Midlife Is: A Poem and a Prompt
Prompt 8: Spring Writing Challenge
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.
Midlife is where I am, mid-stream. I’ve landed promptly in menopause due to a total hysterectomy as well as the removal of my ovaries and fallopian tubes, and lymph nodes. The result of endometrial cancer – Stage 1. No spread was found and now monitoring is all that’s left in my treatment. So I am squarely Midlife in all senses of time and place, body and spirit.
The beginning of Midlife was a growing disturbance and an awareness of the sources of my years of suffering. Seeing my life on its own timeline and the consequences time had on all I had believed was the awakening of a new sense of self. As an undergrad, a professor quoted Robert Frost (who had been his mentor) as saying, “We muddy the waters so we can see in the clearing.” Midlife is the clearing.
The anger resulting from what I see demands a recalibration of my values. With a deep sadness for the losses I’ve endured because I entrusted my life to wrong people and establishments, I forgive myself thoroughly. Midlife is the shedding of skin, like the snake, a spirit animal I now claim. The snake shows us why and how we must do it.
I’m stuck again, not sure how to finish this sentence. “Midlife is…” And then I realize that it’s because I don’t feel like I’m in midlife, can’t quite conceive of my life as a single plot arc. My life hasn’t been one thing that progresses and changes, but more a series of things – the life I lived in my parent’s home. The life I lived with my first husband, the one I toyed with calling “the husband of my youth.” He was also the husband of my early middle age. That life ended and there was a pause, a space of years committed to raising a teenager and grounding myself as a single person. And now I’m at the beginning, not the middle of another life. Midlife doesn’t feel like where I am.
I guess there are continuities – I am a reader and a writer. I am a birth doula. I am a daughter, sister, mother. But even my relationships with my mother and sisters feel like something that started ten or fifteen years ago, not like a continuation of what was there before. Now I’m at the beginning of another life, with another husband.
For this to be midlife, I’d have to remember who I was ten years ago and twenty, and thirty and forty. And I don’t. I know I’ve had other lives – I know there were ten years when I was producer rather than consumer, created three children and hundreds of gallons of milk. I know there was a time when I walked the streets of Paris and stayed out too late to be sure my mother would be glad to see me come home. But these feel like stories I read long ago. They slip away as I try to make continuities, try to imagine coherence and the steady progression of a life.