I Want to Change My Clothes, My Hair, My Face (AKA I Am Afflicted By A Terrible Ennui)

How does Bruce know? How does The Boss, a successful man with a backing band, an entourage, that voice, who is friends with Barack Obama, who is never short of a chat show invite or a hilariously heart-warming fan story, who is admired, adored, validated, rewarded, who has access to all those guitars, who armed with his Fender Esquire, rolls up his sleeves and leads nightly worship at the church of rock and roll¹, know what it feels like to be me?

“I check my look in the mirror,” he says, “wanna change my clothes, my hair, my face”². I check my look in the mirror too and I want to change way more than that. I decide I no longer suit myself. I need a complete refresh but where to start? My hairstyle? My wardrobe? I take a selfie and study it closely. I have wrinkly eyelids. I rub crème éclat contour des yeux vigorously into the creases between my eyelashes and my eyebrows in the hope of reversing the aging process. I start looking closely at other people’s eyelids for reassurance. “I’ve got wrinkly eyelids,” I tell my husband. “No, you don’t,” he says. But how can I trust the opinion of a man, who when I picture a can of fish and a block of cheese in my head, will say “would you like a tuna melt for lunch?”.

In the last days of August, I have been afflicted by a terrible ennui. I am a bored spinster in a Jane Austen novel, waiting for the next dance or a gentleman caller. I don’t do needlework or play the harpsichord to pass the afternoons and so I read. I choose Ian McEwan’s Lessons as my one hundredth book of 2023 and apologise on Instagram that this is not an achievement. I don’t recommend it. I believe I am wasting my gifts. It is kind of a miserable feeling, knowing you could be doing more than you are doing, waiting to be asked to dance. September is coming at me thick and fast with its fancy talk of fresh starts and new beginnings and I feel strangely disconnected from it. I have no exciting plans or projects. I am not itching to get started on anything because I alone will have to start it and it is likely to be thwarted by the demands of others. “I have nothing to look forward to,” I tell my husband. I am looking at an endless repetitive cycle of forty-degree washes, hospital appointments and pick-ups. I am simply too available. I want to be headhunted to do something that doesn’t involve caring for others and that offers me adequate payment for my wares. I don’t want to do any more spreadsheets or group emails. “You’re always waiting for a knock on the door,” says my husband. It’s a bit like those who say they never sought the limelight when they are already in it.

I wonder am I grieving for a past that I gave away without realising it wasn’t as bad as I thought. Leaving my job³ wasn’t the wrong decision but I miss having structure and a place to escape from my family. When I return to my old workplace to meet a former colleague, she asks me have I any regrets? I tell her I think I have lost my confidence, how I don’t know if I could stand up in front of an audience anymore. I feel like a smaller, more subdued version of myself without a title and a position, like I’m fading out. Loss is following me everywhere. I am emotionally undone by the back-to-school photos on Facebook. I know they are a beautiful celebration of life and clean shoes and uniform to grow into but all I see are ‘last first day at school’, missing children who have moved on and are leaving home, children who stand alone because their siblings refuse to join them, acne and future anguish. I struggle to relax when I visit my childhood home. It permeates loss - loss of status, loss of health, loss of independence, loss of energy, loss of balance, loss of hope. My conversations with fellow midlifers revolve around juggling teenagers and the elderly. We share our disorientation at how we find ourselves somewhere stuck between letting our children go and taking on our parents. There is a desire to be free, but we are trapped by our circumstances. We are always guilty. I realise I have tried to alter my reality over the last six months, all those holidays, but ultimately, I am a mum and a daughter. I can run but I can’t hide.

“Something has to change,” I say for the thousandth time in my motherhood career. I have said it before on a beach in Sligo, when I got away for one night in 2007 to attend a wedding, I have said it when I was alone for weeks with four kids, their chicken pox and head lice, when I had to turn down all sorts of opportunities. I said it this morning. But what is this something? Is it my circumstances or is it me? Am I meant to just accept the frustrated mundanity of my existence. I’m not sure I was built for servitude. Nothing has changed since I outed the criminals in Honey, I Can’t stand The Kids⁴. They have not asked for forgiveness nor told me they actually, literally, deep down appreciate me. I put a list of rules on WhatsApp in an attempt to instil boundaries, but they are mainly to protect me from further damage. The last one, is the one I care about most.

As I wrestle with Ian McEwan and wonder why he thanked his editor who should have cut at least two hundred pages, I am strangely drawn to Alissa, the mother who abandons her seven-month-old son to become a writer, a good one at that. I re-watch the first episode of the fifth season of The Marvellous Mrs Maisel. It is the early 1980s. Midge Maisel’s daughter has an appointment with her therapist. She is consumed by the unresolved traumas of her mother neglecting her in the 1960s to become a stand-up comedian.

“Why don’t you go for a walk and get some fresh air?” says my husband when I am immersed in feeling sorry for myself. “Or get a gratitude journal”. There isn’t the option to be an Alissa or a Midge Maisel.

I go to the opticians. My red glasses, the ones I don’t want to change, the ones that do suit my face are irreparable. I must pick a new pair. Change is forced upon me. I have five minutes to make my choice. They are closing for lunch. I don’t know if I have made the wrong decision. “Something needs to change,” I keep saying but everything is changing all around me, just not in the way I want it to.

It is hard to shift, this terrible ennui. I don’t want it to settle. And so, I order a blush, Stay Vulnerable, Nearly Rose. Maybe, just maybe if I change the colour of my cheeks?

1. https://www.guitarlobby.com/bruce-springsteen-guitars-and-gear/ (went down a rabbit hole with this one).

2. Bruce Springsteen Dancing In The Dark.

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