For those of you who have been participating in the Spring Writing Challenge, we are almost done! Just a couple more prompts left after today.
Today I want to invite all of you — paid and unpaid subscribers — to write with us. And to read a poem about midlife by co-editor
.Set aside 10 minutes. Sit down. And write the opening of this sentence:
“Midlife is…”
Write whatever comes to mind. The very first words, phrases, sentences.
What comes to mind? Crisis? Reinvention? Opportunity? Loss? Or, as Brene Brown writes, do you think of midlife as an “unraveling”?
Or do you imagine a scene or a memory, like Stephanie does in the poem below, that encapsulates midlife for you?
Post your writing, if you choose, below in the comments.
Midlife Morning Walk with Dogs
by
I am preoccupied by rage
As I storm in from our walk,
A morning ritual designed to promote
The wellness and calm
Of all three of us.
The dogs and me, that is.
I throw down my bifocals
Both fogged from the reentry
Into warmth from the January cold
And darkened thanks to my “intuitive” transition lenses.
“I’m inside now, you idiots,”
I growl at the progressive cat-eyes
Lying haplessly on top of the
Overflowing shoe cubby while I wrangle the dogs—
Confused by my outburst—from their harnesses.
My time mismanaged as usual,
I sit down to eat the oatmeal I left out for myself
And find I am sweating,
A more common occurrence now that I am 44.
In an act of audacious defiance,
I rip off my fleece Winnie the Pooh pajama top
And eat topless next to the window seat,
Flipping the metaphorical bird to imaginary neighbors
Gawking through their own windows.
The freedom of releasing my breasts is not enough,
I am still sweating—why did I ever think
It was a good idea to go for a walk braless?—
And so I come up with a more satisfying plan for cooling.
Gleefully, I heft them,
One and then the other,
Onto the cool marble of the bar top—
Not granite, too expensive, but quartz—
As though I am a mammography technician
Preparing to flatten them to the machine surface.
I smile at the familiarity of the sensation,
Presenting my naked breasts to a cold, hard slab.
But this time it feels delicious,
So soothing and refreshing.
The appeal of the jade roller springs to mind,
Another hit amongst the midlife set,
Its surface always cool and invigorating.
I wonder what my husband would think
Of this scene, me downing oatmeal
With breasts splayed across the breakfast countertop.
Rather than aroused, I suspect he would be dismayed
Or even disgusted—(as though my tits on the table were
Our children’s muddy boots thoughtlessly discarded)—
By my contaminating our eating surface
With the sweat of my under-boobs.
I vow to hit the counter with some
Mrs. Meyer’s lemon verbena,
Knowing full well
I will forget.
Love the poem Steph!! Fantastic! 🤣 I'm totally with you on that one!
Midlife is ... a completely different concept for me, post-spring-2022, which is when, at 55, I found out I had cancer. Was I midlife then? Who knows. Who knows when, exactly, is midlife? No one. But I know this: having cancer in that part of life changes everything that comes after it. It puts a different color on all the classic midlife things. What would sending my boys off to college feel like without cancer? What would making the first, super-duper-early musings about what a retired life for my husband and me might look like without cancer? (Some of these considerations are esoteric, but some are concrete and practical. Taking my sons to school the particular year after cancer meant I stood by the car and guarded the stuff while the boys hefted things up dorm stairways; I couldn't lift my arms fully above my head in those late-summer, post-surgery weeks. And retirement, even looking 15 years out, if we move from where we live now? Gotta be somewhere near excellent medical care, the kind that saved my life.)
But really, what is midlife and how do we know we're in it, or near it, or just past it? That's another thing cancer has changed. I lost a best friend to cancer when we were 31. I can tell you, when we were 15 and dancing around her living room to the Bangles (this town is our town/it is so glamorous/bet you'd live here if you could and be one of us!"), she wasn't thinking that was her life's midpoint, but it was. You know what she did at midlife? Convinced me the two of us should enter a young adult novel-writing contest, convince me the two of us could *actually do it*. I needed convincing, she *never* did. (We wrote the novel, longhand over a summer, and typed it up and entered the contest, for which we won honorable mention.)
She didn't know she had 15 or 16 years left. I know some things now. But I don't know what midlife is. It's an impossible question. You can't know what is it, but you can figure out what you want to make of it, or with it. My script changed in spring 2022. The pages are blank and I'm filling them up. Cancer hung a drape in my midlife, and while it's thinner now, it's always there, I imagine it will always be there. But like my friend at 16, and for the rest of the life I have left, I'm going to try to keep brushing it into my peripheral vision, and living as loud as I can.