Midsummer

I spent the last 2 years dancing an awkward tango with a mid-life crisis (hereafter, referred to as MLC).  I seriously flirted with a full on buying-a-sports-car-and-a-bunch-of-plastic-surgery- -investing-my-kids’-college-funds-in-a-beach-house-in-Bali kind of crisis.  If you know me well, you probably had no idea. I kept my musings and mutterings and daily rendezvous with box wine (and, briefly, vodka) very quiet.  I still got up and showed up.  I still paid my bills and put on mascara.  I was still at the presentations and turning in my budget proposals, I was on the sidelines and in the pick-up lines, I still bought birthday presents and posted funny pictures on Facebook.   Unless you happen to have been born of me or married to me, this was a completely yawn-worthy mid-life crisis.  If you lived with me, there were surely moments when you wondered if I was going to make it (though this was right before you rolled your eyes and asked me to make you a sandwich).  I daydreamed quietly about all the me’s I might have been.  A book editor living in New York.  A volleyball coach in California. A dude rancher in Wyoming.   An apple orchard owning/organic baby applesauce maker in Vermont (wait—that was Baby Boom).  I was quietly a very hot mess.  Some days, I still am.

But I’m a pragmatic Midwesterner living a very lucky life that even at my worst I can’t pretend is anything but quite blessed indeed.  I had joyful moments in these two years—a family vacation of a lifetime, a volleyball state championship for my oldest child, a work award, holidays, weddings, quiet, joyful moments with a family I can’t fathom abandoning for more than a long weekend when you come right down to it.  I’m not exactly a candidate for a real MLC.

But there is no denying that SOMETHING wasn’t right.  Years were drifting by, my babies were growing older and more independent, my career was stagnating, my marriage was growing ever more familiar, my parents were growing older, my dog still wasn’t totally potty trained, I was still driving a mini-van a solid decade and a half after purchasing my first.  Things were changing—too fast; and yet stagnating—too much.  I had to do the math to figure out how old I was which felt—ugh.  I mean—it was just so boring.  Everything was so much the same, and yet some of the things I have loved about the last 2 decades were coming to an end.  Only my dog comes running when I walk in the door now (and, I suspect, only then because I am the only one who regularly feeds and waters her).  It’s pretty clear that professionally, unless I’m willing to uproot my family with a move, things are unlikely to change much between now and retirement.  Our house is paid for so it seems crazy to move or build anything new.  Chad and I moved something like 15 times in the first 2 years of our relationship and we added a baby every 2 years for the first decade of our marriage.  We are adventurers and leap-ers.  And now we are play-it-safe-rs and put-in-your-timers?  Feels yucky.

And then there is the small matter of my body.

It is not an accident that today marks the 1 year anniversary of my mid-life hip replacement.  I had gleefully (and slightly arrogantly), assumed I would leap out of my hospital bed after the anesthetic wore off and find myself 15 years younger (and 20 pounds thinner—hey!  It’s my fantasy!). But instead, recovery was painful, my immediate family not particularly supportive (one afternoon, as I clumped about the kitchen with my walker, a teenager-who-shall-remain-nameless hollered from where s/he sat engrossed in a phone and slouched on the couch for me to bring them a drink. *Note:  I shall submit to poor grammar before risking said teen’s identity.  While many things may be shifting about this midlife personality of mine, I will never be a woman for whom good grammar is optional).  Unfortunately, in a decade plus of ignoring my body in the service of my sports and my offspring, I have developed more than just the single bad joint.  Suffice it to say, there may be more surgeries in my future (not the hip—my hip is fabulous), and my glorious return to the family games of HORSE have not been quite what I had hoped.  More on that in a later post.

So I spent the last year engrossed in quite a bit of soul searching.  

I think I am at the age when you start to realize that your path is pretty much defined in life.  At a leadership event I attended many years ago the speaker pointed to the Mississippi River outside the conference hall and said, “Our lives have drift.  Like that river out there.  It will keep on flowing and flowing towards the sea unless you do something dramatic to shift it.  If you are sitting here today, you have a pretty good drift going on, but you need to stay awake to the direction so it’s always where you want it to be heading.”  At this age, and after having a major surgical event typically experienced by women a generation or more older than I, is it even possible to alter that drift?  Do I even want to?

The simple answer is no.  I’ve achieved everything I hoped in this first half of my life.  I always wanted to end up married with a big pack of kids.  Ever since I first stepped into a manufacturing environment, I knew I wanted to earn a leadership position at a company that made something solid.  Perhaps one of my most unlikely dreams was to have a cabin near water, and we made that dream come true five years ago.  I am exactly where I want to be, and yet... is this it?   Am I now supposed to sit back and just wait for retirement and grandchildren?  Pay down my mortgages and get my kids through college without getting pregnant or incarcerated, and try to stay married until.... what?  Do we just sit tight until we die?  

My year has been one of quietly raging “is this it?” And then berating myself for not being grateful for the massively blessed life I’ve been given.  So I started asking myself where I could tweak my daily life with more joy, and what else I might set my sights on for this next phase of life.  As a mom of five and a quintessential people pleaser, I have found that at 44 years old I’m not quite sure what it is that even brings ME joy.  I’ve spent a lot of years climbing the ladder at work (involving keeping shareholders and managers happy) and keeping a lot of people at home alive and thriving (involving keeping all ages and sexes of children and a spouse happy) with nary a thought to my own health, happiness, or satisfaction.   

So who am I?  What brings me joy?  Who was I before I started willingly accepting the expectations and demands the world was placing on me?  Before I picked up my glittery baton and started tap dancing for everyone but me?  There was only one thing that remained—and it is this.  For as long as I can remember, I’ve been writing, scribbling stories and poems and diary entries in every notebook and journal and spare scrap of paper I can find.  

A few months ago, a dear, dear friend approached me with the idea of creating a master mind group that would hold each of its members accountable to the pursuit of our “side projects”.  I am paid well at my day job, and I enjoy it well enough, but she said, “You should write a book, Dawn.  Everyone knows it and you know it.”  My heart broke a little—because, isn’t it too late?  I’m so old.  What do I have to say that is even worth writing down?  

And then I remembered the generous comments and compliments I always receive when I blog, and I told myself to be brave, and be vulnerable, and start writing again.  Our master minds have been meeting for over a month and it is time for me to step out.  It’s harder to write about myself and my experience—it was so much easier to tell funny stories about my toddlers and preschoolers.  I suspect this will be a bit different.  My kids are older now—in the springtime of their own lives.  But their stories are becoming more and more theirs to tell.  I just didn’t realize I would get to this place, this time, and wonder if there was any of my own left to tell.

One book I read during my year of soul searching (and self pitying) was called Let Your Life Speak, by Parker Palmer.  “Seasons is a wise metaphor for the movement of life,” he writes.  To which I journaled the following, “If that is my metaphor, I am heading into late summer.  It is a slower, hotter, less hectic season—and yet ripe, abundant, and still fraught with a heavy sense of expectation.  It is a fertile season that cannot be rushed.  I am transported to the heavy heat of mid-August—the deep gold of the summer light, the screeching chatter of the cicadas, and a feeling of both abundance and timelessness.  Of afternoons that linger for hours and days.  The chill of autumn is both imminent—just outside my grasp and line of vision—and miles and lifetimes away.  It is an indolent, reflective time—sometimes marred by violent storms or by melancholy, dripping days.  But mostly it is lazy, reflective, heavily fecund, sunshine filled.  The last days of growth and development before the frenzy of the harvest.” (Note—my journal entries during this time were rarely so frilly and poetic.  Usually they were punctuated with a bunch of f-bombs along the lines of “what the eff am I doing”?)

So, here I sit, ironically in late summer, musing on the rest of my life—the goals yet to accomplish and the long span of days yet ahead.  And I’ve come to one very obvious (if you—or I—know me at all).  I’ll write.

Chad keeps asking me how I plan to make money at this gig (he’s seen enough—more than most—of my pseudo midlife crisis that he’s genuinely worried.  Granted, I may have thrown out some slightly aggressive retirement dates and scenarios over the course of the last several months).  But the simple answer is I just don’t know.  I’ve spent my whole life mixing imminently practical with wild abandon.  I majored in English but built a career in construction and manufacturing.  I had 5 kids, but settled them in my hometown, raising them within sight of the house I grew up in.  I flew my whole family to Costa Rica for Thanksgiving, but packed enough sunscreen and bug spray to fill a carry on.  Why should this be any different?  I’ll keep my reliable, predictable day job but pour hours and energy into a passion blog that may never serve any purpose but to keep me from having an MLC for real.

 I’m leaping back into this head first—into the joy of what God made me to do—and we’ll see what happens.  I know I’ve said this before; and indeed when I blew the digital dust off this old blog I found no fewer than 8 blog titles I had reserved and ignored over the last 10 years).  I really think it will be (can be) different this time for a few reasons:

1.  I have my master minds to keep me consistent.  2. I’ve built an “editorial calendar” of 2x/week blog ideas for the next 3 months (fancy, I know).  3. I’ve tried all the other self care ideas people recommend—exercise and meditation and massages and girls’ trips and date nights.  All of them are lovely, but not quite enough.  And, finally, I know that I’m not alone in this leg of the journey.  One of the most soothing activities for me in the last year were the days and hours spent among women my age and older.  Wise, and funny and similarly slightly rueful souls feeling their way into life transitions they never quite saw coming.  I want to gather a tribe of you—old friends and maybe some new—who figure out now to move into this midsummer season with grace and joy.  I don’t know where this journey will lead, but I’m eager to take this first step.  Here’s to midsummer.