Becoming Forty by Lynne Clark

I am thirty nine and I am unmarried and childless and I feel like a failure.

The patriarchy has inculcated in me since birth that the ultimate achievement for a woman is to marry and reproduce. And if you don’t do that then you had better have a dazzling career at least to show for it. As if somehow the only excuse for not reproducing or marrying is if you have used all your energy and resources on pursuing a career instead.

But really even that’s not a viable excuse anymore. Becoming a woman now means ‘having it all’. So really you should be able to carve out a remarkable professional path, while also being a wife and mother.

But what if you are just doing a mundane, ordinary job? What if you don’t have a glittering career and you also don’t have a child or a spouse?

Don’t get me wrong, I have achieved some remarkable things in my career that I am truly proud of, but why is that the prop upon which I lean to somehow excuse myself from a perceived failure?

I have been in a committed relationship with my partner for the best part of 20 years. Yet there is still an assumption that somehow I am an object of pity because we never married. That he must never have asked me. When in fact that is not the case. My partner would have got married long ago but it is a lifestyle choice that has never interested me. I don’t believe in marriage really, yet that seems to many as baffling as it is implausible. 

I don’t know if I want children either but that decision has almost been taken from me anyway because of the impending doom of turning 40. The ticking of my biological clock becoming louder and louder till it’s presence is all encompassing. Thundering in my head like a metronome. I find myself making excuses to myself, to my friends, to my family.

But why should I have to excuse any of my choices to anyone? They aren’t hurting anyone, save myself when I am made to feel like a failure. But why should becoming a childless, unmarried 40 year old be something to be pitied? Like a failed Bridget Jones to be mocked and reviled because she never actually found her Mr Darcy in the end. Even in the third film, when we meet Bridget at 43, she may be childless and unmarried but she has really ‘made it’ in her career, so it’s ok! 

How about it’s ok to become whoever you are without judgement? Without fear of failure? Without having to navigate a binary determinism where we must be one or another? Either we are a nurturing mother or a ruthless professional.

The black and whiteness of it is suffocating. I want to exist in the grey areas instead. Whatever that might look like. 

Lynne Clark (she/her) is a writer and historian from North-East Scotland. She holds an undergraduate degree in History and a post-graduate Masters in History with Language & Literature from the University of Aberdeen. She has written extensively on the interpretation of museum objects and artworks in relation to wider themes of identity, with a particular focus on feminism and the patriarchy. She is also a roving reporter for a local equestrian business where she is able to indulge her other passion - horses! In this role she has interviewed some of the best horse riders and coaches in the world, exploring issues surrounding mental health, as well as the impact patriarchal ideologies have on gendered assumptions of sport.