Revastated, if you will

on the midlife emotional landscape

Since my girls were pretty little we’ve talked about the experience of being “scited”—both scared and excited at the same time. Like the White mom cliche that I am, I think I learned it from author and podcaster Glennon Doyle. The term has been extremely useful, especially for my little one who tends to run scared in the face of camp drop off, ferris wheels, early morning flights, and other sundry experiences.

As it turns out, you can have two feelings at once. (I have no idea why this reality continues to surprise me four decades into being a human with emotions.) And further more, sometimes these two feelings not only coexist, but are definitionally contradictory.

Last weekend was a case in point. My older daughter and I were driving back to our old house, which we just moved out of two weeks ago, to set things up for our open house. I had a ticker tape of things in my head—brochures, doormat, Weiman stainless steel cleaner, light switch plate, cards for our former neighbors, glue gun (don’t ask), flowers for the mason jars… “I can’t wait until this is over,” I said aloud, exasperated.

“Yeah, I know,” Maya said, while switching to a different Taylor Swift song. Her summer has been all Tay and all squishmallows all the time—the ultimate tween pairing.

I kid you not.

All the sudden, busting into my crushing, but clean logistics, were disorienting and inconvenient emotions. It was as if I had driven my car straight into a fog and suddenly couldn’t see straight. Brochures, doormat…shit, what was the rest of the shit I was supposed to remember? My body felt heavy and sluggish. My stomach ached. I knew instantly that my daughter could feel the vibe shift.

I’m of the mind that acknowledging these kinds of things, even if just a kid-friendly version, is the kind thing to do for our children. I remember picking up on things from adults when I was little and being scared; I only got more scared if the inchoate feelings I was sensing weren’t acknowledged, or even worse, denied.

“I’m feeling sad about selling this house,” I told Maya. “It’s where we first brought you home from the hospital, where you became your little toddler selves and then your big kid selves. It’s where I became a mother and learned how to really live in community. It’s where we spent all those pandemic months together. It’s just hard to let it go.”

She listened quietly, as is her way, and then said, “I think it’s like scited.”

“What do you mean?”

“Like when you try to help Stella understand that she can be both scared and excited at once. You’re feeling more than one thing.” Says my 10-year-old.

I couldn’t stop thinking about Maya’s insight the rest of the day. Yes, I was feeling more than one thing. Probably a baker’s dozen of emotions if we’re being accurate, but what were the two most dominant?

Devastated and relieved.

Revastated?

I don’t know - we don’t have to turn it into a cutesy word like former-mommy-blogger-turned-resistance-warrior Glennon Doyle (though her catch phrases are probably one reason she has such a popular podcast, no?). What I see, landing on these two co-existing emotions, is that being both devastated and relieved feels like a quintessential midlife phenomenon.

My 20s and early 30s were full of experiences that left me viscerally scited—my first book deal (boy oh boy, is that a story), buying my first apartment in Brooklyn, reporting trips to the east side of LA and Eastern Africa and everywhere in between, writing residencies on an island in Washington and at a villa in Italy, falling in love with my now husband, my Saturn Returns topsy turvy late 20s, getting pregnant, all the things. It was a time of cheap food and too many drinks, ambitious creativity and romantic curve balls, craving for opportunities and recognition, sometimes admitting that I wasn’t the sole author of my own story, while also driving towards a life I could love.

20-something Court sciting around.

My late 30s and early 40s have felt far less sciting and far more revastating (fine, let’s just go for it). Giving birth and becoming a mom broke me open. I was so relieved my baby had landed on Planet Earth safe and sound, and also devastated that that life I had been driving towards was now unrecognizable. My ambition transmogrified. I wanted to be excellent and wise, not famous and chosen. My books were not bestsellers, which was sometimes devastating, but also always a bit of a relief; I could carve out a right-sized artistic and professional life of meaning and collectivity without delusions of grandeur or emotional dependence on elite institutions.

Then my dad got sick. And my mom got crushed by caregiving. My husband and I kept falling apart and coming back together, as happens in marriages after a decade together. My kids grew and were mostly happy, and sometimes really suffered. What a devastation and a relief—all of it. It was devastating because loving vulnerable people and being a vulnerable person is inevitably devastating. And it was also always some kind of relief—relief that I couldn’t actually fix it all and wasn’t ultimately responsible or capable of preventing people’s suffering, relief that despite not being able to fix it I could still love on my people and hug them and laugh with them, relief that even though my professional life has not always been charmed or easy, it has been beyond my wildest dreams on scales of connection and curiosity and collaboration, relief that though I couldn’t save the world, I could invest in quiet, fulfilling ways wherever I landed and feel proud of my ability to show up, share, stay morally fierce and searching. Devastation and relief. Devastation and relief. Devastating and relief.

As soon as we got to our old house, I realized that I had left the brochures—arguably the most important part of the whole day—at our new house. I cried in my car as I doubled back, arriving back at the old house with two minutes to spare before prospective buyers started streaming in. (Midlife, for me, involves a lot of crying in your car.) I had screwed up and recovered, fallen apart and come back together, been devastated and relieved—all in the expanse of an hour on a Sunday afternoon.

It’s not glamorous, I got to say. Unless we redefine glamour to be about remembering, over and over, that you are lucky enough to be “just another bozo on the bus”—as my dad’s fave, Ram Das, used to say. I guess it’s glamorous to be 44 at all, if you consider the alternative. It’s always glamorous to get to age, to get to feel two (or ten) things at once, to get to cry in your car. The alternative is not getting to do any of these things because you’re dead.

Sorry, that’s pretty blunt, but I guess bluntness is another facet of midlife I’m embracing. I don’t have time to pretend this is easier than it is—my dad’s restlessness, my kid’s transition tears, my own swirling brain at 4am trying to remember which financial form I was supposed to fill out and where the cold cuts ended up. It’s a crushing privilege right now, a commitment founded on love and kept by endurance, a hard-won fog of emotions. The only way is through.