I’m not sure the middle of the emotional storm is ever the right place to write from.
But here I sit. In the eye of it.
It’s not an unfamiliar storm. But it’s new in an entirely different way. And I think a lot of women are sitting in some version of it right now.
I left my daughter thousands of miles away at college.
We said goodbye again last night, and I boarded a plane this morning. The internal turmoil didn’t settle until mid-morning, once the 4:30 AM wake-up wore off and I was left clear-eyed, caffeinated, and hungover from heartache.
Nothing forces you to sit with emotions quite like a three-and-a-half-hour cross-country flight with intermittent Wi-Fi and a window seat you can’t quite climb out of without waking the two sleeping strangers to your left.
To be fair, one of them was my husband, but he was peacefully asleep and waking him felt unfair since I was the one who booked the flight.
So I sat there, forlorn, staring at the blank black screen on the back of the seat in front of me. It felt ominous as I started wondering how I’m going to make sense of the next several decades of my own life.
How am I going to light up my own screen, if you will?
I wasn’t sure whether to cry, throw my hands up, or pull my hair out in agony. Like I said, I am in the middle of the shit storm.
And the funny thing is, it’s not like I didn’t see it coming.
The label feels opportunistic, but calling myself an empty nester just feels depressing.
Am I seriously that old? Do I really own that title now, too? Growing up, that was always reserved for “old people” with short grey hair set weekly by a hairdresser. Mine is still long and blonde… with a little help, but that’s just semantics.
Honestly, I think my AARP card is going to arrive faster than my daughter is going to return.
She won’t be home again until Thanksgiving. As if that week isn’t short enough, she’ll likely split it between a few days in Naples and time in Ohio with high school friends and family.
Christmas will likely look the same with an added few days.
After that she’s off and running from graduation straight into her graduate program, and the beginning of her future, where time off becomes the luxury someone else grants you, on their calendar and under their restrictions.
There will be no more long summers spent doing nothing and everything. And no more family trips set around our availability. Now we’ll ride on whatever she can squeeze in.
So yeah, it feels like the beginning of the end.
I know I am not the only one in the midst of this existential crisis. Take one look at social media and you’ll find middle-aged menopausal women openly crying or celebrating this new stage of life. Trust me, you’ll see it all.
Some women exhale as if they’ve been holding it all in until the silence permitted a new kind of freedom. One that allows them to finally take the romantic trip they’d been putting off. The closet edit that frees them of the high school sweatshirts and jerseys that had become the Friday night uniform for the last four years, or the pantry clean-out decades in the making that ends with the loud thud of the crockpot hitting the bottom of the garbage bin. And days divided between the tennis court, pickleball court or golf course.
Some just carry on. The corporate world doesn’t stop for a college drop-off. Life keeps moving just with one or two fewer people at the table.
Some keep busy. Like, superhumanly busy. Globetrotting around with friends and other couples. Meeting at tailgates across the country. Filling the calendar with as many social events as their college-aged kids.
Some trade the kid for an aging parent, and the whole thing quietly recycles.
None of that is me. Well, some of it was. But honestly, it was only temporary filler. Because even busy and travel can start to feel mundane.
Where I am now is more in the holy-shit-what’s-my-purpose stage.
I know reinvention. I’ve been living it for three-plus years. When my late husband passed away reinvention wasn’t an option. It was simply my life dictated by a spontaneous brain bleed that arrived on a fateful Wednesday morning before the coffee even found the mug.
One day I was teaching yoga in a studio I built and operated, training for a marathon, and working with a team of architects, designers and contractors on our dream home in Northern Michigan.
Weeks later I was selling homes, relocating myself, my belongings, my life, and my daughter’s. None of it was the grand plan until suddenly it was.
Finding love in the middle of all of it was reinvention on a whole different level. Equally surprising but a surprise I like to think of as a higher power working in my favor… finally.
But so much of that reinvention was reactive.
Something changed, and I had to change with it.
Not the love, of course, but everything else.
This reinvention is different. This one feels personal. It’s not being forced. There is no realtor or advisor or doctor or psychic who can guide me through. I have to figure out what I actually want… for me.
And while 52 is oldish, sure, it’s far from over.
Writing found me last year, somewhere near the peak of my reinvention climb. Right before I said, “I do.” And it’s taken me somewhere I never planned to go, and I’m here for all of it.
But I’ve experienced something since I’ve started. Not everyone takes the second chapter seriously. And trust me, I’ve felt it.
People have come and gone these past six months. Friends who have whittled my writing down to “social media therapy.” Really? And more importantly, why the dig? From my side, why not?
Why shouldn’t someone start writing at 52? Or start a new company at 55? Take up painting at 60? Go back to school at 65? Hell, I saw someone on Substack announce they finished med school at 70!
And yet, we only seem to clap for reinvention if it goes big. After someone becomes the next Mel Robbins. In all fairness, Substack did a grand job of celebrating the med school grad. But the rest of the world seems to be waiting for the book to sell, and the business to skyrocket before there is a collective buy-in that it is worthy of pom-poms.
As if the trying isn’t the part worth celebrating. Why can’t we celebrate anyone who wants to try something new at this stage of life? Or any stage of life?
Because if we’re honest, the odds are better now. Not worse.
We’re more mature. We know our strengths, our weaknesses, who we generally are, and more importantly, who we aren’t.
Nobody reinvents from a more informed place than a woman who’s already survived one full remaking. And I’ve had more than one in the last half century.
So no, this isn’t the sad version of the empty-nest story. It’s the argument for what comes next.
I’m still in the eye of it, and I don’t have the answer yet.
I’m allowed to want one. One more big grand reinvention. Dare I say maybe even two.
So if you’re out there wondering the same, I say go for it. New careers, passions, and paths aren’t just reserved for the youth.
Who’s to say you won’t be the next big thing in your arena.
And who’s to say I won’t be, too.
Always EDITing,
Leslie
P.S. I am curious, if life afforded you one more chapter, what would it be? Aim high. There are no boundaries in here. Honestly, I would love a stint as a CIA agent. I’d be damn good at it. But this is my home, and it seems to have found me. So I’ll retire that notion and write as though I am looking for a different kind of agent.
The college drop off can feel like a door slam. It's not. Initially it will feel that way. Now that I have grown kids, I've decided that being a family over distance is simply our new way of being a family.
I love that you want to reinvent yourself. I suspect you will more than once.
Discovering a new purpose took me some trial and error, which surprised me.
What a beautiful article. I think we are always kinda reinventing right? Maybe sometimes we are more aware or less aware of it, but reinventing is living.
I hope your daughter loves college and yall can kinda find a closeness even far away. Thats what I hope anyhow. Sending hugs.