This was published 4 years ago
The Lopez Effect: I'll have what she's having, thanks
By Samantha Selinger-Morris
Right before she turned 50, Joanne Benneyworth remembered what her parents feared when they turned the same age and were staring down the barrel of an empty nest.
“They were concerned about whether or not their marriage could stay together,” says Benneyworth, a 52-year-old Sydney primary school teacher with two children aged 21 and 17. “It made me start to wonder: 'What am I going to do? For so long I’ve been focused on my family. What’s going to happen to me?'”
At age 49 Joanne Benneyworth started an Instagram account @fifty_at_fifty, and began tackling 50 goals.Credit: James Brickwood
So at 49, Benneyworth, who has always craved adventure, started an Instagram account @fifty_at_fifty, and began tackling 50 goals, such as starting a sustainable fashion brand and trekking to Machu Picchu and to Everest base camp. “It really is me becoming the best form of me,” says Benneyworth, who remains happily married and whose project is ongoing, with a desire to travel to the Himalayas to help train teachers in remote areas.
It’s a far cry from what her parents did at the same age. (They moved house, about three kilometres down the road, and took up water sports.)
So, is this what it means to be 50 now, then?
A debate about what this stage in life should look like erupted across the internet earlier this month when it lost its mind after 50-year-old Jennifer Lopez performed at the Super Bowl halftime show in sparkly, skin-baring Versace bodysuits, while sliding up and down a stripper’s pole.
One man announced he wanted to sue the National Football League because Lopez’s appearance was “soft pornographic” and, also, she was too old to wear provocative clothing.
Jennifer Lopez upset the tabloid moralists with her performance at the Super Bowl.Credit: Getty
Meanwhile, The New York Times declared Lopez’s performance “an in-your-face demonstration of a woman glorifying in her own physicality, and a dare to anyone who might render judgment based on a number”.
According to Geelong-based clinical psychologist Chris Mackey, it’s common for Australians around 50 to feel a push to do what makes them feel most alive.
Perhaps we should now call it The Lopez Effect.
Partly this is a result of greater awareness of mortality, and a liberation from the self-consciousness that often defines the first four decades of life, says Mackey. “There’s a deeper awareness of ‘who am I? What is life on about?’” he says. “People have a keener awareness of those deeper personal questions, or existential questions … It can prompt people in their early 50s to make changes, which can be a very creative time.”
This has been the experience of Nicola McGrath. After toiling in advertising and then in odd jobs for decades after the birth of her two children (now aged 20 and 22) McGrath retrained as a nurse at 49.
“It was what I always wanted to get into,” says McGrath, who is now 55 and working in palliative care in a Sydney hospital.
Her parents discouraged her when she was young from following her passion, reasoning that she was “probably going to get married anyway”. But now she is “very, very fulfilled”.
“I’ve said to my husband before, ‘This is something for me, this is not about any of you, this is about me now’.”
Nicola McGrath decided to become a nurse in her fifties.Credit: Dominic Lorrimer
She says her age sometimes gives her a leg up on her much younger colleagues. “I’m much more able to have an understanding for, or feel more confident, saying some of the things that need to be said, like, ‘Are you scared of dying?’”
This doesn’t mean that some Australians aren’t struggling at 50. Mackey sees numerous clients this age presenting with anxiety or depression, sometimes as a result of mourning the loss of youth, while also facing ageing or sick parents and an empty nest.
He encourages them to look at their struggles as a “hero’s journey”, which can eventually lead them to “creative” solutions for how to lead a more fulfilling life.
“OK look, here you are in the dark night of the soul, but there’s this challenge, something’s out of balance in your life,” he says to them. “A good life is a series of coming up against challenges and wondering how you’ll tackle it. I think it’s really helpful if people look at, ‘What does this [struggle] mean to me? What does this say about how I’m living my life?’”
Robert Frizza relishes the freedom he now has to enjoy nature.Credit: Dominic Lorrimer
Robert Frizza, 59, experienced this journey after his wife told him that she wanted out of their relationship after 30 years together. “It was like a real death of something,” says Frizza, who was 46 at the time.
He says it made him re-evaluate the decades he’d spent “head down, bum up all the time”, slogging away in increasingly well-paid jobs in electronics and robotics, in order to support his wife and their three children and buy their five-bedroom house.
A surfing and Iron Man enthusiast, Frizza spent the next three years travelling around Australia in a Kombi van, moving from race to race. He met his second wife, a teacher, on the trip.
And now, along with her income and his job running a Kombi van touring company and doing odd jobs, he relishes the freedom he now has to enjoy nature.
“Until I had a life out on the road, at 46, do you know what? I never saw a shooting star. I finally saw a shooting star, in fact I saw many! I might as well have seen Elvis resurrected, it was an amazing thing.”