You're listening to a mother mea podcast. Mamma Mere acknowledges the traditional owners of land and waters that this podcast is recorded on. No one likes an angry woman, not me and not you. So screechy, so shrill, so alienating, so annoying. Turn her down, turn her off, kick her out. Problem is, friends, Rage is a wave that women have been trying to ride, tame quiet for a lifetime. Some have more reason to be furious than others, and those
women obviously are the ones. We tolerate it from the least. But in midlife rage crashes over many of us at force, uncontainable, unstoppable, all powerful. I woke up one day and even my hair was irritated. Furious at every inconvenience, rageful at every injustice, impatient with everything from the kettle to the Prime minister. Incapable of forming the smiling mask of a patient mother, respectful employee, supportive partner, dutiful daughter.
I think on screen, come on, stop this.
E My midlife fury was bursting out and splattering walls. It frightened me. I needed it fixed. The doctor's offices of Australia are full of women asking for their rage to be reined in so we can get on with things, working, caring, making the world turn. I wasn't the only one who was frightened. The power of female rage has been terrifying for millennia. It's why hysterical women have been demonized, locked away, even lost their lives. But is anger really that unreasonable
a response to forty odd years as a woman. Is our midlife anger purely hormonal, tomatic of an estrogen plunge?
Or are we just sick of this shit? After all, there's so much to be rageful about, after decades of making nice, of being overlooked or dismissed, oggled or rejected, of trying to sneak under the radar of dangerous men, years and years of sitting pretty and nodding politely and apologizing and forgiving and peacemaking and saying it's fine, I'm fine, it's fine, and making everybody else's lives run smoothly while
yours spotters and strains. And now here you are, at your most wise and powerful, and yet you have never been so pitied. Oh dear, look at you, still around, still here, still striving for relevance, still having opinions and wearing clothes and having a face so cute A midlife women angry? Or are they just shouting so you notice them like a poltergeist flinging vases around the world. Is it the estrogen or is it the universe? Unclear? But look, I'm sorry this has all sounded a bit angry, hasn't
it a bit rageful? I do apologize. No one likes an angry woman, especially not me. Hello, I am Holly Wainwright, and I am mid midlife, mid family, mid meltdown some days on mid our podcast for gen X women who are anything. But you might have heard, and if you haven't, just have a little scroll back that we've already talked candidly about joy, about pleasure, about self care. We've been honest about money, and about booze, and about bodies and
about kids. But today, friends, I invite you to do something legitimately scary, something that's going to feel weird, rebellious, ugly. I invite you to lay down your smiling mask and embrace that furious little goblin that's curled up in because today we're talking about rage. It's okay, you don't have to pretend here. We know that being an angry woman
is the worst. But we also know that as we keep sawing into mid territory, it becomes harder on some days more than others, to pretend that we have chill. We have no chill, friends, when our rollercoaster hormones and our busy lives are clanging into each other at speed, and today's guest has no time for the it's fine mask. She has been through too much and lives with a lot, and has sought the wisdom to grasp the damage that chill can do to us if we don't sometimes pass
the mic to our furious little goblins. Jacinta Parsons wrote a wonderful, sharp and clever book about midlife called A Question of Age. I inhaled it before we spoke, and I urge you to do that too if you enjoy what's about to happen. Jacinta is an ABC Radio presenter, a writer, a journalist, a midlife woman who's got a big career and it's also a mother and also lives
with a chronic illness. We talk about that she has over the past few years made a series of big changes to her life to live a better mid one, one where she's not pretending about relationships, about work, about
her health. In this conversation, we talk about those moments when you're suddenly jolted by how the world sees you, how to distinguish between an impulsive hormonal episode and a big, serious change you need to make, and why exactly it's so complicated dealing with the transition from young to old. Jacinta's book is brilliant about rage and plenty of other things, but it's not rageful, and nor is she. Rather, she is a delight and we had the best time talking.
So put down the mask and join us, me and just into Parsons to talk about anger. Since I have a question, right, I want to know if midlife women are full of rage really or are we just shouting because nobody can see us anymore and invisible creatures have to make noise a bit like a Poltergeists. We're throwing vases across the room, Like, are we really rageful? Or is it just that we need to shout to be heard?
I love that. I think it's two things. I think one hundred percent correct. We've become ghost like suddenly we're see through and it is a bit poltergeist like where we're turning on lights to try and get the attention of people who live in our homes with us. Perhaps because right across the country when I've spoken to women about this, the invisibility thing happens actually earlier than I
think we would imagine it does. The invisibility is actually a really serious issue for so many cohorts of women, and it's actually dangerous. And that's where I think legitimate rage is as well. We have rage for the fact that we are not heard and that we are not seen, and that we are not safe.
That is one hundred percent true. It's often the first whiff of it that women get is about a visible invisibility. I really loved the point you made in your book because it's tied back in a thread through the sort of shock of our visibility that happens so quickly in our teenageyears. And you write about that as being a moment or not not even necessarily teenageers, but our young ears that you're sort of walking down the street and it's almost like the ground is shifting beneath you, and
you can feel a force moving. Do you think that that's one of the things is that we get this shock of visibility and we learn how to deal with it, and then it disappears and we're discombobulated.
Yeah, and I think it's even more than just sort of acknowledging that suddenly we've become objectified and sexualized as young as eleven. Apparently the research tells us that girls
that young are being objectified on our streets. But what it does is it creates for us this sense of ownership, really unconscious half the time, very covert, but this idea that we're owned by the eyes that look at us from the outside and we're valued that way and truly our safety, our currency, our ability to get jobs, all the things that we have found ourselves suddenly in the world doing changes. I think it's easy to sort of discount this as kind of a vanity exercise of oh,
now I'm not getting tutored on the street. What this really is, though, is the changing regard that we have when our sexual utility changes, like when we're not as desirable anymore in that particular way, then the interest of the world in us is diminished. And I think that is really at the heart of it, and that's what ties us to that little girl. Is neither of these states are wanted.
What was interesting to me. You write an anecdote in your book about the moment that you realized you were old in this way, that kind of visibility, the street invisibility, if you like, Tell me about when you and your friends were walking through the city on a beautiful evening.
Because I think so many women have this experience too, where for so long, I guess, you know, regardless of how the feminism arrives in you, there is definitely a rolled eyes. Oh god, what we have to deal with on the streets as young girls, you know, and it's like, oh, I got whistled. I can't walk down the street without being kind of harassed in whatever way, and then the
shock when it stops. So my friends and I were walking down, you know, a fairly regular street in Melbourne, and we're in a group and we're approaching a work site and we knew that there were men there, and you know, almost like you know, it was a practice response. We all kind of got stiff and a little and thought, oh, here we go, and we walked past and nothing happened. So rather than the usual oh my goodness, it was oh my goodness, what happened? Do we not look good tonight.
What's really interesting in that is that moment of, oh my god, am I not really a feminist? Have I also really just been after this the whole time? And do? I really love it? But what's really interesting is that we've been so conditioned to be validated in that way that when it left, it was actually a shock.
The same thing happened to me. I remember very clearly a moment when I was walking down the street with a young coworker. This is years ago, and she was in her twenties or whatever, and we're walking down a busy street in Sydney and a car beaped and I turned to her and I said, I didn't know that people still beaped at girls in the street.
And then I.
Had this moment where I went, oh, yes they do. They just don't be put me in the street anymore. And what's really interesting about it, as you're saying, is it's complicated because it's not that you want to be beeped at, but it's that you've literally spent twenty years or however long like valuing yourself that we're seeing yourself
that way, or just learning to deal with it. I love that you wrote about how what happens to us in that period of intense visibility that you go through at that young age is we learn to see ourselves through the male gaze, and we learn to see each other through the male gaze, and that's how we value each other. So when that's taken away, of course, it's a recalibration, right, it should be freeing, and it is freeing.
But I remember feeling a little bit like, oh, well, I'm safe now in the world, which isn't true, but also it's jolting because your value is plummeted in the eyes of society. Is that how you kind of felt.
One hundred percent? That's so accurate, isn't it to how you know, something that we got very acclimatized to and we adapted to, and we put up with and we dealt with when that's suddenly gone, though, I think it's not only perceived value, it is actually value that we
see ourselves and how we're treated in the world. Then, as the years kind of tumble forward, and I think the compassion that we need for what people do in that regard, you know, try and keep themselves looking young, and all the things that we go to do that needs to be understood and kind of given some leeway through that frame, understanding that we are just trying to recalibrate and understand our value in this world.
And maybe try and make ourselves still visible because we're kind of working out whether we can still play by those rules or not exactly.
And again, this is not about vanity and it's I mean, of course it is in some regard, but it's not because our value has truly been linked to our youth and to whether we are sexually interesting or desirable the world outside of us. So it's not a fancy of ours. This is something that we've been constructed to understand and believe but also experience.
The reason why that can often be a rage, Like one of the things that makes us furious is because once you are invisible, and again we play this out in just everyday situations like being ignored at the bar, or people not really listening to you when you're talking in a group situation, or whatever. It might be that sort of slightly patronizing voice that people sometimes use. When you suddenly notice it being used towards you, that is infuriating. Right.
One of the things that strikes me as one of the big paradoxes is that here we are at a point in our life where we have been through a lot, often where we are wise and we understand a lot, and it's the point at which we sort of are also broadly a bit pitied and patronized. Inside, I feel like I'm at my most powerful in lots of ways. That makes you really cross.
I feel like inside my mind, my most recent book that I'm just finishing is actually speaking to seventy eighty and ninety year old women, and it's exactly that this doesn't diminish as we get older. In fact, that infantilization and that diminishment of us as women probably increases in more overt ways where we get spoken to like we're
little darlings and deers. And it's exactly that we are in our greatest power, our greatest wisdom, our greatest comfort, in our bodies, potentially the sense of who we are is potentially at its clearest, and suddenly we don't exist anymore. And of course that makes us angry, because it's just about validating that utility has always been connected to our desirability, and there's nothing more frustrating and aggravating than that.
After this shortbreak, we hear how to sinter transform to rage into wisdom and ask if we can do it too, please? What's your relationship with rage? Like your last book was also about living with a chronic invisible illness, you have
been living with crones? Is that correct? Since you're in your early twenties, so being hospitalized and going through a lot of surgery and procedures at a time when I imagine a lot of your contemporaries were off abusing their bodies and having a good time, that must have been difficult to suppress rage through. Have you found ways to live alongside rage?
It's such a beautiful question, especially connected with illness. It's something I had to directly address. You're so right. I was really cross, mainly because I felt so isolated in the experience, and I was cross. You know, I would be fuming quietly at my friends for not understanding things, and for not being there at the times, and for not understanding the gravity of the experience that I was
going to. But there was, you know, a real clear moment for me where I realized that that doesn't solve any problems. In fact, it creates more. With that kind of rage where you are angry about a situation, but you're projecting it elsewhere. I found a piece in it. Actually, I found that there was no way to continue and
perpetually go that way. And there is this moment I suppose that a lot of people get to, which is an acceptance of where you are with illness, for example, and a way to accommodate it that's powerful rather than reductive. And it really helped me love beyond myself.
Is there a literal way that you did that. Did you study deeply? Did you meditate? Did you find faith?
Like?
How did you get to that level of being able to accept your hand as it were?
It was hitting the bottom significantly where I felt like I was either going to stay there forever or to find my way to take responsibility. And it's a really hard thing to talk about because illness particularly is one of those states that we don't choose. So therefore, what can I take responsibility for when it's not mine in the first place? Really, but responsibility in that way, I think, is okay, how am I going to do this? How
will it look for me? And so I decided that I would do a really good job of illness and I would find the joy in it. And that sounds
really clear, and it sounds like a Hallmark card. But through meditation, you're one hundred percent ride through studying what it is like to have a body that doesn't work, and to think about our bodies differently, that they're not who I am, and that it shows me something, it's teaching me something, it's showing me through the limitations that it's giving me that actually, ah, there's another way, there's another way. It also showed me not to be fearful.
There was so much fear in illness and what could happen, and when it did, I was like, ah, I'm actually really strong.
That's interesting. I don't want to say after your illness, because I know that's not the case. You're living with your illness. But you became a mother unexpectedly, right almost well, not enexpectedly, but as in you weren't sure your body
could do it, but your body could do it. And I remember feeling that kind of air of invincibility after I had my first child, actually thinking if I can do that, I can do all kinds of things, and that in a way, it's interesting that it's a time when the world almost tricks you, because similarly, in a way to the aging process, when you become a mother, you also get a little bit of that padded on the head, like you're just mummy now, like let's talk to mom. You know, how's mom and Bob doing today?
You know that kind of very infanticizing bullshit.
I feel so strongly about that stuff, and I rejected it for that reason. I just.
Well, you rejected it so much I read, which I loved that you refuse to go to mother's.
Ground my partner instead. I was like, I don't want to be that thing.
It's a time when the world is trying to trick us into thinking that we're weak, when actually we've just been through something and probably for very many of us and very many of the women listening to this, in all kinds of manners of difficult, challenging, painful, traumatic ways, we've actually just been something that's only made us stronger. So it's like the world's constantly trying to say little you when you're like, no, the size of me is unfathomable. Again, no wonder we're angry.
I could go back. Yeah, it is such a crime, isn't it. At our greatest strength, we are given you know, straws to fight the world with. Really, it's such an injustice, isn't it. It is?
And it's kind of a cruel trick in a way. So the thing that happens in this peer of midlife when you are wrestling with this identity and this invisibility, which, as we've said, is kind of a symptom of the changing of your identity from young to old, and there's a line that suddenly you've crossed and you kind of need the outside world to signal it to you. A lot of us go through a period of change then, and I know that you've been through a lot of
change in this past couple of years. You have changed your professional life, your personal life. You know, you've made a lot of adjustments to the way you live. How do you think women recalibrate this time without kind of making wild gestures at the world. You know that we might have once called a midlife crisis that might be ill advised. So like trying to entangle necessary change from just a reaction to all of this.
Ah, again, you've got to stop asking great questions. Because I had to check myself in the big changes I was making, and someone did look a bit and said, just be careful, this isn't your perimenopause kind of creating for you a desire again. I hope this doesn't sound too woo woo, but I really think one of the great aspects of the feminine is connection. You know, to really feel when either you're emotional and you're having an emotional reaction and you're upset and you're angry, or you
know the answer. And when you know the answer, as I did to both of those big life changes, you know, breaking up a twenty five year marriage and changing my kind of job life, I just knew.
Had you been ignoring that knowing for a long time? Do you think no?
But it became just clear. I just remember, oh right, that's the answer, you know, those moments where you just know. And I think what I had done previously in my life was try and find all the reasons why that might not be true, or you know, complicate what is true. So I think that was the first thing for me. This is true, this needs to change. And then the question is, okay, well, how do I go about this in the most loving and constructive way? What is the
best way to do this change? So, if you're changing and your feelings of change, I think are in those moments of throwing the world up and shooting it all out and breaking windows and stuff. Maybe that is the symptom of the restlessness and the rage that comes from other things that you just want to change things.
Because where you are just feels too impossibly itchy and uncomfortable.
But I think we'd always know the answer, and I think it's just going back to the old ways of trusting ourselves when we do sit quietly, when we do meditate, when we do have that knowing that we have the confidence to then strategize, then use our other parts of us to work out, Okay, how do I actually do this well?
And did you feel like that path opened up before you or did you have to hack it out with a machete?
Now I think it opened up, but it wasn't like use your short thing, but there was definitely for both of those. Just once you make a decision, then the world does kind of start providing the answers, not because of magic, but because you've opened up your mind to see them. Now, Oh okay, well that could be a solution, because the hardest thing is to make this decision to change how that change happens is a myriad of possibilities.
More of my conversation with your Sinterer Parsons coming up next about age rage and how you decide it is the moment to make those big life changes. It's also tricky because often by a midlife we've been doing whatever it is we're doing, whether that's in relationship or work, for quite a long time, and it's a very big part of our identity. Were you afraid of making those kind of changes, particularly say your work life for example.
I mean, I know that you're still doing all kinds of creative things and you are still on radio and Melbourne. But when you decided to step back from a daily show that was obviously a big part of your life, did you worry about who you'd be.
Yes, absolutely, because you know that they're the things that come and get you at three o'clock in the morning. Have I done the wrong thing? Why did I do this? I have done this sort of stuff before, where something's
happened and I've thought, no, I've got a change. And what I do in that moment is make sure that while I'm still in that situation, that I'm very cognizant of why I'm doing it so that I don't mythologize the situation I was in and think, oh, I was actually the best time of my life, and what have I done in that moment of change? You think, I'm doing this for these reasons. Whether it's right or wrong to make this choice, it's a choice I have to make,
so whatever happens from here, this is the path. I'm not going to regret it or think that it wasn't the right thing to do.
And I think you're right about them being no such thing as a perfect choice. It is something we need to let go of.
That's it. We have to let go of that. When you talk about identity, though, the thing that really shocked me was breaking up my relationship. I was very aware of my work identity and how much that had made me feel certain ways and positive things about myself. But I had no idea how much I had actually really identified as a mother and as a family until quite a few months, even further down the track after it
was gone. That's sort of when it hit me. It's like, Wow, I had no concept that I had really bought that so hard, you know, being someone who didn't go to mother's groups and you know, I'm just a free will and goal and then it was gone, and that was a shock to me. And I think the truth of how we feel in these circumstances is so important to try and reckon with so that you don't find yourself in those kind of moments of oh, had no idea.
Had I been more truthful about how much I considered myself and identified as a mother and as a partner and as a family, I think I would have been able to deal with that perhaps a little bit better.
Did you have to kind of find a group of people to be around you during that time who would help you sort of push into this new identity.
I think actually I did the opposite. I think I realized that part of this was about being alone and how I would find myself alone, and I sort of felt like I had to go through the fire with that and have those moments of really attending to how it feels on Christmas Eve when you're by yourself, and to not rush it to sort of sit in that but also not get consumed by it. But it needs its space to grieve the change. Changes and choices aren't just all about this unending you know, leaping through the
air with joy. It's also about the grief of goodbye formerselves. I think that's really legitimate and really important that as we evolve and as we move, as we change as women, that we're also allowing ourselves to say goodbye to parts of us that are no longer there.
Absolutely, because the temptation is the alone on Christmas Eve situation, is to fill that diary, reach for that wine, make everything be busy and buzzing and hectic, to distract far harder, but ultimately better to sit with it.
Yeah, and just to ask yourself in those moments, why am I here? And the reason you're there is because you know of really beautiful things and really important things. It's not because you're a deficit. It's because you've made brave choices that aren't always the easiest to live with all the time.
Back to rage for a moment, back to my angry, fist shaking self. So being consumed by it is no way to live, as we just discussed when you're talking about how you have to come to peace with it, when you're talking about your chronic condition. But it's also exceptional fuel sometimes, right, which is possibly one of the reasons why many people are so afraid of all kinds of angry women, some more than others. Are midlife women going to save the world or are we too tired?
I think we're really tired, you know what, I think elder women world. Actually, I think the midlife is still time for us to have older and younger women really care for us. I think it's one of the hardest transitions for women, but I think we emerge better and stronger outside of the middle. I'm really excited about aging
for that reason. And the middle is kind of your preparation point, you know, your liminality, almost where before you get to really kick into life, perhaps the way you've always wanted to.
That's really interesting because there's a part in your book where you say the middle is the worst bit, right, And I railed against that a bit because I was like, but hold on, I'm closer to youth than I'm going to be in another five to ten years, so surely, surely this is a good bit. But that's because I'm still seeing my worth and value tied to youth rather than to anything else. So what you're saying is this transformation that we go through in these years is necessarily difficult.
And messy and challenging, but only if you're railing against the idea of really being old.
Yeah, I think it's difficult because of the beautiful questions we're asking, you know, who the fuck are we? What are we now? If we're not mothers that have children in our homes anymore, if we're not you know, all the things that we've been so focused on. How do we prepare to move out of that stage? That's hard. But the moving out of that into this next part,
which is the woman. Ah my gosh. Having had conversations with so many of them, I am so excited about it because the anger, the rage turns into the fuel that you're talking about, and it becomes something wonderful.
Have they also let go of the unnecessary rages, like so I rage against my face, right, And I'm suddenly not alone in that as a midlife woman. And it's interesting. There's a part in your book where you talk about the invention of the mirror and how suddenly changed everything
about the way we perceived ourselves. And now, with phones and relentless documentation of ourselves, we are more connected, possibly than ever, to our physical appearance, and that can be a source of anger when it doesn't match how you feel. Tell me about the time when you're in the bar and you and you and a stranger were having a really exciting, passionate debate and then.
And then you know those great times. I thought, Wow, how exciting to meet someone another woman, you know, having a great chat as you do. It's so much fun. And then she turned to me and she was like, oh my god, I love talking to you so much. I wish you were my mom. And then I was like, oh my god, like she sees, actually how old I am, but I don't feel like it on the inside. What you know, and what I've been thinking about lately, because in writing the book, I sort of thought, Okay, we
feel much younger, we're much younger than we look. But maybe this is what aging feels like. Maybe getting older feels so alive and wonderful. We attribute all of these wonderful things to being young. But the rebel that I feel, like, like, the fun that I have in my body now is probably more than it was ten years ago.
Yeah, absolutely, we get.
Naughty and it's fun.
And then well, if you can find a way to let go of that anger about that superficial appearance, there's more peace to have us do the more important work that you're talking about the eldest. The eldest will do and indeed have a good time.
Yeah, And I think the anger is really cool because what it asks us to do is actually work it out, Like we're having this conversation and it's a beautiful one because we're working this out right now. Who are we? And what a great experience to be provoked to ask the question Aging insists that we do. Because the outer form that we've relied upon for so long to identify with changes, we're not that anymore. So who the fuck
are we? And that answer is the fun. And if we're prepared to ask the question and really look for an answer but it's maybe something else, then that's where the gold is. And I think that's why I wrote the book. I wanted to know how I could prepare myself to start thinking about it in the other way.
Despite the fact that I've been talking to about rage all this time, the book itself is not angry. I mean, it has portions of that, but it's very much more, as you've said, an exploration having gone through what you've gone through in the past few years and the changes you've made and the process of writing this book, what have you learned? Like, where are you now with all this? And what wisdom could you pass on?
Oh? I love this because this is what I've been asking everyone lately, is the question of wisdom. This is not a gig where we sorted out. It's an eternal kind of propulsion in learning. And I think once you settle into that and know that the shit things actually end up being great, and you know that you know all of these things, that through time and through the application of heat, we kind of get a sense of
how this works. What I know is that we need the rage to change the conditions for women who are in dangerous predicaments because they are women and because they are aging. Every time I think about that, I'm filled with purpose and determination. But for me, I think I am softening, not because I don't have passion, but because I think I can see myself moving into another space and I really like it. I love that.
I think that's probably a good place to end.
Oh, like, I've had the best time ever.
Well, my goblin friends, I hope you found that as cathartic and insightful as I did. The book just since is working on. The one about women even wiser than will be out next year and what it is will be telling you about it. But in the meantime, A Question of Age is out now and there's a link in our show notes the way you can get your
hands on it. For me, that conversation helped me to understand things that are always swirling around my head now as I will my daughter growing and my self changing, that it's entirely normal and understandable that this time of enormous transition, just like puberty, just like mtrescence if you're a mother, comes with huge upheavals and very big feelings. But also it's more than that. Our experience has made us bolder and wiser, and our tolerance for being dismissed
is shrinking to almost nonexistent, and that's okay. Please go and check out our conversation with Leslie Morgan about sex in midlife if you want to hear another empowered, take no prisoner's woman up end the expectations put on us. And also our very first episode, the one with the incredible Julie Goodwin, to whom I will always be grateful for kicking off these very honest conversations about what you can and can't live with as you move into mid And thank you all so very much for being here
with us for these moments. I'll see you back here next week when GOLP I'll be talking to arguably Australia's most successful author, Moriarty about the rich stories of women's second acts.
Women like you.
Of course, I want to tell you that if you are finding rage or anger, or anxiety or depression issues coming up as part of perry menopause or menopause unmanageable, making your life incredibly difficult, there is help at hand, and we've put the links to some organizations that can help you in our show notes. Enormous thanks to our team that's executive producer Named Brown, producer Crystal Cornelson and Tarlie Blackman and Talah Porge's and Tom Lyon for their
sound editing and design. I'll see you next week