Midlife Becoming

In which I found myself all over again at 35.

Do you ever feel like you’ve lost the plot on your own life? I’m not talking about what sort of career you should have or what you should do with your life, but the feeling that you know who you are at your core. The throughline, the golden thread that ties our unique selves together, that I once gripped with assurance has somehow slipped through my fingers.

When I first realized this described me, I felt trapped in that moment of panic that a child experiences when they look up and realize the adult they’ve been following is not their mom. Or from the reverse perspective, the ice-cold terror that floods your chest as a parent when you turn around and find that your child isn’t where you thought they were.

Either way: bracing fear.

It’s unnerving to look up from all your days full of the beautiful ordinary and realize that the essence of self you once felt connected to has floated away. I could blame it on how busy I was for the last semester—or the last two years, really. But I think it’s more complex than that. I’ve come to the crossroads of my own mid-thirties growing pains and my kids’ older elementary years of becoming. I’m doing a lot of emotional lifting as they figure out who they are . . . and I wonder if that’s left me with less energy to remember who I am.

Not that I’m nostalgic for the baby years (I like uninterrupted sleep), but during those years I at least felt like I was standing on solid ground. I didn’t have many friends and was deeply isolated, but I had notebooks filled with things I wanted to write about and endless ideas for projects to tackle. Now I have a beautiful community of supportive friends and a Substack that was supposed to be about more than book reviews but is, alas, mostly book reviews.

This is because 95% of the time I don’t know what to say. Perhaps this is the curse of being someone who views life through the lens of endless layers of nuance. With no easy answers, I don’t always know where I stand. I often write to figure out what I think about something. But that takes space, sprawling hours that used to be available while my kids babbled and played or napped for hours at a time. I used to jot things down constantly with a baby or toddler on my hip, or leave a voice note to myself while I pushed a double stroller. My evenings were so spacious that I had time to record entire podcast episodes in between when the kids went to bed and when I did, often with time to spare.

I thought I was busy with care work (I was). I thought I would be freer in ten years (I’m not).

Covid stole a lot from us. One of the smaller things it took from me was a sense of intentional transition from the Little Kid Years to the Big Kid Years. In 2020, I still had three Little Kids. By spring of 2021, after a full year of being confined to our house, my oldest was entering Big Kid territory and I wasn’t ready for it.¹ All those days of togetherness had left me with little mental room to prepare for the stage ahead. Now my days belong to work and studying, and my evenings belong to accompanying my children on their own emotional work of figuring out who they are.

I feel like my life has been on fast forward since 2020. I’ve been a hundred different people, shifted my preferences in books and in personal style, changed my mind in ways I never would have predicted, expanded my notion of God by an exponential factor.

The shape of my soul has changed. I don’t always recognize myself in the mirror. Sometimes I wonder if anyone sees all the multitudes within me, all the versions of myself I’m trying to piece together in this middle year of a midlife decade.

I’ve wandered far from myself in the last five years, and now I’m finally coming home again. Not for the last time, I’m sure. Our becoming only ends with our final breath on earth. But for the first time in this decade of my life, I have the time and the space to walk the wandering path back to who I’ve always been and who I might be someday. Not in shallow snippets of stolen time but in deep, gulping breaths.

This month, May, is God’s gift to me. It’s the blessed four weeks when my semester is over and the kids are still in school. Without freelance editing projects, without school, with only one part-time job, this is the most time I’ve had for myself since at least 2016 when my second child was born. I’m claiming this Eastertide with every ounce of joy and delight the liturgical season commands.

I’m wandering bookstores by myself, with friends, with my kids. I’m going to vintage shops and coming home with new treasures. I’m putting my FitBit in a box and replacing the battery in my analog watch. I’m pulling dandelions and planting wildflower paper (that came with one of my antiquing purchases) to see what sprouts. I’m writing in an actual notebook, attempting to learn French, taking my sewing machine down from the attic, knitting a hat for a baby that’s due this summer, spending too much money having my nails manicured a bright orange-red.

This revisiting of self is a thing of beauty, a sacred space that I think all women have the capacity to hold within them. That deep, inner knowing of our own becoming.

1. I did have my fourth baby in 2021, but I’ve found that my stage as a parent more closely aligns with my oldest child than my youngest. Once you have even one Big Kid, the rhythm of your days is fundamentally different than it was in the Little Kid years.