“The best stage of my life”
Thirty seconds into interviewing Annabel Langbein, a very Annabel Langbein thing occurs. We are sitting in the lounge of her Auckland home, when her husband Ted Hewetson barrels through the door with two boxes of buffalo mozzarella and two of the cheesemakers themselves. Annabel greets both with equal measures of enthusiasm – she really loves people, and she really loves cheese. She and Helen, from Clevedon Buffalo Co., get into a conversation about how much they are enjoying this stage of their lives when Helen says: “It’s a wonderful time to be a woman.” This mirrors the exact conversation we’ve just been having, where Annabel is saying how surprised she has been to realise that the life stage she’s now in happens to be the best one.
It was a relatively recent realisation, she says, and it was borne out of the expectations that life post-50 would be, well, the opposite.
“I had always thought, ‘Oh, that’s the end of the cliff and life is just going to be over,’” she laughs. “I always thought menopause was going to be the end of the earth. But it is so not – it’s the opposite. You have this incredible energy, and you can still feel sexy and fabulous… but there is a freedom that comes with it.”
“Sexy,” “fabulous” and “freedom”: these are words women can spend a lifetime working towards. Annabel believes that part of the reason they are so achievable now is because the pressure is finally off. “This will sound like an oxymoron, but to some extent,
