Last week I wrote about women; the frustrations we feel and our right to be happy.
From the comments I got, a lot of women identified with the writing and like me, feel strongly about this issue.
I have decided to become a voice for the women, to tell our men how they make us feel and what they should do when we have our identity crisis because that’s really what it’s all about.
Women are relational creatures and we identify ourselves by our relationships. So, we are someone’s daughter, sister, girlfriend, wife, mother etc. It is therefore no surprise that when we have our crisis it inevitably affects those relationships because we start to evaluate our roles within them and want to discover ourselves outside of those roles.
Our identity crisis begin as we approach middle age, become pre-menopausal, when the children have left home for boarding house or university and/or when our husbands have gone through their own identity crises which is commonly referred to as Mid-life crisis”. The entire period can be described as a state of “dissatisfaction”
We are dissatisfied with our lives no matter how good it may look on the outside and it’s a period characterized by our being selfish in that our needs come first rather than last.
There is nothing bad about being selfish especially when our wants, desires, dreams and aspirations have taken a back seat whilst we tended to everyone. So why do our men make us feel guilty about it.
We wonder why it is a crime to look out for ourselves, to find our voices, to discover ourselves. We wonder why our men find it so easy to overlook our contributions, our support, understanding and self-denials in the past and deny us the joys of discovering and living our lives.
We feel hurt and disappointed in the fact that our motives for wanting more for ourselves are misconstrued to mean we are disrespectful, don’t need a husband anymore, want to be independent, want to control or boss our men.
It’s as if all we were and did in the past don’t matter.
I can understand why a man may become threatened and fearful when his wife begins to act in ways she had not done hitherto especially when she is more self assured, confident, more financially buoyant.
When suddenly, she wants to start doing things by herself, hangs out more with her friends or even has a new group of friends, starts to assert herself, is more conscious of her looks, is adventurous, bored with her life with you, seeks validation, wants more from life. It can be frightening when the person you know becomes a stranger but if handled well you will benefit more from the woman she will become as she comes into her own.
It may interest you to know that women have mid-life crises but most of us unlike men don’t throw caution to the wind and decide to burn down the house because we are on fire. We don’t want to compete with you, neither do we want to prove a point. We are dissatisfied with our lives and are looking for ways to find meaning or trying to regain whatever we feel has been lost.
Surely there is no harm in that.
I agree that some of us may take things to the extreme but most of us just want to know our lives have a purpose and meaning more apart from being your wife and the mother of your children.
So what do we really need:
- Support– Just to know that you are after our good even though you may not understand is enough. We need words of affirmation not criticism, we need you to remember our past and see us through the lenses of our past sacrifices. Don’t lecture or try to fix us. Eventually, we will get to the place we need to be at, by ourselves.
- Empathize – we need you to understand or try to, stand by and with us as we journey into unexplored territories. It may surprise you that most of us take the journey with our hearts in our mouths, nevertheless we go on because we can’t afford to go back and it’s then that we discover whether all those years of giving of ourselves was worth the sacrifice but alas for most of us that’s when we find that we are Alone, truly alone, that’s why we feel used and that’s when we decide that whatever it may take and however long it may be, we will live for ourselves.
- Encourage – It’s not about you, it’s about us, don’t be selfish and think only about what our change may mean to you but what it will mean to us, consider our feelings, remove yourself from the picture. Focus on us, our feelings and not how our actions are making you feel.
- Be patient– It will take time but it will be worth the wait especially if you have been understanding and supportive.
- Accept – You don’t have to like it, but it will be best for you and for both of us if you accept this stage of our life and acknowledge our right to feel this way.
- Acknowledge our feelings and try to make adjustments to the new us and your expectations of who we should be or how we should act.
- Be interested in what we like or what makes us happy. Be interested in us as a person not only because we are your wife or the mother of your children.
- Stand up for us– we may rebel or refuse to be constrained by societal expectations of who we are and how we should act especially within the cultural setting. Sometimes we feel we have paid our dues and have become matriarchs in the family.
- Don’t play the guilt card-by doing so you you make us feel resentful and bitter and incidentally reaffirm the feeling that no one is looking out for our good.
The truth is mid-life crisis or identity crisis is part of personal growth. We all will come to a place where we ask more of and want more from life.
We only ask that our men be supportive, empathetic, understanding and loving. This of course does not mean that extreme behaviors are encouraged or justified.
I speak for the majority of women and all we really want is simple and it’s this- to be all we can be and to be happy, really happy with our lives and ourselves.