleanor when you look at
Speaker 2: the at the next stage, the post seventy five quadrant,
Speaker 2: I guess harvest they call what kind of glorious old
Speaker 2: lady do you want to be? In your heart?
Speaker 3: Well, there's that wonderful poem, isn't there about when I'm old,
Speaker 3: I shall.
Speaker 1: Wear purple, wear purple.
Speaker 3: So I don't know if I wear purple, so it's
Speaker 3: not really my color, but I'll certainly wear green. I'll
Speaker 3: keep going swimming, I'll hopefully. Well, I'm really looking forward
Speaker 3: to actually just having loads of grandchildren. I spent the
Speaker 3: weekend with my I've got a baby niece called CC
Speaker 3: who's three, and I spent a very happy day on
Speaker 3: Saturday kind of doing puzzles and hanging out with baby CC.
Speaker 3: So I'm really looking forward to being a grandma.
Speaker 1: But I also want to go on writing. I'm want
Speaker 1: to run my community.
Speaker 3: I hope that Noon becomes a really terrifying load of
Speaker 3: kind of old queen ages kind of tripping around the world.
Speaker 3: We're just about to launch a big trip tos Bekistan
Speaker 3: and we're going to do sixty percent of solo travelers
Speaker 3: are queen ages.
Speaker 1: So we've just done a big link up with.
Speaker 3: A voyage Jules vern and I'm going to take a
Speaker 3: whole load of queen ages all over the world to.
Speaker 1: Kind of be town and Zbekistan and India and on.
Speaker 2: The Oh my god, I want to calm.
Speaker 1: I'm calming.
Speaker 3: Yes, in come it's going to be called it's called
Speaker 3: Noon Voyage, just part of the voyas Jules Verne, which
Speaker 3: is a big part of KUNI, And we're doing a
Speaker 3: whole kind of travel kind of brand. So I'm going
Speaker 3: to be so hopefully. My mum is eighty one. She
Speaker 3: came skiing with us on a queen Age of ski
Speaker 3: trip last year and it's still like paddle boarding. So
Speaker 3: I'm hoping that my granny little she was ninety seven
Speaker 3: and could still do headstands and yoga yoga poses in her.
Speaker 2: Just got to keep moving right, just got to keep moving, Eleanor,
Speaker 2: thank you so much. This has been an amazing conversation.
Speaker 2: We will put, of course, the links to where people
Speaker 2: can buy your book, where people can find out more
Speaker 2: about Noon and all your queen ages in the show
Speaker 2: notes of the podcast. But thank you for giving me
Speaker 2: your time.
Speaker 1: Oh, thank you so much for having me. It's been great.
Speaker 1: It's been really interesting to talk to you.
Speaker 2: Meditation and cold swims. It seems that these are now
Speaker 2: the markers of midlife in a way that might once
Speaker 2: have been a comfy cardian, some flat shoes, two other
Speaker 2: things that can be quite partial too, actually, but I
Speaker 2: think that these signifiers of self care might just be
Speaker 2: better for us. If you want to know more about
Speaker 2: Eleanor and her noon circles, there's a link in the
Speaker 2: show notes to find out and or so to where
Speaker 2: you can buy her book. And if you want to
Speaker 2: hear more stories of dramatic reinvention in midlife, and honestly,
Speaker 2: those are my favorite stories, because what I find more
Speaker 2: exciting than anything is the idea that nothing is now
Speaker 2: off limits. Then you need to scroll back and listen
Speaker 2: to my conversation with the amazing Australian author Jane Tara.
Speaker 2: She lost her business and her long term relationship by
Speaker 2: text message and she was diagnosed with a significant health
Speaker 2: issue all around that crucial fifty mark, and so she
Speaker 2: changed everything too. And if you're addicted to busy, like
Speaker 2: Eleanor admits she was and still is to a degree,
Speaker 2: please go and listen to one of my most recommended
Speaker 2: episodes ever of mid It's with Catherine May, the amazing author,
Speaker 2: about burnout. It's transformative if I say so myself, and
Speaker 2: I can say it because it's not me that makes
Speaker 2: it transformative, it's Catherine. Anyway, come back next week for
Speaker 2: another B conversation with a gen X woman. I can't
Speaker 2: tell you how much I appreciate being with you.
Speaker 1: Here.
Speaker 2: The executive producer of mid is and I am A Brown.
Speaker 2: The senior producer is Grace Rufray, and our producer is
Speaker 2: Charlie Blackman. And we've had sound design and editing by
Speaker 2: Jacob Brown. And I'm Holly Wainwright and thank you for listening.