Birthday Celebrations

July is my birthday month. To celebrate surviving another glorious spin around the sun I have decided to embrace the c-word.

Not that c-word! Tsk, tsk. No, the other c-word. Crone.

Apart from facing down the barrel of another birthday, what got me thinking about the word ‘crone’ was having to write an ‘Elevator Pitch’ for my latest work-in-progress. The pitch begins thus; ‘This is a latter life, coming-of-age story. It is about a middle-aged woman who feels invisible, abandoned by her family, her wisdom considered irrelevant. It is her fiftieth birthday. She is going to do something she never does; go back to Slowden, her home village which was destroyed by the North Sea in one terrible stormy night – the night of her birth and her father's death…”

I really wanted to describe this character as a crone, but knew if I did so, the literary and publishing types would be put off. So, I played safe, using more mainstream descriptions. But I feel sorry for ‘crone’. It has been given a pejorative meaning, like many other female adjectives. Should I call the average middle-to-late-age lady a crone they would probably think I was being extremely rude to them. And fair enough - our modern-day definition of the word is usually something like ‘a withered, witchlike old woman’. Synonym suggestions include ‘ugly’ and ‘hag’! Yeah, modern parlance has not been kind to crone. That’s sad, considering what it originally meant – a wise woman.

I’ve read somewhere that crone is derived from the old word for crown. I’m not sure if this etymology is correct, because it is hard to get past the modern definitions on Google to locate more ancient meanings, but it seems right. Because crone being linked to crown would couple it with the crown and crown-star chakra’s, through which deep connection to spirit is formed. The crone was thought to be within her most valuable phase of life – her child bearing and/or rearing days in her past, she was the keeper of deep knowledge.

It was apparently the Church in early medieval times which began to twist the original meaning of crone –because it feared the existence of wise women and the esteem in which communities held them. All new brooms have to sweep clean, and if the new religion was going to gain power, then the old ways had to be removed. This is not new under our sun. The same takeover of language can be seen in our world today; words and their meanings are very powerful, so if you can change this, you can change people’s behaviour and therefore societies’ norms (it’s one of the reasons I believe passionately in the right to free speech, but that’s a topic for another letter).

When I was young, my father often used to remark upon how women became much more powerful following the menopause (he also used to say he would always promote women because he knew they would work twice as hard as the men – a sort of feminism?). Anyway, nowadays, having got to the age I am, I am inclined to agree.

I believe there is honour and grace in ‘owning’ this latter phase of female life. Taking up the word crone is symbolic of an acceptance of that which awaits me. I am curious to discover how I sit within the world now, as opposed to when I was a mother of young children, as opposed to when I was younger still and had only myself to worry about. I am interested to find out how I will cope whilst travelling within this time, in a body which is undergoing another transformation – just as it did for my adolescence, my pregnancies and my postpartum months.

It will of course not be a big surprise that I am doing this, at least in part, by writing a story. It is of that fifty-year-old woman up there in the Elevator Pitch - a character with a difficult life behind her and an uncertain future in front of her. I’m really looking forward to seeing the lessons the character has to go through, because they might be the ones I am intended for too.

Thanks for reading.

Rachel x