Welcome to my (vant)Age point
I've come here to talk from nearly 40 years of marriage about a woman's place in her marriage, her family, and life. I will say things many people won't like. And I plan to talk about married sex.
I don’t want you to know who I am
I will eventually tell you more about myself, but not yet. For now you can know that I live in a place I’ll call College Town, that I am a middle school librarian, and that I’m a grandmother. That last part is the most recent change in my life and it is amazingly fulfilling to be called that. More than that I’ll keep to myself for now. Yes, my profile pic was made by AI. No, I couldn’t get it to even come close to my actual age without it adding lots of lines that supposedly suggest my age but just looked silly. So it’s really me, but it’s not.
I’m anonymous because I want to talk about hard stuff
Your definition of hard stuff and my definition are not the same, so let me explain mine. I grew up with second-wave feminism as a constant haranguing presence, gnawing at my womanhood, snarling at my religious beliefs, and attacking my role in society. The message from all media, publishing circles, and women’s magazines for as long as I can remember has been: Shhhh, you stay quiet, there’s a new era of womanhood about to dawn and it’s full of things you don’t like. But you don’t know what’s good for you, we do, and you’ll eventually see that we were right.
But they weren’t right. Women in America, especially young women, are unhappier than they have been in decades. This despite all the hard-won independence that good and well-intentioned women who came before us bequeathed to us. Read the New York Times, as I do often, and you’ll find women opining about why other women aren’t happy. It’s because they aren’t having enough lovers, they have sacrificed themselves too much for their children and families, and they haven’t acted enough like the men around them who seem to achieve confidence and swagger so effortlessly.
Be like them, the voices say, and everything will get better. Except that it hasn’t gotten better and now my generation of women are forced to watch our daughters and granddaughters be told that the reason they still aren’t happy is that they haven’t gone far enough, had enough polyamory, enough psychedelics, enough public adoration, enough, enough, enough, and that they will be happy if they just do this one weird trick, changing their bodies to be more like male bodies or having a hysterectomy so they never have children or whatever inanity is passed off on any given day in the major media.
I’m mad about it and though I’m too late to save most of you, maybe some out there could benefit from having an old lady in your life tell you what somebody should have told you a long time ago: It’s okay to be a wife and a mother. In fact, every shred of evidence we have shows that women who are married are happier than those who are not; women who have children are happier than those who do not; women who don’t have children yet but some day want to are even happier than those who don’t want to. It’s okay to want that. In fact, it may be the very reason your body seems to feel wrong right now — because it’s gently pleading that you fulfill its longed-for desire — and you don’t see any possible path to that fulfillment in your immediate surroundings or are told to feel shame if you even try.
I am so, so sorry that I wasn’t there to let you know that it would be okay. That sex and money aren’t as cool as you were promised even while admitting that being a mom is hard and even sucks some days, it’s still far more satisfying than running that call center; getting promoted to VP so you can sit in endless, often pointless meetings; and leasing your body out to high-status men who these days don’t even pretend that they are interested in truly being with you, connecting to you, and fulfilling your emotional, physical, and spiritual needs for the long haul.
I speak as a matriarch. A woman “of age” who has all of those good things, has been building the foundation for that life since my earliest years, and despite having them all, still has to work hard to maintain them, to keep my gains, hold the ground I have won, and expand my territory of joy. From My (vant)Age, I can see a geography of possibilities about which you have been lied to.
I am Matriarch, hear me [offer my experience]
Look, I read the Internet. I know that there are many women out there who write about these truths and, frankly, I don’t think you need another blog or Substack about them. In fact, the Substack I love most does a very good job of challenging the poisonous rhetoric I have been subject to my whole life. That’s Louise Perry’s Maiden Mother Matriarch. I highly recommend it and find so much wisdom in her own words and those of her guests.
If I want to do anything beyond what Perry already offers it’s this: I think people should hear from more Matriarchs. Relying on her typology, a woman is naturally drawn to pass through three phases: maiden, mother, and matriarch. I have been through the first two and am well into the third, though I had never thought of myself as a matriarch before reading her Substack. But the more I hear and the more I think, the more I realize that I owe it to myself and my community to proclaim myself as a matriarch. I am here, standing on the foundation of my years, to offer what I know.
Yet, I’m just a middle-school librarian from College Town. I’m not trying to be Oprah nor even Louise Perry. I just want hear more voices from women like me and I want to add my piece to the puzzle, that puzzle that ultimately reveals an image of a healthy womanhood. I’m not here to roar like a lion at other women, scolding them for not following the one, true path. Of course womanhood can be a diverse assembly, but to be truly complete we can’t hide from the fact that most of us want to be mothers. And that means most of us will pass on to be matriarchs. That is a vantage point I have already arrived at; from here I would like to offer thoughts from my experience that could be useful.
Upcoming topics I’ll opine on
I’m going to try to write once a week. I don’t have a lot of social media time — apologies if you reply to something I write here or that I post on twitter and don’t hear back from me for a week or more. The first few posts are going to go into:
Where are all the matriarchs? Perry’s reference to matriarchs as a source of community structure and strength is beautiful. But looking around, I see very few matriarchs standing up and standing out. I think this is for several reasons and I’ll share those soon.
Can we stop pretending polyamory solves anything? I make my husband follow some people on Twitter that I don’t want to follow but feel compelled to keep up with. This includes a long list of people who are supposedly living the sexy fulfilling life that we were promised in the 70s (and for women older than me, the 60s). No malice. They are welcome to do whatever they want on their own time, but can they at least stop arguing for a libertine sexuality that only 4% of women enjoy? Let them enjoy it. But for rest of us — and it’s a big “rest” — let’s focus on how to get you the long-term lover (it’s a thing called a husband) and the babies you crave.
Married sex. In truth, this is a major reason I finally decided to come to Substack. I feel a need to talk about sex. Because the term “married sex” automatically conjures up a dreary image of people toiling away at a familiar and uninspiring task. That is certainly true for some people — I know some of them. But it’s not true on balance. Married people have more sex than unmarried people do. And married women are more likely to orgasm and report their sex lives as fulfilling than unmarried women are. But that doesn’t make married sex easy.
As a matriarch who is also embedded in my local church community, I have spent my adult life fielding questions from other women who, in hushed whispers, want to talk about how to manage sex. And zero, zilch, nada of the advice they get from the popular sex therapist discourse helps a woman who simply wants to make her marriage bed not only consistently satisfying but to emerge as a symbol of and reinforcement for the family bonds they are trying to build.
There are things you won’t hear much about. I’m not going to rail against feminism as an -ism. Perry and others do a good job with that. I also won’t get into the gender wars. That mess is so filled with police on either side who are only here to shout down other people. (Though I do continue to stock Harry Pottery books in my library, and believe it or not, in places like College Town, that’s called being courageous.) What else would you hope to hear from a matriarch? Probably a lot of things, good things, some of which I might even be able to offer useful thoughts on. But because I’m going to say some frank things about sex in particular, and because I’ll draw on the experiences of (anonymized) friends and family members to do so, I’m going to keep myself private here, not revealing a lot about the rest of our lives. And apologies, even some of the details I reveal will not be true. That’s on purpose. For the protection of the innocent and the guilty.
Stay tuned for more, subscribe, share, and comment if you like. I hope to eventually be able to take your questions and write about them From My Age.