Woman Paused

A midlife crisis is experienced between the ages of 40 and 60. It was first identified by the psychologist Carl Jung and is a normal part of the maturing process. Most people will experience some form of emotional transition during that time of life. A transition that might cause you to take stock in where you are in life and make some needed adjustments to the way you live your life. Most seem to come through the process smoothly without making major life changes.

For some, a midlife crisis is more complicated. It can be an uncomfortable time emotionally which can lead to depression and the need for psychotherapy. Those who have a hard time with this transitional stage might experience a range of feelings such as:

• Unhappiness with life and the lifestyle that may have provided them with happiness for many years.
• Boredom with people and things that may have been of interest to them before.
• Feeling a need for adventure and change.
• Questioning the choices, they have made in their lives and the validity of decisions they made years before.
• Confusion about who they are and where they are going.
• Anger at their spouse and blame for feeling tied down.
• Unable to make decisions about where they want to go with their life.
• Doubt that they ever loved their spouse and resentment over the marriage.
• A desire for a new and passionate, intimate relationship. Source

Photo Credit

A woman past her prime young years

Stares vacuously into vacant space,

At the threshold of an unfolding new chapter

She struggles to rein in and make sense,

Of new feelings rising within her.

The cuckoo’s nest is empty

The last chick about to fly,

The grasslands once green and fertile

Now brown, dried up and futile,

The forest of changing colours

Burnt down by fires of summers,

The lonely desert stretches before her,

Awesome, frightening in its power.

The heydays gone, with it gone

The power of design and birth,

Her desolate womb spurts not

The juice that bestowed the seed,

Loss and pain this cadaver feels, she

Can no longer perform the miracle.

She moans the empty insides within her,

Now like an ancient tree’s hollow interior.

‘Paused’ as she is in her role as creator,

She stops to wonder if she could endure

The frittering away of her lust and desire.

Would she ever feel as she felt in passion

As she felt in her youth of gay abandon?

Would men appreciate the mood swings,

The irritability and edited capacities?

As fate would have it, this word of doom,

Has ‘men’ in its script, O woman ‘paused’!

© Nalini Hebbar/openmind/2009 - all rights reserved

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