This time has been fraught with loss. The empty nest and the great unravelling of my mother self from my children. That year or two was every bit as painful as labor as everything in me resisted, struggled, and then realized their birth into adulthood. How vast and foreign was the void left in the absence of those beings who had taken up such a tremendous amount of my heart space, attention and my time. They are still around physically but it's very different. We are still close, the relationships between us developing in new ways that I appreciate, but rightly and naturally it is their father whom they seek out now more often for the insights and quests they have as men.
The other great loss is the slow fading of my mother to Alzheimers. For many years she has been my best friend. There too, in the newly altered state of our relationship, as the dynamic between us shifts, the road through my mother to the girl I once was has changed. That pathway no longer follows a familiar road for either of us. A road we were comfortable with and comforted by. These pieces, though natural, are a painful part of finding myself at deep crossroad.
There is the loss of fertility and youth as I enter the gates of menopause and my half century birthday. There is the secret sense that while we woman are entering a time in our lives in which we are most invisible to the world around us, we are more keenly and deeply visible to ourselves. It is like the unveiling of Salome, a great unveiling of layers, a deconstruction of our own personal myths. The stories we have been telling ourselves for years about who we are or who we are not and questioning their viability and truth against an emerging new self.
A wise and dear friend shared that the Chinese see this phase in a woman's life as a "second spring" and I can see that threaded in the shadows of yet unformed ideas and feelings of enormous potential available to us in this era. I have another woman friend who did not have children, her mother still quite young, her and her "second spring" is unexpectedly finding the love of her life in her 50's after many years of being solitary. As I move through the changes and shed the many skins of my most fertile years I can see that there is opportunity to prepare the soil of my life with new seeds. Perhaps the dying of so many of life's little deaths and the tilling and preparing of ground in our life is what is at the heart of the "crones year away".
An inward journey? An outward adventure? Finally finding a balance of the two? What shall I take with me? Do we venture forward on such a journey, naked as we came, with only the trust that the years we leave behind will have prepared us? That we will intuitively know what is needed at each critical point. That feels right, certainly it's something I tended to ignore as a young woman and learned to listen to as mother, often paying a costly price when I second guessed myself.
Embarking on a journey in which I am feeling around in a dark lit up by intuition and hope for my own second spring feels like a great way to wrap up the starting point for this blog.
I leave you with this quote that can be applied to the autumn of our own lives:
Autumn is the second spring, where every leaf is a flower~
Albert Camus
Beautiful. My second life began at 50. Love it.
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