Out of Time

It was the death maths that did for me, the pinpointing of the years left, that new (old) knowledge. It started a revving in my head, a pain behind my eyes, a loss of nerve so strong I could barely move. I’m not sure that anyone knew, though. I had dark circles round my eyes, I was tired, but so is every parent of a child under one. And, yes, I was tired because of F, but also because the panic – that dark, revving provocateur – came at night.

I would wake at the wrong time, filled with pointless energy, and start ripping up my life from the inside. Planning crazy schemes. I’d be giving F her milk at 4 a.m. and simultaneously mapping out my escape, mentally choosing the bag I’d take when I left, packing it (socks, laptop, towels of all types), imagining how long I’d last on my savings (not long, because I’d had children, so I didn’t have any savings). I’d be leaving the kids behind. Rediscovering the old me, the real one that was somewhere buried beneath the piles of muslin wipes and my failing forty-something body. I’d be living life gloriously. Remember how I was in my twenties? The travelling I did? That, again, but with wisdom …

Then I’d remember that I couldn’t leave the kids behind, because I loved them so much, and I’d start planning a different escape.

Even while I was doing it, I knew it was vital not to get involved in such thinking, that I really needed to stay put, to look forward. Certainly not hark back. If you keep staring at your past, believing your best times are done, you’ll be facing the wrong way for the next few decades. You’ll reverse into death, arse-first.

And, anyway, hadn’t I’d done those best times wrong? I would consider my younger self and shake my head. I’d decide on the turning points of my life and then spend hours bemoaning the way I’d dealt with them. What had I been thinking, refusing that job? Why did I waste so much time on that deadbeat dickhead? Why didn’t I prioritize what I really enjoyed, rather than trying to please other people? Why didn’t I push myself? What a waste! What a waster!

Sometimes, during the day, as I performed all the tiny, repetitive actions required of an adult when children are young – the wiping, the kissing, the picking up, the starting again – my mind would wander. Worse: it would assess. (No new parent wants assessment: they just want to get through.) I would assess my efforts – my life – so far, and all would come up juvenile and insubstantial. Grown-up epithets burnt in my mind, as though they were absolute truths. It would have been better to have your kids young. Buying a house with a garden is adulthood’s be-all-and-end-all. A good steady job, a good steady love life and a good steady pension are all vital for you to function in today’s world, and you should have established all of those by the time you were 30. At the latest.

In contrast, when I held up my own long-standing beliefs to the light, they seemed broken. The belief that convention was just that, conventional. That, if you and your family weren’t starving, money couldn’t make you much happier. That you were always better to go out than stay in. That a life packed full of experiences was more valuable than one packed full of possessions. I’d rushed around in my twenties and thirties because I’d wanted to enjoy myself out there, to live in the big world, rather than a small one based around acquisition. Where was the pleasure in contemplating the polished wondrousness of a wooden table, or a neatly maintained lawn?

In the middle of the night, when I wasn’t planning to run away, I found myself contemplating those pleasures with envy. We didn’t have a big table, or any outside space. We lived in a stuffed, scruffy flat.

I’d stuck with so many old prejudices – a hatred of wheelie suitcases, of drawer tidies for cutlery drawers – that I’d started to believe my prejudices were my personality. But my new-found late-night hobby of demented self-deconstruction made me see that they were not. They were merely affectations, kickbacks against my childhood and upbringing, the reactions of an overgrown teenager. An overgrown teenager with a family, a mortgage, a fridge-freezer, all that.

And part of my panic was caused by what a friend calls ‘the baby-cage stage’ – how small your world becomes when your child is small, and how manic and locked into it you are – and part of it was the fear of being over halfway through, and part of it was realizing that all the plans I had would remain unfulfilled.

Because I was middle-aged.

Still, could I be, really? There is something about middle age that is terrifically embarrassing. So embarrassing, in fact, that it cannot apply to me. Or you, either. We are of the mind to be young or old. There is cachet in both, even dignity. But not in between. Not in the middle.

Because we know middle age. It belongs to Jeremy Clarkson. It’s blouson leather jackets. Terrible jeans. Nasty out-of-date attitudes manifesting themselves in nasty out-of-date jokes. Long-winded explanations of work techniques that everyone else bypassed years ago. Micro-management of events that mean nothing – e.g. a cake sale. Useless competitiveness about useless stuff that actually boils down to an argument about status, such as Whose Child Is The Most Naturally Gifted? or How Amazing Was Your Holiday In That Villa Of Your Really Rich Mate? or Have You Seen Our New Kitchen? Christ. Who’d want any of that?

Nobody. Or at least nobody I know. I’m surrounded by people my own age who are convinced they’re not middle-aged. They know they’re not young – they sort of know they’re not young – but they’re definitely not middle-aged. And they’re boosted in this belief by mad midlife journalism. There are a lot of articles out there about how middle age doesn’t start until your fifties. Or your sixties. Or never. Everyone over 49 is shagging rampantly while shovelling in the drugs, apparently, just as they were in their twenties, thirties, forties …

Fine by me. Because that means it’s possible that they – that I – will switch easily from their youthful selves into well-maintained, sexy, eccentric, yet wise older citizens. No worries about middle age for us. Suddenly – preferably overnight, if that can be arranged – we will all transform into Helen Mirren and Terence Stamp (looking good!), with the added bonus of Bill Murray’s wit and insouciance. We will merely walk out of one room (marked Young) and into another (Old). No corridors in between, no panicked running from room to room, opening the wrong doors, searching for the exit.

Around this time, the death-maths time, I went for lunch with an old friend. In the 90s, he was a scabrous, hilarious journalist, a man who’d be sent to a far-right politics convention or a drugs den because he’d come back with something funny. Now, he was the same but different (like me, like us all). He was travelled, rather than travelling. And he, too, was struggling with midlife.

I told him of how hard I found it to combine work with little kids. He told me he would like to have children, ‘because then you know what to live for, what the whole point of everything is’.

We had a great lunch and he recommended a book to me. It was about survival. It told the tales of people who have successfully come through extreme events (successfully, meaning they didn’t die). The book was designed to inspire others to reassess their approach to life, meant to excite us boring people into living without fear.

The book was jam-packed with action. A woman was shot by her husband in front of her children. A man was attacked – part-eaten! – by a bear. Another woman had a daughter, a healthy, beautiful, 4-year-old daughter, who caught a virus and died.

God, I hated that book. But there was an image in it that stayed. I can’t remember now why it was mentioned, how it came up, but it was about a chess game. I’ll tell it as I saw it – as I see it – in my head. It’s like a recurring dream.

I am in a bar. It’s a great bar, filled with stimulating people I know a little, but not so well that they’ve heard all my best anecdotes. Someone convivial invites me to play a chess game. ‘Hell, yes!’ I shout, and sit down, slopping my caipirinha as I do so. It doesn’t matter. I am funny, good-looking and clever. Everyone in the room loves me. I am sure to win, but also, as I don’t really care about chess, I’m going to win simply by playing as I wish. No strategy, no sell-out, but many thrilling, unexpected moves that simply pop into my head. Because I’m great!

After about an hour when, in truth, I haven’t really been concentrating on what’s been going on, I go out of the room for a moment. When I come back, the atmosphere is different. The bar seems colder. All the exciting people have disappeared. The lights have dimmed; the person I’m playing chess with is hard to make out clearly.

I look down at the chessboard and see that my hot-headed, non-strategic play has meant that I have lost some vital pieces: a bishop, both rooks, a knight, several pawns. Where did they go? How could I have discarded them so unthinkingly? My armoury is diminished. Moves have taken place that I didn’t even notice, and now my position is weak.

I can see that it’s going to be tough to get anything at all out of this particular match. I’ve played it too casually. I’ve played it all wrong.

I say, with a smile: ‘Perhaps I could start again?’

And someone – my opponent, my conscience, God – answers me, in a voice that’s quiet and calm, but that fills the room, makes my ears ring, my stomach shudder: ‘No. This is the game.’

This is the game.

So I did the only thing I could think of that didn’t involve running away: I wrote about how I was. The fact of being over halfway through my life, and the feelings that fact created. The Observer ran the article I wrote, accompanied by a photograph of me, in a lot of make-up, looking younger than I usually do. This was very kind, though not so useful for the piece.

The article’s title was ‘Is This It?’ And it was, I suppose. Except I couldn’t seem to shake off the uncomfortable feeling, the anxiety itch.

I was still in the grips of my teeny tiny crise d’un certain age (French = more exciting), and it still didn’t show. No alarms and no surprises. I yearned for my desperation to become more flamboyant; I was like the child with stomach-ache who wants a bruise, a plaster, an ambulance rush to A&E. Nothing occurred.

It was pathetic. Who was I kidding? I didn’t pack my bag anywhere except in my head. I couldn’t leave, and a quiet crisis seems, to everyone outside it, like no crisis at all. Why couldn’t I turn my panic into flight – abandon my home, even for a few months – to have a true middle-aged catastrophe? Why didn’t I shag a builder, or a bendy yoga dullard? Why wasn’t I taking a long, solo hike across an unfamiliar landscape, pausing only to meet authentic people who would tell me the meaning of life?

I talked to S about this. I said: ‘Would you mind if I staged a midlife drama, if I left you and wandered around a bit for a couple of months?’

He said: ‘Not a bother. As long as you take the kids.’

On the radio, I heard a writer talking. There was a five-part series of his musings, inspired by the lengthy hikes he takes across cities. An imposing man, he mostly walks at night. I quite fancied this, but it’s a different prospect, going for solo rambles in the early hours when you’re a shortish woman. I thought about cycling, or going for 3 a.m. drives, but both seemed pointless – plus slowing down to talk to a pedestrian when you’re in a car at night could easily give the wrong impression. Also, I still had the days to get through, sorting the kids and earning a living; and S was going away for work, so – babysitting bills.

Still. As a result of the ‘Is This It?’ article, I got a deal from a publisher to write a book about midlife. A book. This book. And I tried to write it. God, I tried. I would bundle P to school and F to the child-minder, and then I would go to the kitchen and sit in front of my laptop, and put my coffee next to it to the right and my phone (switched to silent) to the left; and I would try to write. But the words didn’t come easy, and I had to earn a living, so I would put the book aside and go back to journalism. The quick turnaround kept me busy.

It might have been the head-mush you get when your children are small. Or denial, I suppose. But for some reason, I didn’t seem to be able to approach middle age face on. I couldn’t see it clearly. The panic was there, the Fear, the feelings. I knew how to write about them. But the fundamental crisis seemed to be happening off-camera, just out of sight, weaving itself in and around my everyday life without ever becoming distinct.

For a while, instead of writing, I talked to people. I tried to separate the personal from the more universal. Some of what I was churned up about seemed only to do with me, and some of it was timeless, a classic midlife shock and recalibration, and some of it was hooked into the time I was in, where we all were right now.

There is an element of middle age that is the same for anyone who thinks about it. Not just the death maths, but how the death maths affects your idea of yourself. Your potency and potential. Your thrusting, optimistic, silly dreams, such as they are. As they were … They’ve been forced to disappear. Suddenly, you’ve reached the age where you know you won’t ever play for your favourite football team. Or own a house with a glass box on the back. Or write a book that will change the world.

More prosaically, you can’t progress in your job: your bosses are looking to people in their twenties and thirties because younger workers don’t cost so much or – and this is the punch in the gut – they’re better at the job than you are. Maybe you would like to give up work but you can’t, because your family relies on your income, so you spend your precious, dwindling time, all the days and weeks and months of it, doing something you completely hate. Or you sink your savings into a long-nurtured idea and you watch it flounder and fail. Or your marriage turns strange. You don’t understand each other any more.

In short, you wake one day and everything is wrong. You thought you would be somewhere else, someone else. You look at your life and it’s as unfamiliar to you as the life of an eighteenth-century Ghanaian prince. It’s as though you went out one warm evening – an evening fizzing with delicious potential, so ripe and sticky-sweet you can taste it on the air – you went out on that evening for just one drink … and woke up two days later in a skip. Except you’re not in a skip, you’re in an estate car, on the way to an out-of-town shopping mall to buy a balance bike, a roof rack and some stackable storage boxes.

‘It’s all a mistake!’ you shout. ‘I shouldn’t be here! This life was meant for someone else! Someone who would like it! Someone who would know what to do!’

You see it all clearly now. You blink your eyes, look at your world, at your gut, your ugly feet in their awful shoes and think: I’ve done it all wrong.

I joined internet forums about midlife crisis where men – it was mostly men – lamented their mistakes.

‘I could have done more, been more successful, been a better person,’ said one. ‘I used to be someone but now I’m just part of the crowd.’

‘Maybe,’ said another, ‘I should just resign myself to the fact that I’m not what I used to be. But, see, this is my problem, I can’t …’

Women talked too. A friend’s Facebook status: ‘… the slow realization over the past year that I’ve messed it up. I’ve had a crap start in life and I went on to make a series of poor decisions, so now I’ve made my bed, I’ve got to lie in it. I could be so much more than a fat, grey, toothless, 44-year-old harpy living in a fucking council house with one child who despises me, another who will never live independently, and a marriage that will forever be in recovery … I know it’s up to me to change things. What’s not entirely clear is how to choose the right path. Because I don’t know where I’m going …’

I spoke to a friend who said: ‘I wonder if we messed it up for ourselves, having such a good time when we were young.’

We are each of our age. We share a culture, whether The Clangers, or Withnail, or ‘Voodoo Ray’. Our heroes are communal, our references the same. Everyone has their own story, but it’s shaped by the time in which it’s told.

I’ve always enjoyed being part of something bigger. In the late 80s, I believed in rave and the power of the collective. Even now I like crowds, especially when music is playing; I love gigs, clubbing, festivals, marches, football matches, firework displays. I’m not mad about the hassle of getting to those places, but once I’m there, I’m fully in. As long as it isn’t too mediated, so that you can feel in and of an experience or an audience, so you are there, singly, but also consumed within a whole other entity, the crowd. The crowd has its own emotions, its own rhythm.

It’s good to lose yourself in that. I find it comforting to feel as others do, to share a moment; to know that I’m unique, but not that special. I like to know that what I’m going through, while personal to me, is also part of a pattern.