I’m writing to you from the edge of the cave of summer break, not quite all the way in but looking at that beautiful, velvety, uncounted space ahead where there are no shapes or edges. It is day five as I write this sentence. It’s sunny and warm outside right now, but in the winter months, I have a space heater I use in the living room to take the chill off, and when I turn it off, it continues to blow warm air for a long while until it gradually gets cooler, then room temp, then finally it stops blowing all together. The first week of summer is far from a January chill, but it reminds me of that. My power source is unplugged, but it still takes me a while to power down and unwind. The first few days, I always wander around the house feeling vaguely like I’ve forgotten to do something important. I’m not yet used to the liberating space of nothingness.
I open my eyes every morning after the sun is in the sky, a sensation unfamiliar to me in the rush of the school year. My kids have been away this week, on a vacation with their dad, and I eat what I want when I want. I sit down when I want, go on walks when I want, let my body have what it’s asking for. I’ve planted a few last things in the ground, propagated some plants from the backyard to the front, trimmed the overflowing herb garden, then delivered fragrant little bundles to neighbors' front porches like paper-towel-wrapped green bouquets. I’ve passed long afternoon hours in the shade reading Miranda July’s All Fours, which I devoured in only three days.
It’s in the subgenre of woman-gone-mad-at-midlife that I’ve been unintentionally magnetized toward lately. When I think about the biggest art fascinations I’ve had this year, I land on Fleishman is in Trouble and Nightbitch, and I guess now this one, too. It’s edgy and sometimes shocking, outlandish and exponentially steamier than what I usually read. But what gets me is the lines of prose that appear between and beneath those episodes. Like when the narrator’s best friend talks to her about perimenopause and says, “Imagine what it feels like to be a man. No cycles. No deaths-within-life. No transformation from one kind of person into another.” Or when the narrator has an earth-shattering sexual experience and then confesses, “I had gotten a soft molasses cookie for after. I ate it in the bath, sore and happy. This is the part I’ll remember when I’m old, I thought, eating this cookie in the bath.” There were dozens of other lines like that which made me sigh out loud in the way I do when I feel simultaneously seen and also mildly jealous that I wasn’t the one to write that sentence first. When I turned the last page today, midafternoon in my summer haze, sitting under the patio umbrella with my feet propped on the table in front of me, it felt like a brutally honest friend had just whispered her deepest confessions to me. It’s unhinged in a way that feels as honest as someone’s dirty socks on a bathroom floor. Outlandish and unrelatable in some moments, but there was a familiar drum beat underneath it that I know well.
The narrator goes through outrageous lengths to feel alive, sometimes making horrible choices in the process. A few years ago, I would have harshly judged her, but when she says of her many split desires, “there was a core self in there; someone was leaving the light on for me should I ever have to retrace my steps to find my way back,” some light inside of me flickered, too. There are all kinds of little rabbit trails and side paths mentioned in this novel that I wanted to follow a little further. One of which was her mention of the Amish notion of Rumspringa, a respite from societal norms granted to adolescents as a rite of passage in some Amish communities, a period of time without restrictions before someone signs up for a lifetime of rules and regulations. The narrator’s friend suggests perhaps women need a similar rite of passage in their forties in the years leading to menopause, a few years with no rules before whatever lies ahead in the next season. At one point, the narrator is fighting her own inner desire for freedom as her kid is fighting the nonnegotiable of bedtime, and she explains to them “We have to do a few boring and predictable things every now and then or life becomes total chaos,” a statement that works as a double entendre at that point in the story, aimed at her child but also a way of enacting self-talk to keep herself on the rails. Chaos is always the thing we are scared of, and walking the tightrope of our own rules and boundaries is what we think prevents it. Spoiler alert: the narrator’s life descends into chaos anyhow eventually. She has to make a mess of things and come out on the other side of that mess to take a new shape.
Summer is my Rumspringa. (Or can I say that when I have one every year?) I stop walking the tightrope of my own rules. I give in to what I want instead of what I think I need. I lower the knife from my own throat. I use these weeks like a rite of passage to move me into my next evolution.
I count my life in summers. I have had big summers when I stretched as wide as my arms would reach, sometimes even wider. In June of 2019, I traveled for the first time internationally alone with my kids, a task that scared me enough that I knew I had to do it. Then I flew home to ready myself for the Appalachian Writer’s Workshop where I knew no one and timidly read my work in a circle of writers who helped me unpack what was between my lines of prose, what I was leaving out, where I needed to dig deeper. From that experience came my incredible writing group with our regular meetings and yearly reunions. Last summer I pushed myself physically harder than I have before and hiked challenging rocky trails in Acadia with views I would have thought were painted from the imagination had I not seen them with my own eyes. But during some summers I’ve done nothing but recalibrate, rehabilitate, and reset my nervous system. The summer of 2021, I was so fried from teaching through a pandemic that I knew I needed to slow down like never before to avoid total burnout. I planted zinnia seeds that eventually grew taller than my own head and spent lazy afternoons on lakeside trails. I worked through Julia Cameron’s The Artist's Way for the first time, and that process plus eight weeks of rest did more for me than years of therapy could have. I found my pulse again. Last summer, I reworked my way through The Artist’s Way again, and it felt different this time, another rebirth but the kind that gave me an edge, gave me the courage to leave behind things I’d outgrown and the fire to write again in the urgent way I used to.
This summer is shaping up to be something in between the rehabilitation summers and the reaching ones. I’m scoring AP Seminar essays for College Board; I’m headed back to Rockvale Writers Colony for a writing residency; I’ll be in New York in July for a much needed reunion with longtime girlfriends; I’ve got tickets to a couple of concerts and plans for dinners with friends and celebrations with neighbors, and I have so many pages I want to write. But in between all of that, I hope for days and weeks like this one has been. Reading in a hammock, seeing the flowers bloom, floating in the neighborhood pool watching my kids swim, late breakfasts and dinners outside just the three of us without the pressure of a timetable created by others.
Maybe one reason I’m gravitating toward stories of midlife unraveling is that I’m 43, watching my oldest ascend to high school, looking at the years behind me like a trail of dust I can’t revisit. But my big unraveling has already happened years ago, so that pressure is something I have left in the dust behind me, too. The world ends and begins again many times in one lifetime. Now what? What next? I don’t know the answer to that, but I know the unknowing is what makes me feel most alive sometimes. Anything can happen.
These stories of midlife crises (Or midlife awakenings? What are we calling them now?) illuminate the plight of someone chasing anything they can grasp to feel alive. That is something I get, midlife or not. I think I’ll always be this way. What I want: to feel something, to be moved, to dream, and sometimes to hear the whoosh whoosh rhythm of my own heart in my ears when I do something that scares me a little. In All Fours, the narrator gets lost in a moment of play and asks herself “Was this moment real?...I tried to remember how Pinocchio had become a real boy; it had something to do with being in a whale, maybe saving his father’s life; I hadn’t done anything like that. But surely a woman was more complex than a puppet boy and she might become herself not once-and-for-all but cyclically; waxing, waning, sometimes disappearing all together.” Those lines made me think about all of the cycles in my own life, the blooming and the fallow seasons, the slow summers and the exciting ones. I am never stagnant or linear, always in flow. Maybe the secret is to remember, as Anais Nin says, this season is “only one phase, one moment, one metamorphosis, one condition.” There is always more around the bend.
I’ve eventually come to realize that there are two ways to feel alive. One is that Mary Oliver way, the stroll through the fields all day, gazing at the grasshopper, this grasshopper, I mean, letting hours pass and immersing yourself in a still space. And then there is the way I feel alive when I do the thing that scares me, the stretch, the grasp for something just beyond my reach. I’m trying to make room for both of them this summer. I don’t know what these weeks will hold, but my Rumspringa is here again, carrying me like a little canoe out beyond the shore to the rippling water. No rules, just another layer of myself to uncover, waxing and waning, waiting to be born.