After a chance encounter at the library, I no longer hide my age

A few years ago, I was standing at a counter in my local library while a 50-something bloke at a computer was filling in a form so that I could borrow books. We’d spelled out my name, dealt with my address, and the cursor on his computer screen moved to a box where he would fill in my date of birth. He gave me an amused look, and a corner of his mouth turned down.

“I don’t think ‘woman of a certain age’ will fit in this space,” he said.

Women who are judged no longer young, no longer beautiful, are covertly punished for it. Credit: Getty

At the suggestion of a smirk on his face, something inside me that had been tightly wound sprang loose.

“No need to try,” I snapped. “Because I am a woman of a specific age. We all are.” I told him the numbers and watched as he typed them in.

I’d been thinking about it for a while, this discomfort that arose whenever my age was mentioned. After the milestone of 40, I’d realised I’d begun to avoid confiding it to strangers, but also, it had to be admitted, to friends and acquaintances. It was a discomfort with roots buried deep in the shame women are made to feel for no longer being young, and I guessed it had been instilled early. All those overheard conversations in which grown-ups described someone they knew as “mutton dressed as lamb” – a judgment only ever directed at women.

In her essay, The Double Standard of Ageing, Susan Sontag details the ways women evade answering questions about their age, depending on who is doing the asking. Sontag says: “For a woman to be obliged to state her age, after ‘a certain age’, is always a miniature ordeal”. We hold the knowledge of our birth year as our secret, our private property, and it is “something of a dirty secret”.

Unfortunately, in our culture, there is a barely concealed revulsion for the female body in anything other than its youthful, firm, and blemish-free form. It is this horror of the ageing female that women are attempting to defend against when they indulge in age denial; it is what fuels the anti-ageing beauty business, this almost universal fear of being seen as the witch, the virago, the crone. Women who are judged no longer young, no longer beautiful, are covertly punished for it, and women do the punishing as often as men.

There was a moment, years ago now, when I wondered whether it would be possible to defeat time, to erase its traces on my face. Was I prepared to consider plastic surgery? I thought of all those stretched, tucked and injected faces of ageing Hollywood stars, and the answer had to be an emphatic, No!

Having long passed the milestones of 40, 50 and 60, I was staring at my 70th birthday when I began the arduous task of growing the chemical colour out of my hair. The in-between stage was a bit of a nightmare. But once through it, I felt an enormous sense of freedom: freedom from the tyranny of hairdressers who had terrorised me for decades with expensive cuts and colours that I’d too often come home and cried over; freedom from chemicals being regularly absorbed through my scalp and doing goodness knows what to my body’s various life-sustaining systems.

Most of all, there was the freedom from pretence – I felt more authentic in my own skin. And the hair wasn’t at all a bad colour; there were natural streaks of light and dark, as if I’d paid for some expensive highlights. Grey really is a colour, I thought, and I soon discovered on Instagram a world of other women who think so, too.

The truth is that if we hold our age as “a dirty little secret”, if we lie about it when asked, we are giving our girls and young women no path to follow other than the one we ourselves took, and that is the path through the swamp of fear and self-loathing. It’s the path that plants the terror of becoming the crone without even the smallest nod of gratitude towards the stupendous gift of simply being alive.

The result is mutual deprivation: old women are unable to contribute their experience and wisdom, and young women have no role models to show them how to manage their own inevitable ageing. They are left marooned, unable to imagine a way forward beyond middle age, and further on into the kind of old age that, if they are lucky enough to reach it, they might be willing, even proud, to be able to live.

It leaves girls and young women with no clues as to how they will navigate their 50s, 60s, and beyond, how they might discover, and expect comfort from discovering, an authentic identity for themselves as older women.

Bloomer (Affirm Press) by Carol Lefevre is out now.

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