Women Over 50 - From Chaos to Peace

 

When Marcie Finally Asked, “What About Me?”

Marcie had spent most of her adult life waiting for things to calm down.

They never did.

When the children were little, she told herself life would be easier when they were all in school. Then came homework spread across the kitchen table, sports practices, forgotten lunches, parent-teacher conferences, sick days and evenings spent driving from one activity to another.

Five children could fill a house with an extraordinary amount of life.

And Marcie loved it.

There had been Christmas mornings she wished she could bottle forever. Saturday afternoons with kids piled onto the couch. Vacations that went completely wrong and somehow became the stories everyone still laughed about.

There had also been years when she couldn't remember the last time she'd finished a cup of coffee while it was still hot.

But that was motherhood, she thought.

You gave.

So she gave.

And while she was raising children, she worked.

Her résumé was a patchwork of jobs that made sense at different stages of her family's life. She took positions that worked around school schedules. She turned down opportunities that required too much travel. She stayed in jobs longer than she wanted because the health insurance was good or the paycheck was dependable.

She became remarkably good at adjusting.

Marcie’s Second Half

Marcie had always assumed there would come a time when life would become hers again.

She never actually said those words. She loved her husband, loved being the mother of five children, and had been enormously proud of the family they had built together. But during the busiest years, whenever she caught herself thinking about something she might like to do, there was always a perfectly reasonable reason to wait.

When the kids were older. When the mortgage wasn't so demanding. When everyone was driving. When college was figured out. When work settled down. When she had more time.

There was always another milestone just beyond the one they had reached.

So Marcie became accustomed to postponing herself.

She didn't recognize it as a sacrifice because it happened gradually. She worked different jobs over the years, choosing opportunities that fit the needs of the family at the time. Some she enjoyed. Others simply paid the bills. She became the person who knew when the dentist appointments were scheduled, which child was struggling in school, when the car needed servicing, what was left in the checking account, and whether there was enough milk to make it through breakfast.

There had been difficult years, but there had also been wonderful ones. Their house had been loud and messy and alive. Five children meant someone was almost always laughing, fighting, eating, leaving, arriving or looking for something.

Then, almost without Marcie noticing, the house became quieter.

• The children grew up.
• The crisis years passed.
• The very freedom she had spent decades waiting for finally began to arrive.
• And Marcie had absolutely no idea what to do with it.

At 50, she found herself standing in a life she had worked extraordinarily hard to create and feeling something she was ashamed to admit.

She wasn't happy.

The Life She Had Been Waiting For

The realization came on an otherwise forgettable Thursday.

Marcie had stopped at the grocery store after work. She sat in her car for a few minutes before going inside, scrolling through her phone without really looking at anything.

Her daughter called.

They talked about the usual things for a while. Then her daughter mentioned plans for the weekend and casually asked, "What are you doing Saturday?"

Marcie immediately began mentally sorting through everyone else's schedules.

Her husband had mentioned needing to run somewhere in the morning. One of the kids might be coming by. There was laundry at home, and she'd been meaning to clean out the pantry. The refrigerator needed—

"No, Mom," her daughter interrupted, laughing. "What are you doing?"

Marcie stopped.

She looked through the windshield at a woman pushing a grocery cart toward the store while a little boy bounced along beside her.

For some reason, the question landed differently.

"I don't know," she finally said.

They continued talking, but Marcie wasn't really listening anymore.

After they hung up, she remained in the car.

What was she doing Saturday?

More importantly, what did she want to do Saturday?

The ridiculous thing was that she couldn't think of anything.

Marcie had spent decades becoming exceptionally good at knowing what other people needed. Now, presented with a completely open Saturday afternoon, she couldn't identify what she wanted to do with three hours.

She felt tears beginning to form and became irritated with herself.

For God's sake, Marcie. You're sitting outside a grocery store. Pull yourself together.

But the tears came anyway.

She wasn't crying because something terrible had happened.

She was crying because nothing terrible had happened.

There was no villain in her story. Nobody had stolen her life. Nobody had forbidden her from having dreams. Her husband hadn't demanded that she abandon herself. Her children hadn't intentionally consumed her identity.

She had simply spent so many years doing what needed to be done that eventually what needed to be done became her life.

That realization followed her home.

A Question She Couldn't Answer

That evening, Marcie and her husband ate dinner together. After years of feeding a family of seven, cooking for two still felt strange.

He was telling her something about work when he noticed she wasn't paying attention.

"You okay?"

Marcie looked across the table at the man she had spent most of her adult life beside.

Normally she would have said she was fine.

Instead, she surprised both of them.

"I don't know what I'm looking forward to."

He stopped eating.

"What do you mean?"

"I mean you have things you're working on. The kids have careers and relationships and plans. Everybody is going somewhere."

She struggled to find the words without making her life sound like something she regretted.

"I've spent thirty years getting everybody where they needed to go. And now everybody is getting there."

She laughed softly, although nothing about it felt funny.

"I just realized I never figured out where I was going."

Her husband was quiet for a moment.

Then he asked, "Where do you want to go?"

There it was again.

Another perfectly reasonable question she couldn't answer.

"I don't know."

For several seconds they just looked at one another.

Then Marcie said something she had never said aloud.

"But I'd like to find out."

The Notebook

The following Saturday, Marcie woke before everyone else, made coffee and carried an old notebook onto the patio.

She wasn't trying to create a five-year plan. She wasn't mapping out goals or designing a new morning routine. She had spent enough of her life organizing things.

She simply wanted to know herself again.

She began remembering.

There was a younger Marcie who had been endlessly curious. She liked taking classes. She liked meeting people. She once dreamed of owning something of her own. She had ideas all the time.

That woman hadn't disappeared after marriage.

She had simply become busy.

Marcie began writing about things she'd once imagined doing. Some sounded ridiculous now. Others still created a tiny flicker of excitement.

Then she remembered an idea she'd carried around for years. An idea God had placed in her heart but kept getting pushed back and down to the needs of everyone else around her. 

A business.

She had thought about it when the children were younger and dismissed it because there wasn't enough time. She reconsidered it years later, but one of the kids was preparing for college and the timing seemed irresponsible. Later, she had even researched it online.

Then life got busy again.

Sitting on the patio at 50, Marcie realized something that made her laugh.

She had been waiting for someone to tell her it was finally her turn.

Nobody was coming.

There would be no official announcement that she had completed enough years of service to everyone else. No certificate would arrive in the mail granting her permission to pursue something simply because it mattered to her.

If she wanted a turn, she was going to have to take one.

So she did.

Something Began to Change

Marcie didn't quit her job Monday morning or empty their savings account into a new business. She didn't suddenly become fearless.

She started with two hours on Saturday.

Those two hours became the part of the week she looked forward to most.

She researched. She learned. She made mistakes. She discovered how much had changed since the last time she'd seriously considered the idea. Occasionally she became overwhelmed and closed the laptop convinced the whole thing was foolish.

Then the following Saturday she opened it again.

Her family noticed.

One evening her son walked into the kitchen and found her working.

"What's all this?"

Marcie expected herself to minimize it. She almost said, Oh, it's nothing.

Instead she heard herself say, "I'm starting a business."

Her son looked at her for a second.

"Seriously?"

"Seriously."

"That's awesome, Mom."

He grabbed something from the refrigerator and disappeared.

Marcie sat there smiling.

He had treated her dream as if it were completely normal.

She wondered why she hadn't.

Over the next year, those Saturdays began changing the rest of her week. The business grew slowly, but Marcie grew quickly.

She started meeting people she would never have met otherwise. She took a course and discovered she loved being a student again. She began talking about ideas at dinner instead of asking everyone else about theirs.

Then came her first customer.

The amount of money was almost laughable compared with the paychecks Marcie had earned throughout her career, but when she saw the payment notification she stared at the screen.

Someone had paid for something she created.

She called her husband into the room.

"Look."

He looked at the screen and then at her face.

"You got one?"

"I got one."

He hugged her, and Marcie began laughing so hard she eventually started crying.

Her husband laughed too.

"It's one sale, Marcie."

"I know."

But he didn't understand.

It wasn't one sale.

It was evidence.

There was still something inside her capable of becoming.

A Different Woman at 51

About a year after that afternoon in the grocery-store parking lot, Marcie was getting dressed when her daughter called.

They chatted for a while before her daughter asked, "What are you doing this weekend?"

This time Marcie didn't hesitate.

"I'm meeting someone Saturday morning about the business, and Sunday I'm taking the afternoon off because your dad and I are going hiking."

Her daughter was quiet for a moment.

Then she said, "Mom, you sound really happy."

Marcie looked at herself in the mirror.

She was 51 now. The gray streak at her temple had grown more noticeable. There were wrinkles around her eyes, and she had finally stopped trying to lose the same ten pounds she'd been fighting since her forties.

Yet she looked more alive than the woman who had stared back at her a year earlier.

"I am," she said.

And she meant it.

Her family hadn't become less important. Her marriage hadn't become less important. She hadn't abandoned motherhood because her children were grown.

She had simply stopped requiring Marcie to disappear in order to prove she loved them.

For years she had imagined putting herself first as though life were a pie: anything she took for herself meant somebody else received less.

The opposite happened.

Her family got a woman who laughed again. Her husband got a wife who had something she was excited to tell him about. Her children got to watch their mother begin something new at 50 and discover that age wasn't an expiration date.

And Marcie got something she hadn't realized she was missing.

A future she was excited to wake up for.

She had thought the emptiness she felt at 50 meant something was wrong with her life.

It didn't.

It meant there was finally room in her life for something new.

For almost thirty years, Marcie had poured herself into building a family, surviving difficult seasons, earning money, loving people and doing the work required to hold a life together. None of those years had been wasted. They had given her judgment, resilience, courage, patience and an extraordinary ability to figure things out.

She wasn't starting over at 50.

She was finally getting the opportunity to use everything those years had taught her on behalf of herself.

And that may be one of the great untold possibilities of being a woman in midlife.

The moment that initially feels like, Is this all there is? can become something entirely different.

It can become:

What else could there be?

Marcie found her answer.

Now another woman somewhere is sitting in her car outside a grocery store, lingering in the driveway after work, or lying awake beside a sleeping husband wondering why a life she loves no longer feels like enough.

She may think that feeling means she's ungrateful.

Perhaps it means she's ready.

Not to destroy the life she built.