Transcript: Friendshipping Is a Verb with Mary Pipher
The transcript from Episode 56 of Strong Feelings — a podcast by Katel LeDu, and Sara Wachter-Boettcher.
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Transcript
[Full transcript coming soon!]
Interview: Mary Pipher
KL Mary Pipher is a psychologist whose work specializes in women, trauma, and how culture affects mental health. Her bestselling 1994 book, “Reviving Ophelia,” was a groundbreaking look at the mental health and emotional needs of teen girls. This year, she published a new book about a different demographic: older women. It’s called “Women Rowing North: Navigating Life’s Currents and Flourishing As We Age.” Mary, welcome to Strong Feelings.
Mary Pipher I’m very happy to be on the show, thanks.
KL So, first up, can you tell us about what inspired you to write about older women?
MP Well, first of all, I always write about what I want to learn. And I’m 71 now, and so I am in this life stage. And so are most of my friends and my siblings and my husband. Our particular generation of baby boomers is in a very different place than our parents and grandparents because if we’re 65 right now, we may live 30 more years. That’s a long time. And we also are a generation that has always dealt with life changes by exploration and looking for growth. So, that was very interesting to me. But the main thing that got me started on this was the disconnect between the cultural messages about older women, which primarily were defined by diminishment. We’re not as pretty, we’re not as sexy, we’re not as useful, and we’re in the way. The cultural messages are almost all negative. Whereas, my experience with my own friends is we’re happier than we’ve ever been and we’re telling each other we’re happier than we’ve ever been. So, that strange contrast really made me interested in writing the book. It’s kind of like Reviving Ophelia. What I realized when I was doing that book was there was such a disconnect between the cultural messaging about girls and real girls and their needs. And so that discrepancy is what’s really intriguing to me when I choose a topic.
KL What did you learn about aging in the process of writing this book? Was there anything that you came across that really kind of surprised you or was new to your thinking that you hadn’t explored before?
MP When I’d tell people I was writing a book about older women, they would invariably say, “I’m not old or you’re not old.” In other words, they were saying, “I will not be described or let you describe yourself by the stereotypes and cultural scripts for older women. That’s not my self experience and I know it isn’t yours.” So, that was really interesting to me, how much immediate pushback there was to the word “old.” And as I explored more fully, I realized that ageism is probably a bigger problem for women than aging. So, that was a particularly interesting thing. And ageism is a funny thing because it’s prejudice against one’s future self. I mean, if we’re lucky, we get old. But yet if you think about it, a lot of cultural, negative stereotyping about old people, we’re all going to run into that at some point. So, it’s in everybody’s benefit — not just older people’s benefit — to have a new way of redefining older people that is not in terms of loss or diminishment, but in terms of growth.
SWB I am so glad that you brought that up because I was noting before this interview that you had written about that — this idea that when you would talk to your friends about writing this book, they would be like, “oh, but we’re not older women exactly.” And I’m curious what you think we can do — all of us, not just women who are older — but all of us can do to try and do more to reject some of those really toxic ideas about women and aging. And how can we combat some of that ageism even though it’s not necessarily something that’s easy to fix?
MP Well, first of all, I don’t know how to change American culture, I don’t think any of us do. [SWB laughs] But I do think that my goal writing this book was some new cultural education on older women because the ideas that are out there right now are so toxic that, of course, no one would want to be labeled an older woman. So, I really wanted to reframe that whole developmental stage for women in a way that was much more positive, primarily to help older women be happier. If we don’t believe in our own growth, we can’t grow. If we don’t have some ideas about how to view ourselves in a positive way and form a positive identity and move forward in our lives with happy expectations, we won’t be happy. And so, it was very important for me to write this as a piece of cultural education. The other thing I think is very important is connecting people across generations. The better older and younger people know each other, the better they get along. But what we tend to do in this culture is put older people in one set of buildings, middle aged people in another, and college students in another, and babies and daycare in another, and we don’t intermingle the generations. And it’s a great tragedy because each generation has its own kind of energy, and wisdom, and its own ways of loving. And the more we can mix things up, the healthier culture we have and the less ageism there is.
SWB Yes! So, one of the things that I really love about this is this idea that we all need to get a little bit closer to people of different age groups, which is one of the reasons why we wanted to have you on this show!
MP Thank you.
SWB And one of the things that I’m really interested in that you talk a little bit about in the book — and actually you mentioned earlier even if this interview — was the way that older women are often actually very happy, and that the story that’s told about older women is very sad, but it doesn’t really align with reality. So, something you’ve talked about is how older women are the happiest demographic in the country. And you have some research that backs that up — that the happiest people are women in their sixties and seventies. And I’m curious if you could talk a little bit about why that is and where that comes from?
MP Yeah. The research is by Dilip Jeste out of UC San Diego. He looked at happiness as it correlates with age and found that older women are the happiest people in our country. You know, the main thing I argue in terms of why older women are happier is that happiness is a choice and a set of skills. And that over the course of say, six or seven decades, we have a lot of time to build up of resilience skills. And resilience is essentially a question of attention and intention. And the intention is the desire to be happy, and the desire to be kind, and look for joy, and look for beauty. And then attention is deciding what it is we’re going to focus on. So, for example, if we focus on whatever we could possibly have done wrong or any self criticism that we can give ourselves, we’re likely to be pretty unhappy people. But if we wake up in the morning and set our intention — “I’m going to go around the world today looking for joy and beauty” — we’re going to have a different life experience of that day. So, that’s part of it. The skills are really basic skills, which, of course, women don’t need to wait until they’re 65 to acquire. But what happens is these skills, over a lifetime, accrue so that by the time were 65 and 70, we really start seeing the benefits of them. And one of the skills, for example, is just having reasonable expectations. As my aunt Grace said, “I get what I want, but I know what to want.” So, especially when we’re young, we sometimes feel like we can do anything or we can do everything, or that it’s really important that everyone like us all the time, that we would expect everyone to be happy with us all the time. But in fact, reasonable expectations are that every day is going to have joy and sorrow as mixed up as sea salt and water. And that every day is going to have problems because there is just virtually never a moment in time when we aren’t dealing with some kind of life problem. So, that’s one thing — reasonable expectations. Another thing that is very important is female friends. And, in fact, my number one piece of advice to women your age, Sara and Katel, is to have a really good, strong group of female friends. To me, that is an emotional and mental health insurance policy. And I’m very lucky. I have some of the same friends I had in 1972. So, my friendships are very deep. And I’ve been going camping with the same group of women since the mid-eighties. And we’ve gone through everything together. We’ve gone through having babies together, we’ve gone through complaining about our husbands together, we’ve gone through dealing with the school system together, and seeing our children graduate. We’ve gone through menopause together, during which time we were pretty cranky with each other. [SWB laughs] And now we’ve gone through, in some cases, the death of parents, and the death of friends and siblings. So, it’s a beautiful, tight group. And women friends are people that support us and people that validate us and will listen to us and nurture us. Older women tend to do a lot of nurturing, so it’s just wonderful to have women friends who will nurture us.
SWB It really validates me a lot to think about this. I know me and Katel have that kind of friendship and I look forward to us being in our seventies and beyond and still having that kind of friendship. But I also know a lot of people — I think we both do — who are maybe in their mid thirties, early forties, raising little kids right now, trying to hold down professional jobs. And a lot of them have talked to me about how hard it is to sustain those deep friendships during this time when they feel like they’re barely holding it all together. And what do we do now to make sure that we’re building those fifty year old friendships as you talk about by the time we are in old age?
MP Friendshipping is a verb. You only have friends if you actually act in a way that keeps those friends close. I mean, I’m very sympathetic with younger women with children. I remember when I was a working woman with children — I just barely had time to make a coffee. And I know how tired women are at the end of a day and how many things there are still left to do on their todo list. On the other hand, I think it’s a good example of “are you spending your time in accordance with your values?” If one of your values is friendship, somewhere in there it’s important to make time for your closest friends. And I would actually argue even further that that can’t be text messaging or email, it has to be phone calls or face to face where you’re actually together in some meaningful way and having a conversation.
KL Thinking about time and growing older and this idea that perhaps we have more of it to devote to appreciating and just experiencing maybe littler things and finding bliss in that, when you talk to other older women, how do they talk about time that was made different from what you heard from younger women?
MP Well, the really beautiful thing for most older women is we have more time. So, for example, one thing I never did when I was a working mom was get up in the morning, make myself a cup of coffee, and sit for half an hour and watch the sunrise. And just kind of settle into my day and set my intention. It’s a beautiful thing. And there’s a line author Vicki Robin uses called “slowing down to the speed of wisdom.” And there’s really something to that. If you slow down, you have time to be present, you have time to be kind, you have time to be aware of the world around you. If you’re moving at zero warp speed, there’s just so little time to be awake and present to the world. And most older women have more time. They don’t have children. A lot of times they’re not, at least, full time in the workforce. And so they have really the ability to catch their breath and do things that are a great luxury for older women. And that’s one of the real joys of this life stage is just simply having more time. For example, one of the gifts of this life stage I write about is bliss and epiphanies. Where you’re just having this moment where you feel like, “I’m connected to everything and this is a beautiful moment and I feel so whole and so peaceful and so happy and so awake all at the same time.” It’s much easier to feel those moments if you’re not in a hurry, if you just can move more slowly around the world. And that’s something many older people report — is that they’re much more inclined to feel bliss and epiphanies than when they were younger.
KL I think that’s so beautiful. Sort of related, it seems like a lot of people in my generation — women and a lot of folks — are anticipating and even excited about working well into older age. And you’re so actively engaged in your career, how does that fit into your older age plans, and has your relationship to your work and your career shifted at all?
MP Our need to be useful and have a meaningful life are over when we stop breathing. And I can’t imagine a life without some kind of work because I like work, I like meaningful work. And I’ve been lucky enough that I’ve been able to do meaningful work most of my life. And meaningful work is very different than unmeaningful work. One of them is something that at the first moment’s chance, people abandon. The other is something that no matter what, they want to continue doing. So, that’s a really important distinction. But I’ll always be writing and I’ll always be engaged with working with people in some ways because I like people and I like to see new people and meet people and experience the change process in people. On the other hand, one of the things I’m not doing anymore because I don’t enjoy it so much these days — I’m not traveling and speaking. I used to do a lot of traveling and speaking. I spent as many nights in a hotel room one year as in my own bed. And that’s just not something I choose to do and I’m very grateful; I don’t need to do it anymore.
SWB So, when you were talking about continuing to work, continuing to have meaningful work, it made me think a lot about the women who are getting older who aren’t necessarily working because they feel that tug, but because they need to work to survive.
MP Right.
SWB Right? And the economic reality of a lot of older women are working in ways that aren’t necessarily something they’re choosing. And I’m wondering if you talked to any older women who were in that circumstance as you were working on the book, and how were their perspectives different or how did they relate to aging?
MP Well, actually, the way people relate to aging has almost nothing to do with income. In fact, one of the things that was really interesting to me was that the women who had objectively the hardest lives in terms of pain or disability or income or tragedy in their past were the women who had the most highly developed gratitude skills. And they were survival skills for them; they needed to feel grateful and be able to create joy and appreciate life in order to be happy. And they’d had a lot of experience with utilizing survival skills of gratitude to make themselves want to face another day of pain or another day of loss or another day of hard work at the grocery store. So, it’s very interesting to me that a lot of people assume the people who would be happiest would be upper middle class women. And that’s actually not true at all. In fact, people who haven’t suffered tend to be rather insufferable. [SWB laughs] And they’re made miserable by the smallest of calamities. Whereas, people who have suffered or are currently suffering are really looking for opportunities to be grateful and find joy. I mean, first of all, women who are working jobs they don’t like or are physically uncomfortable obviously wish they could quit their jobs. But it certainly doesn’t mean that they don’t have all the resilience skills of everyone else and aren’t able to use humor, for example, at their job, aren’t able to make close friends at their jobs, and also aren’t able to define even a drab job in a way that gives them some sense of meaning and accomplishment. You know, almost any job can be improved by realizing that there’s a personal investment in some aspect of that job. So, for example, if I had a job mopping floors at a hospital, I wouldn’t like it very much. I’d find it dull and I’m not very strong, so I’d probably have some physical aches and pains from it, but I know right now that what I would do with that job is say, “I’m helping people who are very sick not get infections. And that’s an important job. And I’m going to do the best I can.” And there’s almost always a way to frame work — even unrewarding work — that allows you personally to feel it’s meaningful.
SWB That feels like something that I can definitely think about later and I don’t need to be in older age to have that be meaningful. So, one of the things you mentioned in the book is that you say, “we cannot just settle for being a diminished version of our younger selves.” And you talk about how we tend to feel like these diminished versions of ourselves. And I’m wondering, what are the ways that that happens for older women and how do you encourage all of us to look at this differently as we age?
MP I see this age as a very serious challenge. There’s a lot of things that happen, including — at least from my point — the most serious challenge of this life stage is we start losing people we love. And I’m really lucky so far; I haven’t lost my partner, I haven’t lost my siblings, all of my close women friends are alive. So, I feel very, very lucky. But I know that within the next few years, I’ll lose people I love and I’ll eventually say goodbye to everyone I love. So, there’s a lot of challenges. And what those challenges do is create in a person a sense of emergency. And emergencies call for emergent behavior. And there’s a lot of emergent behavior that comes from this life stage because first of all, we’re very aware that the runway is short and that if there’s anything we want to do with our lives, now better be the time we’re doing it. So, eventually, it’s no longer work to me. If there’s something I want to do, I’ll do it. So, partly what happens with this life stage is because we oscillate between sorrow and bliss, gratitude and pain, it’s very catalytic for growth. And we tend to grow bigger and deeper as a way to deal with the sadness and challenges of this life stage. So, it’s enormous portal for growth and people move into a larger self. They tend to get kinder, they tend to be more appreciative, they tend to have a much more inclusive moral imagination and be more tolerant. And they tend to have this long view of seven decades that allows them to keep things in perspective in a way that’s very hard to do if you’re 22 years old or even 30 years old. Perspective is a beautiful word. And as we age, it’s easier and easier to keep things in perspective. So, those are some of the ways that we balance the pain. Now, of course, Sara and Katel, I want to be clear. We all suffer, but we don’t all grow. And unfortunately, I know — and I’m guessing you know — some women who haven’t grown. Partly that’s because I don’t think they’ve realized they have the potential for growth. Old age transfigures or it fossilizes. And one of the things I want to do with Women Rowing North is help older people transcend in a sense their former selves and move into a bigger, more resilient, more adaptive self. For not only facing what’s coming, but for deeply savoring the time we have left.
KL I’m over here just feeling more hopeful about aging and the future than I’ve ever been before, so thank you for saying all of that. [laughs]
MP Wonderful! That makes me so happy. [KL laughs] That’s the goal of this book, of course, so that’s wonderful.
KL Yeah, yeah. Well, hearing you talk about suffering a little bit ago, I’m actually also interested in your perspective on grief. You say that it’s not just something to endure, that it’s also a reflection of our capacity to love. And this feels like just such a really important way to think about and reflect on challenging moments in life. What led you to that perspective?
MP Well, for example, sociopaths presumably don’t feel much grief because they don’t have any feelings for people. And on the other hand, I’m someone with very strong feelings, very deep feelings. I’m a mammal; I like heat, I like emotion, I like warmth. That’s the primary way I relate to the world. And I have a lot of people I love very deeply. And so from my point of view, the idea of loss is really difficult. And even when I lose people that are somewhat peripheral members of my community — like, for example, when I lose a dentist or I hear someone that I used to see in a grocery store died — that for me feels really sad. Because even though they weren’t people that were really close to me and I saw all the time, I cared about them and there’s a part of me that feels really sad whenever I hear anyone has died. It’s very interesting. With the more intense grief people feel when they lose someone in their inner circle, we don’t have adequate language to describe that. We really don’t have this sense of how much we love someone and at the same time how grateful we are for their memory and how comforting it is to have their voice in our heads. There are words like bittersweet and poignant, but we have so many complicated feelings when we lose someone we love. And even helping someone die, on the one hand, it’s a responsibility and it’s sad. And on the other hand, I know from doing this many times by now that it’s also a great honor and it’s some of the most beautiful and joyous moments of a person’s life are in those last few weeks of life when they’re aware they’re saying goodbye. Because as they realize how short time is for them, everything they do because infused with meaning and beauty. And it’s a really miraculous thing to be around someone who is dying well.
SWB I’m actually tearing up a little bit over here to hear you talk about that. And I’m thinking about that honor —
KL Yeah.
SWB — and how beautiful it is to look at grieving that way and being there for someone in that way, thank you for that.
MP Well, and it may come in handy for you. You’re still young, but it’s probably not that long until you start losing older friends or aunts or people that really matter to you. And it’s a very good idea to go into that process as a learning process where you want to do everything you can to take advantage of being with someone who is facing the end. By growing and learning and increasing your ability to care for people and your own appreciation for life; it’s very important. One of my friends told me a beautiful story about her mother when she was dying. And one of the very common stories I hear is about people just at the end of life or in a very difficult situation finding a way to make that moment good instead of tragic. So, this friend’s mother was in an ICU with pneumonia and she’d never been in hospital before except one night to have my friend, Gretchen. And at the same time, she’d never taken prescription drugs and she’d never taken over the counter drugs; she did not like drugs. So, she’s in a lot of pain and Gretchen’s in the room with her mother and the doc comes in and says, “I want to give you a shot of morphine for your pain.” And the mother starts to shake her head no. And my friend, Gretchen, says, “please, please take it, mom.” So, she nods to the doctor and he gives her the shot of morphine. And her body had been really clenched up and tight and when she got that morphine, she just totally relaxed. Her arms fell away from her body and you could see all the pain disappear from her body. And she looked at Gretchen and said in a big smile in a joking way, “I’ve made a terrible mistake with my life… I should have been taking drugs all along.” [SWB & KL laugh] Well, what a funny thing to make a joke on your deathbed! [SWB laughs] But older women do that. And so when we see that, when we see that, we realize, “well, we could do that too. We could make a joke. Or we could say something beautiful that allows people to remember us.” So, if you’re resilient at twenty, if you’re resilient at thirty, you’re going to be resilient on your deathbed. Resilience is an attitude and a set of skills. And those skills increase. you’re more resilient. If you weren’t more resilient in your last life stage, you couldn’t possibly handle it. But because older people are happier than anyone else, they obviously have those skills; they’ve learned how to handle it over the years.
SWB This has been so wonderful and so heartening for me. And we are just about out of time, so I want to ask one last question before we let you go. There’s this quote of yours that I really love that is, “let’s aim to become more curious and less worried, more self aware and less reactive,” which I think that you were just speaking to in some ways. And I want that now, right? I want that now, not just as an older woman. And so, what would you tell women like us in our generation to help us get there as we age and as we grow?
MP It’s wonderful to accept oneself. It’s wonderful to stop the self criticism and the rumination and the worrying about if we did the wrong thing or if we made every, single person in the world happy every moment of the day. And instead of that, to learn to look inside ourselves and just be really kind and tender with that crazy baby that’s in us all. Just really practice kindness and tenderness toward our own selves. That is the best thing that we can do for ourselves at any age.
KL That is a beautiful note to end on. Mary, thank you so much for being on the show. Where can folks find more about you and just keep up with your work?
MP Well, I have a website — marypipher.com — and Women Rowing North is in most stores now. I also wanted to mention that Reviving Ophelia, the book I started out with earlier mentioning is going to be reissued in June — 25th year anniversary edition — and I wrote it with my daughter, who is a teenager. I’m really excited to see Reviving Ophelia come out. But thank you, Sara, thank you, Katel; it was a wonderful experience.
KL Thank you.
SWB Thank you so much for being here and everybody should definitely pick up Women Rowing North and the new edition of Reviving Ophelia — this is such meaningful work, Mary. Thank you.
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Strong Feelings is a weekly podcast about work, friendship, and feminism. Because life’s too short to bottle things up. Hosted by Katel LeDu, and Sara Wachter-Boettcher. Produced by EDITAUDIO. Made with ❤ in Philadelphia.
