Last week at my grandmother’s funeral I was engaging with some light conversation to be polite as you do, when someone I’m vaguely related to asked me “If I wasn’t too old to still be teaching”
Now this individual has always had about as much subtlety as a Trump Golf course bathroom (there really are gold taps & it’s a long story) but to say I was left slightly dumbfounded is an understatement. Now granted this man does live in a world where woman play a subsidiary part to men, he inhabits a space where his own self importance truly knows no limits but his willingness to say something so directly hit less of a nerve & more of a fault line.
Unless you really are living the Good life existence & have exiled yourself to a life without social media, the news & quite honestly reality you cant fail to have noticed the tide of misogyny washing through the shores of lands the world over. Being part of a democracy has never guaranteed equal anything but at least on the surface the value of women in society was higher. We may not be tied to the kitchen sink but instead we now seem to be binding ourselves to an aesthetician’s clinic instead. Once it was a hairdresser & maybe a manicurist now its someone promising you a way out of ageing with 1000 different procedures to do it.
The only real answer to stopping ageing is death but that doesn’t profit so well on Instagram it appears.
Anyway, I digress, I have been working & making my own money since I was 13, I don’t have a pension. I work for a living, if I don’t, I can’t pay my mortgage. So, I hustle & yes, I’m not 25. When I started teaching, I had no email address & no computer, things have changed, so have I.
I have 25 years’ worth of teaching experience, I’ve seen fitness trends go as quickly as they arrived. I’ve heard enough wellness bullshit to keep a Podcast going into the next millennia. Cellulite isn’t woman’s enemy, an Industry making you feel inadequate by having it is the true dictator here, the more insecure you feel the more money they make.
My ballet teacher is 76, many of my Pilates teachers north of 60. You cannot learn that kind of knowledge & experience. It must be lived, tried & tested. Can you imagine asking an English teacher at 51 if they felt too old to be explaining Shakespeare?
The Fitness & wellness Industry is brutal, but then so was working in the Arts. And whilst I haven’t seen the newly released film The Substance with Demi Moore (a little too gruesome for me) its an interesting artistic look at how we perceive the presence of woman in certain industries & by in large woman past 50 don’t belong here, or at least only if they keep trying to look young enough to be acceptable.
I don’t just do what I do because I have to I do it because I love it. If I didn’t love it, I would find another hustle to keep the tiresome wolves from the door.
But wolves show up for women everywhere, whether you play be the rules of expectation or not. I’m a believer that all women should make the best choices for themselves in all aspects of their lives. As for me well I’m a 51-year-old teacher learning more each day & Ms Riding Hood wasn’t the only one who could wear red & decide just how her life was going to be lived.
Grandma may be gone but she raised a wild one ready to take on any wolf suspecting or otherwise.
With love & wildness,
Suzy xx
www.seraphinapilates.com
