For most of my life, womanhood has felt like a series of thresholds I crossed without the right kind of witness.
At forty, I have met a woman who makes me curious about the next one.
Sharon Moloney approached me last November at an ArtPost exhibition opening. She had seen me around the village with my daughters, she said, and enjoyed watching the way I interacted with them. Something had drawn her to introduce herself.
Ordinarily, being told that a stranger had been watching me with my children might have raised my defences. But Sharon’s presence was calm and uncomplicated. I did not feel watched. I felt seen.
She invited my girls and me to swim in the creek at her Smiths Creek home and share tea. Something made me accept. I learned that Sharon had spent decades working in women’s health, completed a PhD in women’s spirituality and written a book. On Christmas Day, she came by simply to slip a card beneath my door.
It was a lovely new friendship. I did not yet understand it as an intervention.
Then I listened to Sharon speaking with Lisa Fitzpatrick on the Feminine Body Speaks podcast about menopause and female power. She shared a teaching that reorganised something inside me:
“At menarche, a young girl enters her power. During her menstruating years, she practises her power, and at menopause, she becomes her power.”
I had never understood my life through that sequence.
My first threshold was not properly held. I hid my period from my mother for a year. When she discovered it, the ceremony she created felt less like being welcomed into womanhood and more like being placed inside somebody else’s idea of it.
My mother knew the language of female power. Our home was filled with spiritual books. She taught massage and breathwork. But the language surrounding me did not match the way I was mothered.
The same fracture followed me into birth. When I needed my mother during the final push that brought my first daughter into the world, I watched her retreat into the shadows. The midwife stepped forward. My daughter arrived safely, but my body recorded the difference between speaking about women’s power and knowing how to stand beside it.
I have spent years examining those moments. I do not need to build another home inside them.
What Sharon offered me was not a better explanation of my past. She offered me an image of the future.
Recently, I have been interviewing women in their seventies and beyond. In some stories I sensed bitterness and wondered what life had done to them. Sharon’s words encouraged a more generous question: what happens when a girl’s power is not honoured, when a woman has little room to practise it, and when the authority of age is treated as irrelevance?
Perhaps some of what we call bitterness is power that has had nowhere to go.
More importantly, perhaps it can still be reclaimed.
When Sharon and I sat down to speak for the Tweed Weekly, she described authenticity through sympathetic resonance: strike a chord on one guitar and another across the room will begin to vibrate. A woman may know all the correct language, but the body recognises whether truth lives beneath it.
Sharon jokingly calls this the menopausal “bullshit radar”.
I understand exactly what she means.
Her work has intellectual substance—a PhD, decades of professional practice and research—but it is the integration that moves me. At 71, Sharon is not theorising about female power from a distance. She is beautiful, vibrant, sexual, intelligent and fully inhabiting her age. She does not present menopause as a problem to be conquered or a decline to be disguised.
She makes it look like an arrival.
That possibility matters in a culture with an enormous commercial investment in making women fear ageing. What might change in families and communities if older women were recognised not as fading from relevance, but as becoming less willing to betray what they know?
The piece I am writing for the Weekly began as a profile of an interesting local woman. It has become a question about what we lose when female ageing is reduced to symptoms, invisibility or jokes.
For me, it has become more personal still.
Watching my mother move through menopause was violent and frightening. Without realising it, I had accepted her experience as a preview of my own.
Sharon has disrupted that inheritance.
I am forty. I feel better than I have ever felt. I am still in the years of practising my power, and for the first time, I am not using that practice simply to survive what has already happened.
I am practising for the woman I am still becoming.
