” In the waiting, we come to know ourselves more deeply: who we really are, what we hope for, and who we’ll become.” Grok Nation published a short piece of mine yesterday. It’s about the waiting we do as women in different seasons of our lives, feeling blindsided, and finding camaraderie. Click here to read it in full.
List-making in a Dark Time
For any other list-makers out there, I published this on HerStories yesterday.""In this time of quarantine, my lists are offering me space outside of the walls of my home, a way of making sense of chaos, a self-imposed structure on structure-less days, and even a way...
Hello Julia, I read your piece. Beautiful, as usual. I know your experience. I was completely through with menopause by age 42. I too experienced the grief you described. I married at 37, never had children, and thought I didn’t really want any. But up until then, it had been my choice to not have them. Now it was out of my hands and I was sad and a little angry at God. I felt like God had taken the option away because I would not have been a good mom. It was a difficult time. Blessings as usual. D
Thanks for reading and sharing, Debbie. It seems a grief experienced in relative isolation, quietly.
Women in my family go through menopause early; for my sister it started in her mid-30s. At 42, I’m fully in menopause. Nowadays I think a lot more about age. In the faces of elderly I look for traces of what they looked like in their younger years and wonder about their experiences. In my childhood old people seemed like a different species. I didn’t have anything in common with them. Now I see how similar we are, just born at different times.
Thanks for sharing. Yes, I too look for traces of what they looked like in their younger years…I always liked this quote by Madeline L’engle about how we are all all of the ages we have ever been. “For, after all, I am not an isolated fifty-seven years old; I am every other age I have been, one, two, three, four, five, six, seven . . . all the way up to and occasionally beyond my present chronology.”
Written from the heart.
I, too, went through early menopause. A heart-searing realisation that my child-bearing years were over. But, having married at 32, I am grateful that God gave me children.
Like you, my husband died six years ago. The pain doesn’t end, but it isn’t as acute. The regrets are forever.
I saw a woman today get into the car, joining her husband. Something I did, unthinkingly, many years ago without any realisation that it wouldn’t be forever. Then, soon after the thought: the worst – husband dying – is behind me and can never happen again. Small mercies.
Thanks for sharing, Sharon. I’m sorry for your loss. I so know what you mean about watching the woman get into her car. I remember blogging my first or second year after my loss about watching a woman’s husband bring her a cup of coffee at church or a school meeting and casually hand it to her. Wishing you joy today…