Hi friends! If you’re smack in the center of a midlife and wondering what matters and where you belong, welcome. This is a place where I lay down observations, stories, and heart for the second half of life. Please join me.🌿
Midlife can sometimes feel like an accounting, a leafing through of decades, a weighing of paths taken and untaken. The unbidden griefs and struggles we carry. The triumphs and hopes we hold close, too. The first half of life is finished. Menopause makes that clear with her foggy thinking and internal fires. What is she hoping we forget or burn away?
Toss into the fire that carefully constructed persona—the role of wife, mother, professional woman. The decades of accumulated accomplishments and sorrows. Let go of the approval and the betrayals. The wandering that leads back to the self, or to dead ends.
We try so hard to hold it all together, to get it right, but midlife demands something else entirely—surrender. Give up the cultural script of perfection. Let go of your parents’ idea of who you were supposed to be. Put down the self-help lists, the self loathing, the next diet or exercise plan that will change everything.
As Mirabai Star says in her book Wild Mercy, “The dismantling of our false structures is holy work. . . The phoenix is born from the ashes. Resurrection does not happen without crucifixion.”
Sitting close to my midlife fire for a few years now, something new is dawning in me. When I reflect on my first decades of steps and missteps, I see a picture of Love finding expression in me during those years—just as I was—and am.
I see the torrid love affair in my early twenties that was doomed from day one. I know the belonging I still feel while writing and creating. I notice when I imbibe sugar or social media to numb a grief I can’t quite bear. I’ve always sought art, books, and films that make me think, laugh, and cry. I breastfed babies in moonlight. I fought for marital connection, then got divorced. I’ve sipped thousands of morning lattes and slurped bowls of summer watermelon. I’ve lost and found friends. I remarried a true partner. I watched loved ones die from incurable diseases. I’ve tallied financial losses and gains. I’ve been betrayed and betrayed myself. Today I stand in the bittersweet stage of adult children flying away.
What I’m finding in my own surrender, browsing through decades of both triumph and missing the mark, is Love—a Divine Love welling up alongside my striving, hoping, and struggling. In the seed of even my failures is a little woman trying her best to get it right. I have more compassion for her then, and for myself now.
This is the phoenix rising—not in egoic glory—but connecting again to what’s eternal and true, with (not despite) one’s human failings and gifts. Midlife can be painful because a way of life is ending. Star reminds us, “The heat of our grieving becomes a catalyst for mending our soul’s broken connection to the Divine.”
This path is not marked by a shiny confidence on the outside, but a homecoming one feels on the inside.
In the heat of midlife, I notice how Love has always been here with me, waiting. The gift of this understanding brings me greater peace in my skin, and I’m more attuned to recognizing Love when I see her.
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I was drawn to write a novel about Mary Cassatt because of the Love that pours from her paintings. Her life, like mine and yours, took many turns. She achieved a career as a professional artist, but along the way, her heart was broken open with grief. In midlife, though not a mother herself, Cassatt began painting mothers and children. The purity of a mother’s love, the devotion that fuels late nights and sacrifice, comes through the artist’s hand. I haven’t read anything to indicate Cassatt was a particularly religious or spiritual person, but she captured the holy in everyday life through her art. Mary Cassatt’s paintings touch us in this century because Love doesn’t age.
The Cassatt Sisters: A Novel of Love and Art is packed with creative ambition, romance, heartbreak, and sisterhood. Though its official publishing date is October 9, my publisher is offering a preorder discount of 15% with the code PREORDER2025 at this link.
Thanks for being here! If you’ve enjoyed this piece, I’d be grateful if you’d like it, leave a comment, or share it with a friend. 🌿
My midlife transformation took me to Spalding.....
Just pre-ordered your book. Excited for you--and me!