When I was 22, I had a hazy view of my future, but if hard-pressed, there were five things I was certain of: I wanted to be an artist. I wanted to eventually get married, probably to a fellow artist. I wanted at least two kids. I wanted to live in Brooklyn for the rest of my days with my family and college friends. I wanted to one day own a house in the Catskills where my family could gather every summer.
Let me tell you how many of those five things happened: one. One! I am, indeed, an artist.
But the rest?
The actor-boyfriend I spent my twenties convinced I’d marry? We broke up when we were both 33. I married my now-husband at 34, but he is most definitely not an artist. Marrying him meant leaving Brooklyn and moving to Europe and then to Los Angeles.
Those two kids I wanted? I got just one, which has been one of the biggest heartbreaks and joys of my life.
The house in the Catskills? I guess I can keep dreaming.
There are so many other things that haven’t turned out as planned: my marriage is — like most — more complicated than “I do.” I’m not always satisfied with how far along I am in my career, in part because I’ve done most of the childcare in our home. Because I live in L.A., I spend much of my life in the car. My aging parents and most of my oldest friends live a continent away.
Those are the hard things, but there is so much that’s unexpectedly wonderful: my daughter and I are about as close as a mother-daughter pair can be, perhaps because she’s an only. My left-brained husband has a stable job that allows me the freedom to be an artist. By moving to L.A., I now live within an hour of my sister for the first time since we were kids. My family has found a community of friends on the west coast that has been the foundation of our life for the past decade.
It’s a great life that I love. And, also, sometimes I really hate it.
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The other morning, I was blabbering to my therapist about this very thing, about how surprised and sad I was about how so many parts of my life have turned out, all the while being so grateful for a whole lot of it.
She stopped me. “Midlife,” she said, “is all about holding the tension of opposites.”
Wait, what?
It was one of those moments in therapy when you have to stop and just take it in.
Midlife is all about holding the tension of opposites.
Unlike in our 20s, when it’s all about the future – getting the job, dating, building a career and/or a family, traveling, doing good in the world – this stage is all about holding the light and the dark, the good and the bad, at once. For most of us, that means there’s plenty we are happy with, and plenty that we are shocked or disappointed by. Perhaps a marriage has ended or we weren’t able to have kids. Perhaps our parents have fallen ill. Maybe we fell into unexpected careers that turned out to give us enormous satisfaction. Perhaps our second marriages are much better than our firsts!
At this stage of life, she explained, we are reconciling how we thought our life would go with how it’s actually going.
My brilliant therapist’s point: there’s no getting around this. Welcome to midlife.
Of course, there’s something hard about this realization, but it also offers a not-so-small glimmer of relief. One of the most refreshing things my therapist said to me when it came to holding the light and the dark had to do not with a big thing but a small one: My husband’s work will take him away from home for long periods this year, and I’m already anxious about it.
“You’ll miss him when he’s gone, and you won’t miss him when he’s gone,” she said, “and both are okay.”
Both are okay! Well, if that isn’t a motto to live by in midlife, I don’t know what is.
Abigail Rasminsky is a writer and editor based in Los Angeles. She teaches creative writing at the Keck School of Medicine of USC and writes the weekly newsletter, People + Bodies. She has also written for Cup of Jo on many topics, including marriage, preteens, perimenopause, and only children.
P.S. Enjoying an empty nest, nine reader comments on aging, and how would you describe yourself in five words?
(Photos of Tina Fey and Amy Poehler from Amy’s podcast Good Hang.)
