Well, this is one topic I am absolutely authorized to comment on! I have written volumes on men and their quirks when they reach a certain age, and I feel I haven't really expressed my views on women in their mid life and our society and what travails and trials they have to face in it.
My observations (the same ones that have landed me in trouble most of the time) of women after the delicate age of forty goes somewhat as follows:
Women tend to become scared - afraid of getting old, of not being youthful any more, of losing their hold on life. And this fear takes over their personalities, they change into possessive, stern and worried wives and mothers. They want to be reassured of love from all around them, right at the time when their middle-aged husbands are going through a crises of age themselves, and in their dying efforts to retain their hold on an ever slipping youth, are eyeing younger women.
In direct opposite proportion to their age, they become less intelligent and less thinking and sure of themselves, and say the silliest things. I have seen reasonably smart women age pathetically, it is as if their grip on their reason and logic is becoming lose as they step up the ladder of age - wisdom and women - a contradiction in terms.
In Pakistan, a macho society, women get their power vicariously through the men in their lives, the little control they have on their own lives initially transforms into a pathological need to control the lives of their husbands and children eventually. They want to choose who their children marry, how they ought to live their lives and so on.
But, the above is true of a certain portion of our women - with a new age, new issues are being faced by women in Pakistan today.
Divorce, separation, being left by the man with whom one has spent more than a decade is becoming a norm now, how does a woman in her forties and older, deal with this sort of abandonment? How does a woman reconcile with fending for herself and at times her children when left alone to do so. There is additional trauma of humiliation, of absolute shame - the fact that a man after so many years and so much time together finds it in himself to leave and make another life for himself.
But, this isn't the only dilemma facing a woman today - there are many who have taken the lead in walking out on their marriages and not always with happy results. I have witnessed the desolation of so many women who have ruined their own lives for a fleeting fling or a deeply felt affair.
Then the attitude of children. The days of obedience is gone. We don't see many children putting their mothers on a pedestal. I feel in our society the age old dictums are being challenged. It is being discovered and much to the chagrin and shock of society that not all women are maternal and instinctively drawn to raising children and putting their needs above their own. This is a rude shock, and of course has disastrous results.
Then women who are now in their mid life realizing their own mistakes, their wrong choices if they made any and the rampant depression, the hole in the soul phenomenon that is so prevalent in our midst.
And finally, the sheer disregard and absolute non-existence to introspection. We are a lot of self-satisfied, smug people, we may feel like facing a wall, but how much we are a part of that wall usually escapes us and with age this propensity to frivolity, this lack of thought becomes overly manifest, the result being - a bunch of old, haggard and inanely stupid women at your disposal!
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