stereotypes do not apply
Photo by Volodymyr Hryshchenko on Unsplash

What Do You Call Women Who Aren’t Old Yet?

Many of Us Were Just Not Cut Out for Conventional Labels

Pamela M Tsigdinos
5 min readMar 24, 2021

--

Ahead of dawn light I punched my pillow before flipping it to savor the feel of the cool side against my cheek. I willed my mind to chill as my body fought the urge to fidget. Thoughts, however, kept tumbling.

The past two weeks surfaced some disquieting realizations. This usually means (heavy sigh) a bit of ‘growing’ awaits. Try as I might, I could not shake nagging questions about where I fit these days. The realizations began when a few oldish women in a virtual group I belong to starting crowing about a newly minted grandmother in the crowd. This escalated to an unwelcome group text brag-athon about grandchildren. Curiously, at the same time, I learned about a Childless Collective Summit soon to take place online.

Square Peg Syndrome

This new event, organized by a woman 20 years my junior, first came up in a Zoom call. It then appeared in several posts on Instagram (a social media platform I’ve never fully embraced beyond posting one-off nature, food or cocktail shots).

There, in perfect hashtaggy Instagram fashion, I found 15 to 20 creatively formatted smiling shots of women I’d met through blogging — some by phone, others in person — the past 10 years. All…

--

--

Pamela M Tsigdinos

Writer/Author. Published in The New York Times, San Francisco Chronicle, WIRED, The Boston Globe, Fortune, Reno Gazette Journal http://tinyurl.com/4kwypjtm