Middle Age and Family-Focussed Women

Dr. Gillie has just retired from general practice. She was Chairman of a working party on the future of general practice. A PHASE of transition in life usually tests qualities of personality fairly severely. When the transition coincides with the decade loosely called middle age the stresses are correspondingly severe, for the body is undergoing changes as well as the pattern of life. This can be the testing experience of the mother of several children who has focussed her activities on the care of the family and home and whose youngest child becomes independent when she herself is aged forty or over. For twenty years or more she has been using and developing skills to meet the day to day needs of her children and her husband. A successful family woman can develop many skills as the family grows; cooking meals based on economical shopping, ingenuity in family laundering whether by launderette, washing machine or plain tub, and spreading the load of ironing with proper pride in the result, are acquired over the years. Cleaning with the advantage of such gadgets as justify their cost, some mending and making do, must all be planned to leave patience and serenity at the end of it for children doing homework or just kicking around and for her work-weary husband, often in space over small for growing boys and girls. These activities have occupied her mind and body even through the hours when children were at school. The day must begin early and end late, so that outside interests may well have had little place in her life. Her interests and satisfactions have been chiefly found by turning inwards into the small family life, sometimes with progressive exclusion of the outside world, just because she does her work well and enjoys it. So long as one more child is still clamouring for help and notice, the departure of the o\^ ones is not very apparent in the day routine. Abruptly the continuity of deifl^ ceases and with it the continuity satisfaction in her life's work. L? house is too quiet and too tidy-1 t critical date may be when the young ^ goes to secondary school at twelve yea or so; lunches at school and deve!0*^ teenage independence of outlook, the earlier because of older br0 *jje and sisters. This change strikes mother the more severely because brings to full consciousness the ledge …