Lately, I’ve been experimenting with giving things up. This is nothing new for me, since I’m a natural down-sizer. I love to purge. I do it regularly, and with gusto, especially because we have three kids that come home daily with something new for the ever-present pile on the kitchen counter. Why does that pile never go away?

The key, is to do that next step from a place of calm control, not ravenous impulse, because when we react with impulse then we are only replacing one addiction with another.

It comes down to the disruption in the habit, and then a plan to move into something else that disrupts the pattern. I’ve just completed the 12 days and guess what? I added two more days. Now it’s the weekend... what to do, what to do. Perhaps I wake up tomorrow and eat a pint of ice cream and wash it down with a gallon of strong coffee. But if I know the newer version of me, then most likely I will treat coffee and sugar and even alcohol just like everything else in life - with moderation and intention.

Mindfulness.

To be honest, I’m kind of in a teen state of mind myself, so maybe this doesn’t bother me as much as it could. Midlife has given me a very teen-like intolerance for other people’s demands, and unnecessary dinner conversation, and dishes, and a world full of adults that we all prefer keep comments to themselves.

So, when my teens shut the door on me, I think yea, I get you, I could use a break from this broken world, too. 

For this reason, I’ve come into the teen years choosing to hold it all very loosely, and I’ve done this by reframing this time as a season of transient grief. There is so much changing and evolving in both of us. We are both grieving the loss of their childhood, and the loss of their need to be parented in the same way. This is only heightened by my own grief around the closure of the first half of my life, and what comes next now that parenting isn’t the centerpiece of my purpose. 

Doesn’t that sound amazing - to let all of life’s responsibilities fall at the doorstep, and then close the door on them, and pull the covers over for a few months? But letting go is a painful process because the ego has no place to perch. The ego is an insatiable dopamine addict, so the withdrawal from achievement can be a long and painful one. It’s a detox that leaves no cell untouched. 

The purge was deep. I did a full house cleaning both literally and figuratively. I set boundaries in my marriage, with my children, with my friendships, and with myself. I lit a fire and started pitching things into it with abandon. I turned up the heat in every aspect of my life. I made requests without apologizing first. I stopped using the words “I’m sorry” in my emails and text messages. I stopped saying yes and instead enlisted the power of a polite no. I plugged up the slow leaks of energy that we think make us likable and palatable, but only serve to weaken our resolve to be seen completely. 

I'm a sucker for a good road trip. To leave behind what is known, to find something not yet known. There is so much wanderlust knocking around in me that I’ll happily road trip to just about any X on the map. Pack the car, honey, we are out of here!

I can hear the thrum of the road under the tires, now. The blue Pacific, a fading shimmer in the rearview. And when we’ve logged a few hundred miles, the sky suddenly opens, the landscape takes a deep breath and the desert rises in a great blanket of unmoving silence in every direction. It’s like passing through the mist in a dream.

The desert is my version of a lunar landing. Desolate and barren, it offers a blank canvas on which to unfurl the poetry and longing that needs big, star-filled skies to awaken.

If you know me, then you know that I am a big fan of purging, which I willingly do on a regular base in our house. I do it so frequently that my son said to me the other day, I don’t like that word anymore.

I get it, it’s a lot of work. Five people – three kids – with active lives means every day something (or piles of things) comes walking in our door that needs to be sorted, cleaned, and found a home.

I am of the mindset that most things that come home do not need to stay here, but when sentimentality and a span of ages get involved, it can be harder to throw away things even when considered not worth the space they occupy. With the new year feeling fresh and full of promise, I thought it a perfect opportunity to touch nearly everything in the house and ask again if it needs keeping.

Two weeks before my 50th birthday I took a pregnancy test.

I felt phantom sensations for weeks, and I dismissed them for all sorts of benign things. Until they became more regular, and over a month, went from tiny bubble-like tickles to undeniable thump, thump, thumpity-thumps right in my womb.

I mustered the courage to go buy the pregnancy test, along with a box of color for my greying middle-aged hair. With shaking hands, I took the test and then hyperventilated into a pillow while my husband peppered me with affirmations and nervous giggles until it was confirmed negative.

The whole experience left me feeling unquestionably relieved, but also, surprisingly sad. As I crossed over into a new decade, I could hear the audible closing of a door, signaling the end of an era as a woman of childbearing years. I had brushed up against that possibility for the last time, and while I didn’t want another child, I did feel the choice to do so had already slipped through my fingers, never to return.

I related on so many levels, and I laughed until I cried because this illustrated perfectly the tender pursuit of reinventing yourself at a certain age and level of experience. After a substantial amount of equity invested into a career, a network, a name, a title - one day you get the notion that maybe there’s something else you want to do with the good years you’ve got left. Perhaps other people you want to collaborate with. Maybe learn something new, test new limits, and find new boundaries. But when we do pivot, what gets left behind might be the very pillars on which we are built. It’s a humbling thing to let go and start again.

I have these thoughts on big thresholds like New Year’s. I don’t like finality. I don’t like doors that close and don’t reopen. Perhaps it’s the dregs of my childhood memories when my parents expressed regret over things they could not let go of, nor go back and fix.

For this reason, thresholds sit heavy with me. The regrets of whatever may have happened weigh me down like boulders in a backpack that I heave around on some holy mission to feel the weight of my life. I am so very tired of the weight in my life.

My favorite word right now is liminal. It’s such a beautiful word on the tongue, on the page, and in concept. The actual letters in the word liminal appear to line up like levers to pull, archways to walk under, and a small wormhole in the ‘a’ inviting a complete departure. Liminal space is the uncertain transition between where one has been and where one is going.  It can be a deeply unsettling time of dissolution, quiet, confusion, and sometimes the unshakeable fear of being lost and never again found.

I wrote the first poem two years ago when the full moon landed in the portal of the winter solstice.

I woke in the thin hours of the night, sure that someone had called my name. This wasn’t entirely new, as I was up most nights at that hour cooling my burning skin, and breathing into a quieter mind that was raging in confusion and desire for an awakened life.

It could all be blamed on the liminal changes of midlife, but it could also be blamed on the very recent resignation from my career. Arguably, one begot the other, and I was squarely undergoing the painful and necessary process of extracting myself from anything that no longer felt like a fit in my life.

In a busy house, getting up at 5:00 am to write is my only hope. But at that hour, I have a problem. My littlest minion is deliciously warm beside me, and I went to bed too late, and I have a very persuasive voice that tells me I’ll just carve out an hour later, or tomorrow. You’ve been so stretched, my dear, maybe it’s a good idea to go back to sleep. Of all the people you could let down today, you are the easiest one.

Sunday feels like my own personal kind of church. A download directly from the source.  A moment of pause where my bed provides a cushy pew to lay belly-up before the Divine All.

Speak to me, I say, and take your time. I’ve got all morning to transcribe the sermon before the holy task of the afternoon nap. Before the day folds itself into the dark and the week begins again.