Thoughts on Twixmas Croning

When life goes quiet and the ghosts get loud

Photo by yonatan anugerah on Unsplash

So it’s here now. The week between Christmas and New Year. The liminal week when life goes quiet and the ghosts get loud.

This time, three years ago in December 2019, I was on my knees with exhaustion trying to complete the edits to the second edition of my book Living the Life Unexpected. I was desperate for some time off but it kept not being possible and then, in January 2020, I blew a kind of fuse; it could even be described as a mini-stroke, affecting my smell, vision, hearing, taste, speech, balance and emotional regulation. After a decade of overwork, my central nervous system went on the fritz and declared that it had more than enough of being pushed more relentlessly by me than I would ever have tolerated from a ‘boss’. Burnout it’s called. I knew that I needed to make some big changes but then the pandemic took hold and everyone’s plans went tits up.

However, my ego still thought I could enact the necessary changes in a timely and well-ordered way but, in truth, the process turned out to be protracted, unpredictable, heartbreakingly painful and inelegant.

Breaking free of who you were in order to become who you now are is never a popular move with anyone, including your own ego.

This leaves me, at Twixmas, for the first time in over a decade, not holding a space online for the hearts of thousands of other childless women, but instead free to let myself sink into my own experience again. I can’t say I like it all that much. And so that’s why grief, my old partner in change, is rummaging around, looking for things that are no longer needed for the journey ahead. My psyche feels like an air balloon that needs to eject ballast in order to rise over an oncoming mountain: this precious part of my identity as the ever-giving mother figure in the minds of others? That’ll have to go. The golden projections of others invested in me not-changing, without any idea of what that has and does cost me? Heave that overboard too. My legacy? Nothing to do with you really.

And although I love the idea of the IDGAF energy of post-menopausal women, perhaps the reality of croning is not that I no longer care about what others think of me, but that I no longer allow the pain of their disapproval to sway me.

It seems there’s a deep and emerging wisdom in me that’s just had it with courting approval, yet she’s still accompanied by a young and tender part that can be utterly skewered by disapproval. Perhaps part of the work of croning is about finding a balance in that tension, about acting, not reacting? I hope so. And I hope it gets easier…

But back to today and to Twixmas. For many, it’s a time of stopping all the doing after what is often a frantic part of the year, whether you have children or not. When I was a smug, unconscious ‘trying to conceive’ married woman in my thirties, the run-up to Christmas was all about attempting to get projects completed in the interior design business I ran with my disorganised then-husband, and get us both to whomever we were meant to be spending Christmas with, hopefully on the right day but very rarely on time.

During the haze of life-altering grief and brutal otherness that constituted much of my single and childless forties, the main experience I recall was one of not knowing how the fuck to ‘do’ Christmas anymore: should I tag along like the ghost of Christmas past at my ex’s extended family celebrations and skin myself alive watching other people’s children grow up? Brave the fantastical ‘let’s pretend you had a happy childhood’ celebrations that my damaged and damaging mother was increasingly orchestrating? Or should I try to escape the whole damn thing by getting away to a beach, a Buddhist retreat, or gutsing it out on my own at home? (Reader: I never nailed it and I still think it’s the ‘holiday’ that remains the most challenging for the unpartnered and grieving in this world).

And now in my non-smug, once-again partnered late-fifties, having made peace with my childlessness (and soon-to-be grandchildlessness), I still wouldn’t say I enjoy Christmas, because no matter what I’m doing, it always seems to be a lot of work in one way or another. Which means I’m usually looking forward to it being over. To it being now. Twixmas as it’s cutely called.

Before I knew it was called that, I often had big ideas about what I would get ‘done’ between Christmas and New Year: decluttering; getting my tax return ready early; finishing the essay I needed to hand in for whatever course of study I was still engaged with; reading something Important - you know the drill. And as I would always dismally fail to get any of these done (and that was even before social media existed as the utility par-excellence for noodling away ‘free’ time), I would often start the New Year feeling disappointed in myself.

So now, with what I hope are the green buds of croning wisdom, and dealing with crunchy parental eldercare issues that my imaginary children aren’t going to be around to worry about, I don’t bother with any of that anymore. I leave this week as unstructured as possible and let the loose-knit shawl of grief sit gently about my shoulders as it instructs me what I’m saying goodbye to.

This is the only decluttering I’ll be doing this week. Because only then will I be able to hear the quiet whispers of what wants to emerge anew. Only then, will I be light enough to pick myself off the floor and open the door to whatever wants to come in.

Endings are messy. Another croning skill might be about finding the diamond in that rubble? Maybe even being grateful for the mess, but I’m not there yet. After all, I am still only an Apprentice Crone.

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