Is time the particular enemy of women?
And other thoughts while on sabbatical
I was given a monthlong sabbatical by my team, which I am presently enjoying. Sabbaticals at Journey are a gift after seven years of service (or, in my case, nearly 10 years, with delays caused by three children).
It’s been interesting to talk about what a sabbatical is with friends and acquaintances. Unless you’re a professor or a priest, the concept of a sabbatical from work is greeted with a fair measure of confusion, maybe even pity or concern: Was I banished for some workplace misconduct? Was I sent away to get myself sorted? (I like letting people’s imaginations run wild on this front and won’t disabuse them of this notion if a look of disquietude flits across their faces.)
The most common question I get asked is: What are you going to DO? And almost everyone is vaguely disappointed by my answer, which is some variation on: A whole lot of nothing.
By “nothing,” I mean walking, gardening, weeding, writing, reading, lovemaking, lifting, daydreaming. When I want to, without an agenda, without a computer, without a phone, without a deadline.
So far, it has been very beautiful and nourishing. After the first day, a sunny Monday alone in my quiet house, I told Guion: “Even if all I had was this one day, it would be enough.”
Over a week in, what has it feel like?
At first, I felt guilty. I felt like I was forgetting something (many somethings). And that I needed to let go of things I didn’t know I was carrying. (For the first four days, I dreamed every night about Journey Group going through a catastrophic merger and coming back to the office with a new team of horrible people. Each dream with the same plot except in a different setting!)
But then: A deep, pervasive sense of calmness, like the feeling you have when you’re heavy with sleep and about to drift off in a safe and quiet room, except that this feeling lasts most of the day. An openness to longer conversations. An expanding patience with the children. A willingness to be led by them and by their sense of unhurried time.
A particular joy this past week was a three-day visit from our beloved Wei, J, and PB. The children got along so well (with Felix and PB forming a special bond), and it was a delight to wear ourselves out with them during the day and then have rousing conversation and dinner each evening after they were all in bed. We felt so honored to host and miss them already.
Time still stretches out in front of me, and each day seems to unfold on its own accord. I’ve been able to resist my typical urge to be directed by a list of tasks. I feel more impulsive and sensitive. As Tate would say, Tomorrow is a year away.
To know time as it is
From a young age, women have learned to be very critical of their bodies and appearances. We learn it from the women in our lives; we learn it from culture, as pervasive as the atmosphere.
Criticize yourself internally; criticize yourself externally. Alone in your room, lament and fixate on all of your failings. Out with your friends, share the dizzying litany of your bodily complaints (“my nail beds suck”). To fail to do so, to refuse to participate in this ritualistic self-shaming, is to appear out of touch or deeply vain.
At 38, I’ve noticed a darker strain in this feminine practice among women my age or older.
The self-shaming is still there, but it’s become more universal, more irresistible, and more… hopeless. As our bodies no longer resemble our fertile 20-something selves, the tenor of this practice has become troublingly pessimistic. I feel it in myself even as I lament it. The discourse is about all that we have lost (our hair, our collagen, our figure, our sheen) instead of all that we could gain.
There’s a thinly veiled terror beneath it: We feel that we are fast approaching irrelevance, uselessness. If beauty was our only source of power, and we are observing it daily slipping through our sun-spotted fingers, what else do we have? (The terror of the grave.)
I just finished the latest book from Zadie Smith, who is a perpetual guiding light in my reading life: Dead and Alive.
Each essay is resplendent in its own right, but I got stuck on this particular passage from the short essay “Agelessness.”
Having been asked to write about the baffling concept of “agelessness” for a women’s magazine, Smith says:
“It is commonly thought that time is the particular enemy of women. Because we supposedly have so much to lose: our ‘looks,’ our fertility, our cultural capital. There have been feminist modifications to this story over the years, but it remains powerful: a tale long told by men and subsequently retold and internalized by women. But there are other ways of looking at it. That women have timepieces built into their bodies—primarily ‘biological clocks’ and the menopause—signs that must eventually be heeded, signs that are, finally, impossible to ignore, seems to me at least as much gift as curse.”
The strangeness of sabbatical time has made me reflect on time in general, but I am riveted by Smith’s description of time as a special source of intimacy for women. When compared with men, women’s bodies go through radical transformations, throughout our lives, allowing us to keep time in a deeply personal way.
Could this biological reality be seen as a blessing instead of a curse? Could we, as women, allow ourselves to tap into this chronological strength?
Smith continues:
“That our bodies should bring us such concrete signs of time passing—that they should have the miraculous ability to bring us news of what is actually the case—surely means that every woman is offered the opportunity to be, as Young Disciples have it, a ‘conscious observer’ of her own life. It strikes me that one consequence of this bodily awareness of time is that adulthood—with all its complex responsibilities and demands—often seems to come as less of a surprise to women than it does to many men (there’s a reason our folk tales are full of ‘wise old women’). Our hyper-awareness may well be a kind of opportunity, one that might allow even death itself to be well imagined and prepared for. And yet, this unique feminine opportunity to be wise—to know time as it is, rather than as we would wish it to be—is almost always diminished or ridiculed.”
There are small things here we could quibble with, but overall, I love Smith’s sentiment. Here we have this unique feminine opportunity to be wise.
Women can access big time, mystical time, eternal time through our bodies. I think of how women are present at the beginning of life and the end of life (at least traditionally). As mothers and midwives, women bring new life into the world. As caregivers at the bedsides of the dying, women usher life out of the world. Feminist histories could paint these traditions as women being servile and oppressed, as if there were no power in life-bringing. But tell me: What could be more powerful than bringing life into and out of the world?
With this vantage point, what would it mean to observe our aging bodies as blessings? Heed the call to turn away from the surface, from the Botox’d and benighted. Hear an invitation, from your very body, into a deeper reality.
Currently reading
Proto: How One Ancient Language Went Global, Laura Spinney
The School of Night, Karl Ove Knausgaard
Spring, Ali Smith
I love this so much Abby!