Changing: Midlife Series #1

The awkward middle where changes are necessary

Fear stops writers from telling the truth on a page. Some of us sit down to a cacophony of voices - an audience to please, a person to impress, a terrible fear of being found out or left out if we change if we write what is true. We imagine the consequences of sharing, of risking our work in the world.

This is me taking a risk to talk about my experience as a woman entering midlife. 

Flannery O'Connor said, "I write to discover what I know." We don't write because we have it all figured out. We write because this is how we make sense of the world. I want to write to you the way I wish someone had written to me about midlife. Open, honest, brave. It will be messy and vulnerable, but I hope it is a blessing to you.

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Pregnancy came easy to me the first two times. You could find me every Wednesday and Friday in my friend Teresa's garage doing Crossfit with other moms; everyone's babies littered across the yard in car seats and strollers while their toddlers ran around us doing burpees. I was the last of this group to have a baby, and they cheered me on in my final workout a few days before my due date. My first son came the day they said he would, and we treasured all ten pounds of his no-sleeping self.

My second was born forty-five minutes after throwing up ten times in an Uber from Harlem to downtown as I begged God and every medical professional in that God-forsaken Presbyterian hospital for an epidural. "She's crowning!" Jesus Christ, I'm what? There was a flurry of hurry while my husband locked eyes to tell me I could do the thing I must do, and suddenly, I felt a squishy baby on my belly, rooting for my breast. Nine pounds of perfection and seven tons of trauma.

Both times, within a few months, I'd bounce back to my former life, former body, former self, exhausted of course, but same me.

However, in 2019, two years after my second (plus a series of changes and challenges), I found myself slowing, giving in to the ground, concrete filling my feet. It was sporadic at first, but one morning I lay in the fetal position in our parachute sheets, staring at the hardwood floors. I couldn't move, couldn't cry, couldn't tell. Darkness settled heavily on my chest, and scary thoughts began to beat my brain. In my heart, I whispered the word, help. The weight lifted enough to move, and I tried for months to ignore it. I'd list good reasons why I was tired and didn't have time for a mini-breakdown.

• You've got two babies in your late thirties. You're also working full-time.

• You live in Manhattan - of course, you're tired - get over it!

• Your work is serving people - they need you. You're more than a decade deep. People are counting on you.

• So if you don't have the help or support you need - plenty of people don't have help, but they keep going - what's your problem?

• You wrote a book dummy, and you have another one to write. This platform won't build itself, and this was your dream! Do you know how many people would kill for this opportunity?

But I couldn't shake it. I pushed myself to fulfill my responsibilities but grew more sluggish and slow and more tempted than ever to drink myself into oblivion or drive myself right off the George Washington Bridge. On the way to a friend's birthday party, I confessed to Cody, "My sobriety is in danger. I can't keep going like this."

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Women carry invisible burdens. We are tasked with remembering, executing, and reminding others to execute major and minor responsibilities in every sphere we inhabit. It's not that men don't do this or experience it (intersectionality teaches us that there are overlaps in gender, class, ability, race, etc.). It's that women overwhelmingly experience this at home, at work, in faith communities, and in families.

Because of societal, cultural, and familial pressures, we feel shame over what we are not able to do. We feel ashamed of our changing needs and abilities. Shouldn't we be who we've always been? Capacities are only ever supposed to grow, right? Not shrink? 

Why do we resist evolving?

It is natural to change, natural to want different things, natural to settle into a season. But when we internalize the lie that we cannot age, evolve, or quit without impending, unknown relational consequences, we divorce our minds from our hearts to carry on, warriors.

I felt like when I became a mother, especially the second time, I wanted so desperately to slow down, to let my body heal, to allow my mind and heart to adjust to the demand on my body, to grieve the loss of autonomy and margin, but there was no way to make it stop. I carried on working, serving, and fulfilling what I believed were my responsibilities, and I didn't know how to shout out loud: PLEASE MAKE IT STOP. PLEASE HELP ME. Even when I managed to get it out to people, the response was empathetic but not helpful.

We don't know how to help mothers. We don't know how to hold space for their pain. We don't have the resources in American society to make childcare or therapy or medical care accessible or affordable¹. No amount of mommy juice or mani/pedis can alleviate the pain, so we just kind of hope mothers won't completely lose it. That their bodies won't break down. That they'll pull themselves together. That children won't flatten their productivity.

It feels like women are not allowed to change.

Not our bodies. Not our minds. We're always trying to get back to some number on the scale, some perspective people approve of, some ideal way of being that makes people feel comfortable. And men are not allowed to be soft. To say that they're hurting, to own that they just don't know, to admit that their changes are hard, too. I wonder if this is partly why aging can feel so isolating.

Midlife makes so much sense once you get there. A lightbulb goes off, and it's suddenly easy to understand the crisis, the divorce, the addiction.

We moved back to Los Angeles with high hopes for a more "ten-minutes-away" community and margin for mental health resources, space, and childcare. But two weeks later, the world shut down. Four months after my first book launched, and a year of speaking engagements (including a two-week speaking trip in New Zealand) were canceled or moved, half my income gone. Cody began to pastor in a new community over zooms and live streams. Our brilliant kindergartner became a remote learner who graduated over Zoom. What we thought was me having Covid turned out to be our third baby, and our sweet toddler didn't play with a kid his age for close to a year. Families were breaking over politics and religion. Friendships ended. We were marching in the streets. Everything was at a fever pitch.

Covid pregnancy was brutal. My OB wore a space suit to appointments, extra gloves taped to her suit, and a tank on her back. Her eyes were the only visible body part. I went to every appointment alone, a grief Cody and I share, and in the last trimester, my body broke. Restless leg syndrome jarred me awake all night and the only thing that would soothe it was running water in the shower. I couldn't get hydrated. Back pain, pelvic pain, and hip pain kept me from walking well, and I couldn't walk up a small hill without feeling like I'd run a marathon. I had little energy and slept all the time.

Same as in New York, same as always, I pushed myself, berated myself, and believed what society taught me about women and mothers: Pull yourself together. You should be able to do all of this. You've got no right, room, or resources to fall apart, slow down, or stop. Everybody's counting on you.

So, we marched on, Cody and I, celebrating our fortieth birthdays together, bringing a new baby home for the holidays in 2020, with few friends and family by our side. I realized I didn't want the career I'd built, and unfortunately, I did not get better. My body did not get better. It did not snap back the way it had twice before. Neither did my mind.

It would take two years to figure out what was wrong.

Sobriety has taught me to be gentle with myself, open to change, and to accept life as it comes. I didn't do any of this pushing and berating myself out loud - I don't think most people experienced me as an anxious presence or someone on the edge of a cliff. I took care of others, listened to their problems, opened our home and my heart to people, mentored women in recovery, took phone calls and sent voice memos, cared for our children, cooked meals, shopped for groceries, actively engaged in my community, showed up for people.

This is what I mean by the invisible burdens, the invisible work of women. It is internal: Constant thinking, remembering, interpreting, worrying, considering, planning, and pushing. So, as I lost more of my physical ability and mental capacity after the birth of my baby girl, I didn't give in to my need for less caretaking, fewer connections, fewer people pulling on me; I tried to maintain it while feeling like my entire being was wrapped in a wet, weighted blanket.

But I could feel myself changing, defenseless against my natural state, powerless to resist an evolution of life at the middle stage.

So I started letting go and distancing myself from everything non-essential. Which we’ll get into next week for #2 in this series on midlife. Thank you for letting me share. I hope you feel seen. If not, I hope you can more clearly see others. Most of all, I hope you are reminded that you are not alone.

In love and solidarity,

Ashley

In case you missed these:

• On Midlife and Motherhood (wtf is happening)

• Is less really more? (give ‘em hell)

• Happy birthday to After Hours

1. https://www.americanprogress.org/article/basic-facts-women-poverty/ and https://edsource.org/updates/u-s-ranks-worst-in-the-developed-world-for-early-childcare-study-shows and podcast series No One is Coming to Save Us