Cooked

Are we pretending that outdated women are not at the social bottom of a modern Western society?

Every year I buy a flower in a pot. And then, I let it die. In the end it won’t matter if I chose the red or the white one, its destiny will be the same.

The flower, with its pointed petals, is called a Christmas Star in my native Scandinavian tongue. The English name is Poinsettia. It’s a sturdy and beautiful plant with moss-green leaves and a crown that extends out in either white or red petals. To my luck, it only needs an inconsistent amount of water. But as a seasonal thing, it must die when “‘tis season to be jolly” has passed. It cannot be allowed to flourish longer than its agreed upon time frame.

I am a poinsettia. Carelessly left to die without a fight, even though I was trained for war.

As a middle aged, divorced woman with two kids (and the wrinkles and body to show for it), my teenage daughter would say I was “cooked”. Who would want me? How would I survive in this lower caste of midlife women?

We pretend that outdated women are not at the social bottom of a modern Western society. That we are evolved and beyond old fashioned views on spinsters, crones and hags, but if you have ever been on the receiving end of an oh-so-nobody-wants-you look, you know this is not the reality. There was anger, frustration, and sadness that spilled over. The increase of small wrinkles around my constantly pressed lips didn’t help the perception of me as a bitter woman.

Last year, on Christmas Eve, my season was up. My husband, my social safety net, couldn’t keep me—or us—alive until New Years. That would have taken a splash of water, and he did not have a container. At least that’s what he told me repeatedly, whenever he had his short stopovers at home.

During his brief touch downs between international projects and exotic endeavors, he showed his disappointment through withdrawal and painful questions with an angle.

“Where did the sweet, caring girl I married go?”

”Have you considered anti-depressants?”

“Why don’t you ask more questions about me and my dreams?”

He expected to come home to a lush, growing garden in joyful colors, and he came home to a brown spotted lawn with short shrubs, desperately reaching up their naked, skinny branches like once-alive fingers.

Of course he was disappointed. I was tired—no, exhausted—from holding the fort. Acting sentry at night, keeping an ever watchful eye on the enemy, securing the perimeter, protecting the keep. It was a constant battle of trying to mix must-dos; picking up kids on time, holding a full-time job, cooking dinner, remembering to buy his mom a birthday gift, and sometimes I was even busy being pregnant and throwing up. It’s a cliché because it’s a boring story: The husband who is never there, and the wife worn down by the physical and mental load she is left to carry.

Once upon a time, I walked through beautiful poppyfields, scouting, muscles tense, expecting an attack from anywhere by a real life enemy but now I went into a daily battle with my commuter pass, my grocery list and telephone numbers for potential emergency nannies, who acted as potential foot soldiers, fighting an adversary I couldn’t put my finger on. In spite of all my efforts, the battle was lost and I was defeated at my weakest flanks: depression and stress. Like the Germans in Versailles, I succumbed to the devastating and humiliating treaty of divorce.

And when my ex-husband introduced his twenty something girlfriend to our kids, we all exploded into clichés that made me miss actual bombs.

All through my thirties, before I gave up on packing a suitcase with a few days’ notice and anticipating excitement, there were times I feared the real explosions—-roadside bombs. I had a semi-permanent cough from polluted dust and sand thickening the air that settled in my lungs. As a government employee, I talked to women in Afghanistan who were trapped in compounds with fathers, husbands, brothers and the flock of children they were often forced to bear.

From the outside the compound was the same color as the sand it stood in, but behind the gate, Persian style gardens revealed themselves. Even here, it was the men who got their gardens. But there were no naked, sad branches or bald patches of grass. These gardens were carefully tended to, because nothing less would be acceptable.

The women would pull me aside to shady corners and ask in a whisper through the blue fabric of their burka how they could prevent more pregnancies. They hoped for a chance to choose what they could control—what would be allowed to grow.

Women of all ages, even though they were not in the battles, they were already cooked. They were defeated. A man could mess with their minds and even kill them on a whim, and no one would lift an eyebrow.

I felt lucky. I was free! I had options. No man was holding me down, I knew where the danger was, and I could take precautions. I was trained, learning how to shoot and follow in a narrow line, stepping in the same footsteps as the person in front sweeping for bombs so I wouldn’t get killed.

For my life back home, I have no training. It’s a learning by doing, with the wounds compounding.

Once, I got to have it all. A career, a husband I got to choose for myself, leaving the house alone if I needed to, and I had my very own bank account. Still, I slowly began to die of thirst. I was a free woman, in a dead garden, on a path lined with loneliness (as well as the shame and ridicule that easily targets a midlife single woman without her protective safety net, a man.)

As an older woman, I can either wrap myself in a burka-like protective cloak of isolation, so I can avoid ever watching my roots dry out again while begging for water… or I can become the kind of woman you feel a little sorry for. The kind who reinvents herself with lip filler, maybe a boob job, and copious amounts of dates, preferably with younger men. Newly single older women who are too loud, wear skirts too short, and maybe drink too much in public. We laugh at them out of pity and feel a secret sigh of relief that at the end of the day, we are not them. The comfort we feel when we nestle in at night as a “we” protects us from standing out.

In Afghanistan my options as a younger woman, yet to marry and bear children, seemed endless. Now as a divorced midlife woman in a modern world with, theoretically, an endless array of choices, I only see these two.

I might not be trapped in a miserable marriage anymore, but I stayed in it because at least I was socially safe. Some bullets could be dodged, even without training. This part of my life offers no protective gear, no sweeper whose footprints I can follow, no powerful guns to hold up.

We have our traditions and it makes sense not to plant a flower like a poinsettia that has outlived its season in a winter affected garden. Frozen, colorless and naked, does that mean we should just let it die? But we could care for it so it can last until spring, when the soil is no longer frost bitten. The damaged roots would be nourished by rich, dark soil that envelops it, and the sun will do its job. This expired lady might blossom after all.