Where to start, where to start…

Mid Life Crises Suck.

There.  Got it all out there and admitted it to the world.   You do reach a point in life, at that “certain age” where your subconscious does the mental math and suddenly you think:

Holy Shit.  Statistically, more of my life is behind me than in front of me.

All of the sudden time is not the limitless quantity that we got used to it being.  There are things left undone that might not get done.  Ever.   People we love, who we will leave.  For ever.

There is a deadline to the rest of our lives.  Literally.

Now, if you mention this to people who are younger than you are (and a few who may be older but haven’t reached that waypoint yet), you get the inevitable “well, you know that anyone can get hit by a bus tomorrow…”

Well, yes.  This is true.  But I am not TALKING about the chance fatal meeting with a bus or an asteriod.  I am talking about the inexorable crawl toward certain death.  So if you ever have the urge to give a person in a midlife crisis that speech, let me stop you now.  It doesn’t help.

But there is a little bit more to my current situation than coming face to face with my own finitude (yes, that is a word – I looked it up to be sure).

The past four years have been tough.   Sometimes, when you are in the middle of something and gritting your teeth and squinting your eyes so hard just to get through it to the other side, you don’t realize what a toll it’s taking on you.  You only realize it when you look back and the weight of the experience is yanking you backward by the shoulder straps.

Everything that I defined my life by for almost thirty years has systematically fallen away in four years.   Now, most people can survive one life changing event pretty much intact.  But when they come on the heels of about one a year, when you are already at a inflection point where your life naturally becomes redefined, it’s a bit, let’s say, disorienting.

Let’s leave aside the whole first-time-motherhood-at-forty-thing for a moment.   I was ready for that one.  It’s really not a primary variable in the equation.  But I will come back to it.

Let’s also discard the “lost all my stuff and every memento of my past life” part.  Because truly, the stuff?  Just stuff.  In all sincerity, hand over my heart and hope to die, I do not miss the stuff.  At.  All.

But let’s pause on Katrina for a moment, because that is where the great dismantlement of my life began…

Next Installment – Part I, or How I Wandered in the Wilderness and Lost My Tribe.