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Reawakening

A woman’s mid-life passage into authenticity

It was an afternoon like any other afternoon.  I was 53, just through menopause, and my son Zak had entered college a few months before in a city several hours away.  My 66-year-old husband Art was selling his medical practice, and we were spending hours looking at 55 and older “active adult communities” in Florida and Arizona on the Internet. 

To assuage my empty nest pangs and my imminent descent into shuffleboard and Depends, I knitted morning to night.  Sweaters, stuffed animals, shawls, hats and scarves flowed from my hands and adorned my bemused husband and grateful family and friends.  I knitted on, head down, fingers flying, back and neck stiff and frozen.  I was like Moira Shearer in THE RED SHOES, except my shoes were my Susan Bates knitting needles.  If I stopped I felt shrieking, unrelenting loneliness and despair.  Loneliness from my empty house, despair over roads not taken and time running out.

That afternoon my knitting needles were silent.  I realized I had come to the end of that temporary coping mechanism.  Fourteen years of yoga practice and decades of spiritual seeking had taught me that in order to deal with my issues I needed to sit with them and let them take me to the depths necessary to completely feel and understand where I was, how I got there and what I could do to move through.

I felt I had done the work I needed to find peace and contentment in midlife.  I had completed years of successful therapy, made peace with an incestuous family member, my father’s alcoholism and an intense and ancient sibling rivalry with my older sister.  But I was not peaceful.  I was agitated, unsettled, and uncomfortable in my own skin.  I had become a recluse in my own home, I rarely socialized in two years as I went through a grueling and often debilitating menopause, and as my vagina grew dry so it seemed had my creativity and my former zest for life. 

I wasn’t really depressed, I was dormant. My art studio was quiet, the paintings I had done up to two years before haunted me from the walls as my easel stood clean and empty and my computer no longer hosted scripts, articles and essays, just emails and aimless web surfing.  Like a perennial plant in winter, I was underground, hidden, silent.  Waiting.  I didn’t know what I was waiting for, but it felt it like a phantom circling me, trying to find a way in.  I didn’t know if it was friend, foe, death or Life with a capital L, but getting from here to there felt higher and wider than jumping the Grand Canyon.

As I sat I basically hit bottom emotionally.  I accepted that I was done with the active, happy, productive part of my life.  I gave up holding on to any ideas I had about what life was for and why I was here.  I felt I had squandered opportunities, lost time and now my beloved son was gone and I was done, played out, dried up, finished.  Dotage and death were all that waited for me, punctuated by occasional visits by family when I would have a few hours to feel useful again as I fussed and cooked and nurtured once more.

After this revelation I sat in my art studio and passively watched a movie, WHAT DREAMS MAY COME.  In this film, Robin Williams plays a man who dies in a car accident and leaves his wife inconsolable.  They had already suffered the loss of both of their children in yet another car accident a few years earlier, and Robin’s death ultimately leads to his wife’s suicide.  Because she takes her own life, she is relegated to a place of madness and perpetual misery we would call Hell. Robin’s character is warned by well-meaning citizens of the afterlife that if he follows his wife to Hell he will also become mad, and they will not even know each other after a very short time.  Nonetheless, he journeys to this desolate, hopeless place to be with her.  As he feels madness descend, his wife recognizes him at last, hugs him and says “Sometimes when you lose, you win”.  They miraculously leave Hell and find themselves together in Paradise.

For reasons I may never understand, I cracked like an egg.  My history, my sadness, my small self oozed out of me and disappeared in wave after wave of wrenching tears.  My heart grew exponentially, I could literally feel my soul open like a flower.  Winter was waning, and I was coming into the Spring of a new, expanded Self.  I had experienced a profound gift of grace, unexpected and completely overwhelming.  My journey to my real self had reached an end, and a new beginning.

In retrospect I can now see that I was holding on too tightly to the life I knew, rife with expectations and assumptions that now felt flat to my soul, and the old notes running through my brain felt false.  New music and open arms were replacing old tapes and grasping desperation to hold on, hold on, don’t let go of all you know, for all that waits for you if you make your dark leap off that moonlit cliff is sadness and loss.  Loss, it seems, is necessary to make room for a Life of Love that is bigger and wider than we ever imagined when hormones ruled and home fires must be kept burning.

My story is unique, as all women’s stories are, but we do share the midlife passage.   I’m writing this with the hope that at least some of my experiences and realizations may resonate for other women at midlife.  This is an amazing time, it truly is.  It’s a time to rediscover our selves independent of our roles as wife, daughters or mothers.  It’s our  time.  The passage often isn’t easy, but maybe I can do my part to help point the way.

6/2007