Sitting in a cafe recently, I saw a poster advertising a barista training course for young people interested in a career in hot beverages. Things in the NHS being what they are, I enjoyed losing myself in a fantasy future spent standing behind a sleek, shiny machine, having witty exchanges with customers and colleagues as I skilfully poured smooth, foaming milk into silky dark espresso, tipping and turning each cup to create my own unique artworks on the coffee surface.
That was until I read the small print, which included the rather brutal definition of “young people” as aged 18 to 24. I realised, with an internal gasp, that my limited ability to pour liquid without spilling it was not the only obstacle to this career choice. There was a core personal reality here from which I had become totally untethered: the passing of time.
This untethering is bad news for anyone interested in building a better life. A lot of nonsense is spoken and sung and written on plates and pencil cases about how we should all stay young and never grow old. But I’ve discovered as a therapist and as a patient in psychoanalysis that the capacity to anchor yourself in the reality of time passing is fundamental to good mental health, and to the potential for life to get better.
Whether it’s infancy, toddlerhood, childhood, adolescence, young adulthood, midlife, early old age or your final chapter, every new life stage brings the opportunity to mourn the loss of what has gone before, to grow through and around it, and develop into the person you are right now. It is a chance to work through something and change. So buying into the “age is just a number” philosophy – consciously or unconsciously – robs us of the valuable experience of feeling rooted in our personal timeline. Of feeling rooted in something true.
Middle age has a reputation for being staid and frumpy. But when I got stuck into the interviews about this life stage for my book about growing up throughout adulthood, I saw that it can be a particularly fertile period for people who can face the reality that there will soon be more time behind them than there is ahead. Recognising this obvious but shocking fact meant this chapter of their lives was not lacklustre, but more full of life than the ones that went before, fuelled by a different kind of energy. This moment was a chance to make important changes and focus on what they really wanted from their second half.
As I now enter my midlife, I am clearly struggling to truly believe that my “young person” chapter is ending. I think it’s because I don’t want to accept the losses.
We expect the feelings of loss that follow a death. As devastating as this grief can be, it can sometimes feel more understandable than the losses that come with life, development and growth. My young daughter has helped me to see this very clearly, forcing me to face ordinary losses that leave me totally gutted. Her “gooster”, which a week later became her scooter will never again be a “gooster”. I was not prepared for this loss of a word that seemed so entirely her, which has now been so carelessly dropped by her – but longingly clung to by me.
This is my most painful work of motherhood so far. Aside from the sleep deprivation. And the mastitis. OK, maybe not the most painful, but it’s up there. How to let these parts of her go, while understanding they are still inside her somewhere; how to let her become her own person, rather than getting so caught up in my own feelings about who she has been to me. How to hold and love her tightly and loosely at the same time, giving her the space to grow into the child, then adolescent, then adult she will be. Some mornings, I collect her from her cot and am momentarily stunned: who is this child who looks so much older than the toddler I sang to sleep last night? Where is my baby?
It’s that moment of shock – like the internal gasp when I read the small print of the poster in the cafe – that jolts me out of my comfortable bubble, reintroducing me to the devastating reality of the passing of time and the losses it brings. The good news is that when the bubble pops, growth becomes possible. If we can allow ourselves to move in and out and back again through the different life stages – as my daughter moves through toddlerhood, and as I move into midlife – we can grow around our younger selves, not away from ourselves.
It’s like Gianna Williams told me, speaking of her work as a child, adolescent and adult psychoanalyst: “We’re always finding the infant, the young child, the adolescent in the patient. Like the circles in a tree, they’re all there.” That’s what it means to me to grow up, rather than just growing older. And if we can keep doing that, then we have a chance at building a better life until our very end.
• Moya Sarner is an NHS psychotherapist and the author of When I Grow Up – Conversations With Adults in Search of Adulthood
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