I USED TO THINK WOMEN WERE THE ENEMY

Having endured years of cruel treatment at an all-girls school, Celia Walden grew up preferring the company of men. Then came a midlife epiphany...

Waitrose (always the way) as I watched a mother wrestle with a toddler in the full floor-flailing throws of a nuclear meltdown. Taking in her frazzled face, the white knuckles gripping her trolley, and the brief moment in which she closed her eyes to block out the agony, I knew exactly what this woman was thinking: I can’t do this. And I would have given, done, said anything to help her. So

I did what we all do and tried to distract the toddler out of his fit, pulling faces and waving my hands around like a lunatic. But in the end, all I could offer the toddler’s poor mother was a smile. We’ve all been there. Because those silent messages of sisterly support had meant everything to me.

If motherhood hadn’t broken down the barriers and allowed me to make a whole new set of friends that have enriched my late 30s, and now my 40s, in a way I could never have imagined, the ageing process would have. I wasted a lot of time putting on a front for other women, trying to hide my flaws. But getting older exposes all of that as a pointless sham. It both reduces us and elevates us to more than the sum of our parts. And now that I’ve failed and been caught lacking professionally, parentally and physically; now that my jawline has slackened and my laughter lines are more entrenched, I no longer feel I need to pretend to be perfect in the way that I once did.

Many more experiences are going to reinforce those female ties over the decades to come – not all of them joyful. They might be infuriating, sad or traumatic experiences at the hands of men, like the ones I describe in my thriller Payday, in which three very different women who have been humiliated and belittled by the same man forge the darkest of bonds. Or they might be complex and painful experiences of a more prosaic kind: the menopause and the debilitating women’s afflictions and diseases thrown at us by that least sisterly entity of all, Mother Nature. But knowing we’ll share them is a comfort. And as much as we love to hate social media for its trolls, its ‘fakeness’ and its ‘glossiness’, I see and feel so much genuine female warmth on those platforms every day.

As for all the new friendships there for the making, well, that’s as exciting to me in middle age as the idea of falling in love once was. Remember the feeling we had in our teens and 20s, when every social gathering was an opportunity to find ‘that special someone?’ I have that now. All the time. Only the special someone’s a woman I haven’t met yet. One who might just enhance my life briefly – or last the distance. Because that tall blonde girl I was supposed to hate? She’s been my best friend for the past 20 years.

Celia’s novel Payday is published by Little, Brown, price £12.99*