Inventing Ancestors

Where do we turn to find stories of women who made the leap from younger to older, without meeting their demise? What tales can we tell ourselves if all we were handed was fear, shame, or grief? In her books Hagitude and Wise Women, writer Sharon Blackie offers some wisdom from ancestral stories of crones and hags. And while I love this work, there’s a part of me that doesn’t want to translate across millennia. It’s work to figure out how I am, or am not, like Baba Yaga. I need modern day role models, newer stories. 

The answer cannot be found in the celebrities with enough cash to win the collagen wars. It can’t be in the wives of the grandest politicians. We need stories that move like us, feel close enough to our lives that we could almost step inside the world we imagine. We need stories that embolden us to breathe the air like it was made for us, and conjure a world that brings pleasure and satisfaction. 

Faced with a dearth of examples, I’ve decided to make some up. I’ll write my own fairy tales of aging women, to keep me and my friends curious and engaged in our lives, even when the world around us starts to look past us. 

So let me tell you about the women I “come from.” Women like my aunt Sara, who, after she turned 50, read 100 books in a year and knows all her librarians by name. A few years into her bibliophilic transformation, it seems she learned the language of birds and how to predict the weather by the wind, and spending an afternoon in her garden is never a dull event. Or, my great grandmother who had a dream of flying while under anesthesia during her hysterectomy, and two years later had earned her pilots license over the protests of her husband and her priest. And no one will ever talk about this, but there was the great aunt who came back from sabbatical with a buzz cut and a swirling tattoo that stretched from her heart to her fingertips. 

And did I ever tell you about how my mother-in-law quit her job as an accountant and opened up a tea shop where they hold dances on Saturdays? She swears it brings good luck into the shop. Have you heard about the distant cousin somewhere in Eastern Europe who saw so much mismanagement of the local school system that she ran for office to become the first female mayor in her region? Last I heard, they were planning to put her face on a postage stamp. 

I am connected to these women, at least until I write a better story. Having invented them reminds me that I’m also in the act of inventing myself. 

What stories rush through your veins? What myths, ideas and connections will you adopt, offer a home, and allow yourself to be held by? What ancestors will you choose, or invent, to guide you through this next phase? It’s a time that promises to be very interesting. After all, you’re writing it! 

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Christina Cameli is a nurse-midwife in Portland, Oregon. In her private healthcare practice she supports those in the menopause transition, and as a menopause educator she employs metaphor, levity, and compassion as tools for understanding and inhabiting this unique transition. She loves a good paddle, a cold kombucha, and something fresh from the garden.