Embracing My Mid-life Crisis

I’ve decided to start my mid-life crisis at the grand old age of 39. I say “decided to start” as though I have any say in the matter. In reality I’ve been going through an identity crisis for quite some time.

I find myself approaching 40, married with two children, having spent almost a decade of my life as a stay-at-home parent before returning to the workforce three years ago into a low level job that leaves me deeply unsatisfied. I love my family completely, but feel like much of my free time is spent on chores and life admin. My body feels like it’s on a downward spiral. I struggle to exercise regularly, and every morning when I look in the mirror I see the lines between my eyebrows deepen and my jawline start to soften. And I feel restless. All the time. Restless like I need something else in my life to fill a void, but I don’t know what, and I don’t know if I have the energy to do it if I ever figure it out.

My 39th birthday was back in December, right in the middle of the holiday season. I was sitting on the floor one evening having a glass of Baileys in an attempt to feel festive, and checking off various purchases against my list of giftees. Living in the southern hemisphere Christmas takes place at the beginning of summer, and I’d purchased two bodyboards to give to my children for our upcoming summer holiday. As I wrote bodyboard next to their names I remember thinking “I used to love bodyboarding when I was younger”. Something about that thought stuck with me. It was like a symbol of all the things I used to do that I no longer did because I’d lost myself in adulthood, in motherhood.

I found myself a few days later making my first mid-life crisis purchase, a bodyboard of course. After all it had only been 25 years since I’d last been on one, how hard could it be?

The first few days of our holiday I only caught one wave and it was essentially by accident. My upper thighs were being slowly covered in bruises from attempts to leap onto the board, and I was feeling a bit deflated. But slowly I remembered how to read the waves, slowly I started to catch one, then two, then many. I loved it, absolutely loved it. The feeling of being lifted up by the wave and rushing down the front of it made me grin, and I felt like a part of myself that I’d forgotten was waking back up. I even began to love the bruises that were starting to feel like markers of accomplishment. I had always loved the ocean, but over the years of having small children I had become the person who watched from the shallows to make sure they were safe. Now, with my children older and my husband supervising them, they were the ones to watch me as I gained confidence and waded out again and again.

The experience made me reflect. For so long I’d been interpreting the restlessness inside me as a sign I needed to find something else, something new. But I started to realise that maybe what I actually needed was to reconnect with the old, the parts of me I had put aside to focus on other things. And so I’ve decided to embrace the mid-life crisis and stop keeping the things I used to do in the past. I want to take up dancing again, go on random road trips with no destination in mind, write for fun instead of for work, and go to gigs. I mean, I can still pull off black nail polish and band t-shirts right?