Midlife Unpacked

This week our eldest child graduated from high school. There are still a set of exams to complete, but formal schooling is done and dusted. It is a momentous milestone in the life of any child. But it’s also a pretty huge “WTF??” for us. 

You don’t really notice time passing. You just notice the effects. The lines on your face in the mirror, the padding on the belly. The fact that your child is suddenly an adult and using your Uber account to get home from a club at 2am. 

My attention seems captured by beginner parents at the moment. Suddenly they seem everywhere. Mums and dads walking their little kids down the road to school. People pushing prams. The smiling faces of toddlers exploring the world that is the inside of a train. Often I still feel like that beginner parent at the start of the journey…but it is clear we are not. I think to myself – how are we here all of a sudden? 

I remember that stage. I remember being present during the first years of school. Of pointing things out and playing treasure hunt on train rides into the city. Of Friday night dance offs and after school play dates in the park. But somewhere along the journey the kids disappeared into their own worlds for long stretches of time and emerged, occasionally, as different humans to the little people we used to know.

It feels like I blinked and we jumped forward in time. 

It makes me realise that while our lives might feel unique and individual, they are constructed of a series of stages that we all pass through in some shape or other. Life just moves – it flows and we flow along with it. You are in one end and out the other before you even know it.

Maybe we only notice the passing of time when we enter the choppy waters of change. A new chapter approaches, life becomes a little less routine or automated, and the barely noticed flow of life suddenly feels more like a series of ripples and rapids, as you have to work to re-find and redefine yourself again. 

That’s were I feel we are at the moment. In the rapids of change. On the horizon is a new world where our roles, responsibilities (and influence) are vastly changed. We’ve got one child left to get through high school – but we’re getting a glimpse of a new world order and I for one am finding it just a teensy bit difficult to navigate.

Last year, in Cairns, we went floating down the river in a tube. It was fun but I got stuck on a rock for what seemed like forever. It took a great deal of wiggling and pushing to get off. All the time I was stuck there (and if I’m honest during the approach to the churning and rippling water visible up ahead) I was fighting anxiety and fear. 

That’s what this stage of transition feels like to me. I feel the gentle ripples and bumps of a changing tide, and mostly navigate them well. But occasionally I get caught in a whirlpool of insecurity or pushed up onto a metaphorical rock, stuck facing backwards.

Of course, it’s no good clinging to a rock and looking backwards wondering if you missed important things or made the most of that stage. We did both, no doubt. And it is utterly pointless to be caught up worrying about what my role is now that I’m not primarily “mum” any more, or whether I am enough just as I am without being “essential” anymore. Not that I do that intentionally, but still, them’s the rocks that pop up in my stream of life.

Probably it is normal to feel unsettled at this stage of the game. To get snagged now and then by whirlpools of worry or currents of insecurity. It’s all complicated, of course, by the joys of perimenopause.

Another way to look at it – as opportunity. A new stage approaches. One filled with perhaps more freedom (although I suspect no less fretting) and adventure. An opportunity to try new things. To be something different. And it too will probably pass before you can blink.

A wonderful part of that river trip was floating down the water after the “got stuck on the rock” moment – drifting through dappled sunlight as we flowed on beneath the lush overhanging branches in a glade of trees. Having navigated the rapids, there was a quiet sense of “got this” achievement too. 

A good reminder that, if life has taught me anything so far, it is that answers (and joy) are there to be discovered through living and experiencing, not worrying and pontificating. They didn’t hand out a manual for the parent stage of life and they aren’t likely to hand out one for the “now that your kids are adults” one either.

And yet here we are. A joyous ride and a bagful of memories under our belts. And even better, our “once were babies” are now young adults with whom we are truly proud and pleased to share our lives.

Time to wiggle off that rock and embrace the flow.

Onwards.

Sharlene

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