Just Wondering

Greetings from the land of Midlife. Ok, I haven’t officially arrived in Midlife yet, as it’s still exactly 17 days until my 40th birthday, but I’m almost to shore now and can see the landscape from my cabin window. I’m now old enough to realize that really, truly, I will be old one day. It will happen. Unless I die first. (But that’s another conversation altogether.) I’m not old enough to feel old, yet. But for the first time since childhood, I can wrap my mind around the fact that I won’t always be young.

One way I know this is that time is moving faster for me these days. I had heard from other people who had gone before me that I should expect this, but now it is here and I am still surprised by it. One day you’re diapering the baby; the next day he’s asking for the car keys. What happened to all the years that were supposed to come in between?

Sometimes I wake up in the morning, or from a too-long, too-late-in-the-day nap, and wonder who the heck I am. Not in the groggy, disoriented sense of not being awake yet, but in the distressed, existential sense of Rip Van Winkle wondering why his beard is so long. Is this normal? I’m not unhappy or, to borrow that outdated feminist term, “unfulfilled.” I have a good life. But is it the life I was supposed to lead?

It is tempting when facing this question to start pointing to all the good things you have done with the time you’ve had, so far, as though you could justify a life, as though that were even possible. But none of those things, good though they are, feel like an adequate answer. There have been enough twists and turns in the road – some of my own doing, some forced upon me – that I can’t help but wonder if I left the road altogether. I just never saw this – this place where I am, right now – on the map at all. What does that mean?

I don’t know. All I know is that lately I’m asking the question often.