Welcome to Croning

I stumbled upon The Women’s Wheel of Life at just the right moment. I was reexamining the realm of what I will call “women’s spirituality”—something I embraced in my youth, grew skeptical of in my 20s, and had mostly forgotten about by my 30s. I was, at the moment I’m speaking of, trying to imagine what my life would be like once I was no longer engaged in full-contact parenting. (Years later, I have yet to leave full-contact parenting behind, but that’s a story for another day.) As I considered the popular trope of the Triple Goddess, I struggled to see where I fit into this triad. I was surely no virgin. I was looking toward a future in which mother would not be my defining role. But I didn’t feel quite ready to identify as a crone. Elizabeth Davis and Carol Leonard offered me a new category: matriarch. I loved their suggestion that I was stepping into my full power and ready to be a leader.

As it happens, I have become something of a leader in middle age and, in my political activism I still aspire to Final Boss. This didn’t happen, though, until I made the choice to embrace cronedom. No shade to anyone who finds matriarch to be an aspirational archetype. Matriarch away, my sisters! But I am here to talk about how I learned to love the crone.

An origin story, if you will

I was at a conference in Austin, Texas. I was there because a client paid my way and, to this day, I don’t entirely understand what this conference was about. “Tech” seemed to be the overarching theme, but beyond that… Anyhow, this one-syllable descriptor should be enough to tell you that women were thin on the ground and that people over 40—people over 40 without venture capital to spend—were also outliers. I would also guess that most of the attendees were engaged in some sort of biohacking (bless their hearts), so the fact that I was a woman over 40 who ate bread made from wheat, not cauliflower, and didn’t bulletproof my coffee made me some kind of unicorn. Just not the good kind.

I took detailed notes and asked good questions at the panel discussions and whatnot, but the socializing—I mean networking—aspects of this weekend filled me with a kind of anxiety I hadn’t experienced for a while but, of course, still found familiar. I was, once again, a short, kind of fat, not especially attractive girl wanting desperately to be liked.

On the second night we were all bussed out to a farm-to-table situation. It was all very lovely in a barn wedding kind of way, but I was on my own and anxious. I did my best to be likeable, and I did all right! I mean, I’ve had a lifetime of rocking a “great personality,” so…

I was standing close to the bar, talking with one of the many fit young men who were there when another fit young man stepped right in front of me, in between me and my conversational partner, while I was in midsentence. It was as if I wasn’t there at all. Now, I knew enough to understand that there are few categories of human less consequential than a woman who has allowed herself to age, but this was the first time I had ever been treated as if I was not just undesirable but, rather, actually invisible. My young friend had the grace to look conflicted, but I spared him the difficulty of making a choice by drifting away.

The next day, I stepped into the elevator at the hotel where the conference was happening. The car was full when I entered but, after a few stops, it was just me and another woman of a certain age wearing the same lanyard as me.

“We should create our own panel,” I said.

“Right here. In this elevator,” she responded. “We should call it ‘If You Keep Putting Quarters In The Machine Until Your Clothes Are Actually Dry They Won’t Smell Like That.’” She got off at the next floor and took a little piece of my heart with her.

I now recognize this confluence of events as a moment when something began to shift for me. The idea of being eager to appeal to a cohort that, yes, did smell faintly of damp just seemed silly. What, after all, did I want from these boys? What, truly, did they have to offer me? How much wisdom did they miss out on when they looked right past me and my elevator crush without even registering us as a people of value? I wonder what those boys are doing now. I wonder like an old school teacher might wonder, or a former babysitter. I hope they’re doing well, and I hope they’ve learned to keep the dryer going until their clothes are actually dry.

As said above, I’ve got no beef with anyone choosing the matriarch lifestyle. If we’re lucky, we live a long time—long compared to our ancestors—and American culture is famously youth-obsessed. I get wanting to embrace a stage of life that isn’t young but isn’t quite old. But I have chosen to lean into cronehood because, to me, it’s a liberating choice. I can’t say that the crone exists beyond the bonds of patriarchy, but I can say that crones are free from caring about many of patriarchy’s demands. To put this another way, I am close to having coveralls or overalls for each day of the week and I am loving it.

This I why I asked some friends to help me create Croning. We plan to make the first issue available in early December.

Get old with me.