Middle-Aged Women

Notes from my journal

Andie

May 11, 2025

About Middle-Aged Mothers

My Best Friend’s Son: I have no idea what it is.

My Son: Your Mum made it though.

My Best Friend’s Son: She’s embraced absurdism.

Soundtrack for This Post

Three Drink Recipes for Middle-Aged Women

Swim in your friend’s pool with her, both of you drinking Rosé because it is her favourite wine.
Ask him to make a Bloody Mary for you. That Martini pin full of olives is like a hatpin, like a little weapon for women.
Red wine and a glass of water. I don’t get myself dehydrated at this age1.

Middle-Aged Temperance

I was ill over Christmas, and so, I spent it mostly sober and eating very little. I came out of it ravenous for fruit.

We got home from the New Year’s Eve party just before midnight. I read in bed and listened to parties in our neighborhood, which was a lovely sound.

Sometimes, I don’t want to drink alcohol. I don’t want any sensation dulled. I have the power to feel everything.

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Parties

My son is sixteen and has become someone who goes to parties2.

I am lucky that he is not the kind of teenager you worry about at parties. (And, it is luck and has very little, if anything at all, to do with the parenting. I know that because I see the kids you do worry about at parties, and I see that their parents are sensitive, thoughtful people).

All you get with my son is the fun stories. Like the birthday party in the park that was broken up unexpectedly by the birthday child’s mother. The child’s mother is a friend, so I got to hear her description of it later at a dinner party. Tipsy teenagers lying on the grass and vaping in the garden of Eden. There was even a snake - my son saw a python paused across the path.

Last night I dropped him to a party at the biggest house I have ever seen. (He told me afterwards it had eight bathrooms, a double staircase and a line of statutes by the pool).

We couldn’t find the house on Google Maps, and it was very dark in the hills. I drove around in our little car for almost an hour in the pouring rain, but I was too curious about the whole thing to be annoyed; it had by then taken on the feeling of an adventure.

My son was on the phone to his friends, getting impatient about the directions. They said it is a very long driveway.

Yes, I assumed so.

The next morning my son and his friend met us for breakfast at this Middle Eastern cafe I love. They said the party had been more of a gathering, really. It was a dozen kids with every space too large for them.

What was the art like, we asked. All they could remember was a Van Gogh print they had seen. A print?! My husband and I stored that observation away for the drive home together.

Life in the Sub-Tropics

This man, who is some kind of champion golfer, tells me it takes a little while to adjust to the ground when he leaves for tournaments. It’s because the ground in Brisbane is soft, from all the moisture in the air. Even when it hasn’t been raining, the ground remains soft.

I like that description. I live in a city where the ground is soft. Know that, in case you should fall.

In middle-age, you are relieved that wild things continue to exist.

Many Australian trees have pom poms for flowers. Our streets and gardens in this city are lined with one such tree. A couple of weeks ago the Golden Pendas were decorated to bursting with yellow pom poms and the colourful flashes of birds.

Rainbow Lorikeets arrived as shrieking flocks. The Noisy Miner birds, which are very territorial about trees3, could normally see off a visiting bird, but the Rainbow Lorikeets were too enthusiastic for them.

To add to the chaos for the Noisy Miners, the Blue-Faced Honeyeaters arrived too, and were not only feasting on nectar but pulling sticks about for nesting season.

All of this, I could see from the couch in our living room.

The French girl loves the sounds of Australian birds so much that she has recorded their sounds on her hikes. She has never managed to see the birds making these sounds. What is this… and what is this one, I love this one?

Bellbird. Whipbird.

Last spring the plovers successfully raised their chick to adulthood on our neighbour’s lawn. It was with a constant sense of anxiety that I looked for their tiny chick each morning.

Many nights were punctured with the sounds of outraged plovers (who maddeningly and inexplicably nest on the ground4) being disturbed by something unwanted.

Young adult daughters, who are always partially concealed, always furtive, like things lost in overgrown gardens. Shapes under the vines.

In this city you can see art about death. Perhaps, because it is never that cold, memento mori means something different here. There is no sense of an ending, as there is with the dark winters of the far northern hemisphere. It is more Buddhist here; death is just part of one consciousness, with life still calling and spinning around it.

The Powerful Owls are back. I know because I sit on the deck at night5.

Observations From My Husband

My husband is describing his frustration with the unnecessary nature of his brother’s secretiveness:

“Yeah, but I’m not invested in his downfall”.

The point of my story is that with age and perspective, I have mellowed. I am telling my husband about my university days, when I trained myself to spell ‘woman’ without using the word ‘man’ in it. Did you have any of these sidetracks, I ask him.

My husband did not go to university until later in life. He spent his youth labouring. He replies, “I thought, yeah, the language is one-sided. But I never lined up on the lawn to have a big natter about it”.

My husband, flirting with me when I am DJ’ing for us one evening:

“Good mix. Good tits”.

Because he is a counsellor for teenagers and young adults, he is expert at pausing and not assuming. The therapeutic maneuver of waiting.

An Intruder

It was midnight when we saw a break-in at our neighbour’s. My husband walked through the darkness to the intruder, who was now standing over our neighbour. He grabbed the intruder by the shoulders and spun him towards him. All resistance abruptly left the intruder.

I thought about the time my husband had explained to me that whoever throws the first punch wins the fight. Nine times out of ten, he said.

But, when my husband grabbed the intruder, the movement was more like dance than preparation for a punch. I thought, this is how men communicate with one another, with the broaching of space, with audacity... with something like dance.

You’re leaving, my husband told him, and he pointed him down the hill.

Moments With My Son

My son, describing one of his best friends:

“He is funny with presents. Sometimes, you will get something very generous and other times he will be like, here’s a deck of cards I don’t want anymore”.

You’re a wog like me, where are you from, the young Croatian man asks my son. But my son and I don’t know. There is something - the high cheekbones, dark eyes, and the long legs that they both share - but from where and how much?

My Son: She’s a bit like ____. (One of my closest friends).

Me: I’ve long thought she is like Tilda Swinton.

My Son: I love the way you talk.

Oh Mum, not this song. We all hate this song.

Since when?

We all talk about it behind your back.

I laugh at the thoughtfulness, until now, to keep this from me.

Behold the foul temper of a hungry teenage child.

I am trying to let him exercise a sense of authority with us. His older sister and stepfather can’t stand it, and the truth is it is grating. Constant little arguments. An endless criticism of us.

But because it has emerged so suddenly in a goodwilled boy, I figure it must be something unstoppable in him - hormonal or instinctive. And, the easiest way to get through this is to let him achieve this thing, whatever it is.

I also remind myself of what my therapist said - it is helpful to become more human to a child when they are in a ‘black and white’ stage of thinking.

Ways to Make My Son Roll His Eyes

Me: I just stopped listening. You weren’t getting to the point.

About My Daughter

Before they take her into theatre, I notice how beautiful she is. With her cap and gown, I see more clearly her dimples, her big, sparkling blue eyes, her peaches and cream complexion.

For obvious reasons, the night before her surgery my dreams are full of vulnerable little animals and unattended babies. I reluctantly fret over them all.

She is fighting with another casual job employer. These disputes stress you out, I observe, maybe don’t put yourself at the front of them.

When that does not work, I tell her to call her Godmother, who is a Commissioner for some advice.

“Mum says I am rabble-rousing,” she announces on the call.

After she signs off, I ask her what my friend/her Godmother said. “She said this is not the time to back down”.

Signs, But of What

I kept hearing a man whisper-call my name, but no one was there.

I explain the Buddhist phrase, ‘life is suffering’ to our friends, a married couple. The woman likes the phrase, it brings her comfort. Her husband is less convinced.

He returns to telling us about their trip to Italy over Christmas. And, how they found themselves stuck in a remote house in the snow and had had to walk out to find something to eat. They ended up at a tiny restaurant, approachable only on foot, filled with locals around a fireplace.

“And because life is suffering, we had this incredible meal of rabbit”, he said.

“Exactly”, I replied.

After hand-raising them, one of the young birds flew away. She was worried about its survival and whether it was as capable of returning as they say they are. I tried to empathise, but found I couldn’t. It is too close to home for me.

This is fate or Hecate. A projection manifested for her.

Where Dreams Come From

I am showing my mother our old house on Google Maps. Look, you can drive down our street, I say. I move my finger past the motorbikes and scooters on screen, like schools of fish. But I can’t pick which house was ours.

She thinks it is this one. I tell her I don’t remember it being two stories. Yes, she says, but I could never find a reason to use the upper level, so I just left it sort of empty. For a while I thought I might paint up there, but I painted downstairs, to be around you all.

My God, I say. For years I have been having this recurring nightmare about repression and finding a forgotten upper story in whichever house I am living in. A repetition compulsion.

But turns out this revisiting and uncovering I am doing is my mother’s, not mine.

I wonder about the anxiety I feel in these nightmares, too. How I should clean it, face it, deal with it.

It was my mother’s all along6.

And, is this not a perfect illustration of how anxiety is transferred from mother to small, sensitive child?

Better Halves

Even women like my daughter and I get tired of making a fuss. We were chatting to a nice man we barely know when he unexpectedly made a joke about “beating your wife”.

We both startled and reflexively half-chuckled. But my fifteen-year-old son reacted before registering our need for politeness.

“Hey, that’s not ok,” he said, full of disgust, and I was filled with relief.

Observations From My Father

They’re gorgeous dogs, I see why you love them, he tells me.
He is awestruck when he sees an Aboriginal dance performance on his return to Australia and is moved to tears telling me about it. Tears of affection for his country but also tears of shame for its history of racism.
He used to love the international cinema club he belonged to over there and he reminisces about all the interesting films he saw. Run by a visiting New York film curator, he marvels. The strangest collection of people come together in places like that. But the club has moved on, as so many things do with expats.

Mothering Young Adults

I am trying to replace all feelings of shame with grace, all feelings of ‘what if’ with ‘so what’.

Finally

Dear Reader, sorry about not getting a newsletter out last month. I will try for two this month to make up for it. Or, God, did I say that last time? I hope not.

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Middle-Aged Women

Notes from my journal

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