Midpoints, Endings, and Beginnings

Midlife Mapping

This weekend, my husband is officiating the wedding of his best friend’s second marriage. This is the friend who married us on his boat for our marriage, also a second one, so this ceremony feels particularly full circle. A few days later, my third and youngest kid graduates high school along with my youngest stepdaughter.

I call it weeping season—the time between graduation and going off to college, the last summer they’re really a kid. I think it will get better with each child, but it never does. I’ll be making breakfast or folding laundry and remember that in a few months, I won’t be doing that anymore, and the waterworks start. My kids roll their eyes and laugh at me. I wipe mine and laugh/cry with them.

Midlife is so confusing because you’re smack in the middle of everything as it’s happening all at once. Friends are getting married and divorced. Family members are aging and being born. Kids are graduating and starting new schools or graduating and starting jobs. You are aging, but also simultaneously facing a whole unknown phase of life. Things are both liminal and also retrospective. You have a more panoramic view of where you’ve been and what the lay of life looks like, but you also still have uncharted waters ahead. Your vision turns to shit just when you need it the most.

This is time of life, it seems to me, when ceremony and ritual start to matter in a visceral way, when those things get down close to the bone. We start performing the ceremonies we went through ourselves and it’s bittersweet on the other side. We bury the people we love. We marry each other—not just get married to each other. One day, we’ll be the ones being buried. That fact starts waking you up at night. It sits twitching its tail at your feet while you drink your morning coffee in the sun. You’re not sure what to do with it since it’s clear it’s not going anywhere. So you just let it hang out. You buy bigger jeans. You give up on dying your hair.

This is the time when you’re out of time, but also when you still have plenty of second chances. Maybe all the old maps you laid out for yourself at an earlier phase of life are outdated. Or maybe you drew those maps exactly right and have gotten exactly where you wanted to be, but the road signs you relied on have suddenly vanished. What now? Or maybe you’ve jumped onto a whole other road and there isn’t a map for it at all.

Times like these require a new navigation system and a different way of looking at life. We need bi-focals at this age. We’re not young anymore, but we’re not at the end yet, either. We’re at the beginning of the end. We’re watching things start to come full circle, but you can’t do that stuck in the past. You have to learn to look with your whole heart, not your head. You have to laugh and cry.

I’ve heard midlife compared to adolescence as a formative stage of life that is an upheaval, a sea change. But I don’t think that’s quite right. It’s just the halfway point. You can look back, but it’s not going to tell you where to go. It might, though, tell you where not to step. You can look forward, but there are no guarantees. Just better odds based on the monsters and difficult terrain you’ve faced before. Maybe the best strategy is just to be radically present, to pay exquisite attention to what’s right in front of you because you know it won’t last forever, for better or for worse.

As a storyteller and writer, I naturally look at life in terms of narrative. I know from painful experience how hard it is to tell a good story. The beginning is easy and always so full of optimism. The end usually takes care of itself. It’s the middle bit that’s the sticky part—the section that can lag, that can seem too long. Those are the chapters that you write with blind faith, panic, and hope. Each one is a little building block, even if you can’t see it quite yet. That part of a story requires you to trust yourself down to your core, even as you let go and let god. That part of the story requires a backbone of rituals and rites to get you through, to support you, to give you a little structure in the muck.

I am blessing my friends with a happy marriage full of everyday comforts and joy: coffee together in the morning, walks with the dogs, music in the kitchen while they cook, the solace of each other as they fall to sleep. I am blessing my son with a steady mind and an open heart as he goes off to college. I am hoping he remembers that he has roots and wings.

I’m reminding myself of the same.