There’s a certain kind of woman society has, for some inexplicable reason, deemed irrelevant despite the fact she is anything but. She’s being phased out at work. She’s an unpaid carer to ageing parents whilst still looking after children who are beginning their adult lives with more ‘un’ than certainty. Her hormones have gone feral. Bedtime needs to be 9.30 or all hell breaks loose, and in one way or another, she’s constantly told it’s time for her to fade quietly into the background.
And now and then… that actually sounds quite nice. Because she’s exhausted. She’s holding everyone and everything together, and she’s too busy to even say it out loud.
But, although she has more on her plate in a single day than many could handle in a month, there’s a resolve and a resilience in her that speaks volumes to what she’s capable of next. Despite the campaign to write her off, in reality, she holds more power than the institutions that have stopped seeing or speaking to her, or the industries that were built on convincing her she’s past it and needs a better wrinkle cream. Also, regardless of whatever she has already achieved in her life, she holds more power now than she has at any point before.
She just doesn’t see it yet.
She feels stuck in the middle, when really she’s at the centre of one of the most important eras in history.
They say a parent’s voice becomes a child’s inner voice. Whatever you heard often enough, at the age when you were still working out what kind of person you were, you are very probably still saying to yourself now.
That isn’t a metaphor. It is how the thing is built.
So here is the question almost nobody asks. If one voice can do that, what would it do for a child to have all of them?
We know the answer, because somebody measured it. In 2001 two psychologists at Emory University asked children twenty questions about their family’s history. The ones who could answer had higher self-esteem, lower anxiety and a stronger sense that their own choices mattered. Of everything measured, how much a child knew about their family’s story was the single best predictor found of that child’s emotional health and resilience.
Which means the stories were never sentimental. They are structural.
Duke & Fivush, Emory University, the “Do You Know?” scale, 2001. Findings are correlational.
This is who she is
Sources: Forbes; NielsenIQ; US Small Business Administration. The £250bn from the Alison Rose Review of Female Entrepreneurship, HM Treasury, 2019. Sandwich carer figures from the Office for National Statistics, Sandwich carers, UK. Spending power, household spending decisions and the 2019 earnings crossover via NOON and Accenture, “The Rise of the Queenager”. Female-led company returns via NOON and Women Are Good Business.
She is in the middle of two generations she loves.
In the middle of the woman she has been and the woman she is still becoming.
In the middle of a society that celebrates her and suppresses her in the same breath.
She is holding all of that power, with no time to do anything with it.
And she is the most important player in a game nobody has told her she is playing.
We’re living through the greatest wealth transfer in human history. Good news, because inheriting is no longer a nice-to-have. Her parents didn’t need to inherit; the boom took good care of them. But for her children, inheritance could be the difference between long-term security and long-term struggle.
The problem is, 90% of wealth transfers fail. And it’s almost never because of the solicitors, the markets or the paperwork. It’s because of families that don’t talk.
She may well be the most powerful force on earth. And I believe she has the ability to set herself free to focus on whatever ‘IT’ is that’s calling to her next, while also ensuring her parents and her children have what matters most to them too.
Why the conversation nobody wants to have is the one that changes everything, and why it takes five minutes a day.
I’m nearly fifty. I had my youngest daughter at 42, and the years that followed were the hardest of my life. I came out of them a single mother of three, paying all the bills on my own.
I have a young daughter still at primary school, a teenager I am currently caring for through major surgery, and an eldest trying to start a life on a ladder that isn’t there in the way it was for me.
And I care for my father. Not just the practical things, the appointments, the lifts, the endless admin. What he actually needs is to know how much he’s loved. That we noticed what he built. That all of it mattered.
That’s the part nobody puts on a care plan.
I lost my dear friend Millie to metastatic breast cancer. She was younger than me. And my nan died in my arms, on my son’s seventeenth birthday, the exact day, seventeen years earlier, that I’d become a mother.
So I know what it costs when the stories go quiet.
I don’t ever want my children to be in a position where they can’t hear my voice. Where they can’t feel that they were loved and supported, whatever else is going on. That’s not a business plan. It’s the reason I built one.
InHerItEra is in progress. Drawing on original research into why families don’t talk about inheritance, and what happens when they do.
You’ll get the research survey first, so your answers go into the book. Then the findings when they’re in, and the book when it’s ready. Nothing else.
