We’ve done the college drop-off. We’ve watched Stephanie put her daughter on a plane to study abroad, an ocean away, and talked each other through what that grief actually feels like. I thought I had the muscle memory for this. Kid moves somewhere new, you help her get settled, you cry in the car on the way to the airport, you go home.

Then last week I flew to Seattle to help my daughter move into her first real apartment (the one with a lease, not a housing portal login) and none of that muscle memory showed up. What showed up instead was something I hadn’t felt since she was a toddler learning to walk toward the deep end of a pool: the specific discomfort of watching someone you love do something you can’t do for her, in a place you can’t picture.

This Was a Bigger Move Than It Looked

Here’s the thing nobody tells you about the difference between college and this: campus was fifteen minutes from our house. We gave her plenty of space those four years, but she knew, and we knew, that we were the safety net one text away. Seattle is not fifteen minutes away. Seattle is a full day of travel, a city none of us had ever set foot in, a place I genuinely could not picture her life in because I had never seen it.

She’d moved out there over the summer with three suitcases and a sublet, started the job, and figured out a neighborhood she liked, all before I’d contributed a single opinion. By the time I landed to help her move into the real place, most of the decisions were already made. Insurance, lease terms, budget, all hers. And I had to just trust that we’d given her the tools to handle it, because there was no version of this where I was going to swoop in and fix her spreadsheet.

That lack of control was the anxiety. Not “will she be okay” because I believed she would be. It was the strangeness of not being needed for the parts I used to be needed for.

The Moment It Got Real

My flight was delayed, badly. She was supposed to meet me at the airport, but by the time I landed she’d already gone to bed because she had to be up early for work. So instead, the next morning, I met her at her office to pick up the apartment keys.

Walking in and seeing her at her desk, in her element, doing her job, that was the moment. Not the lease signing, not the empty apartment. Her, working. I hugged her and just about lost it, right there in the lobby. Missed her that much. And underneath the missing her, something else: I was so proud of her for building a life, without me, out of nothing but three suitcases and a plan.

Where I Held Back (And Where I Didn’t)

Before I got there, she was doing what she always does with moving, avoiding it. She hates it, and she’d been procrastinating on packing up the sublet. I told her, flatly, that she needed to have it packed before I arrived, because I had a rental car and a limited number of days and it would be foolish to waste them on boxes she could’ve packed alone. She listened. We got everything moved, and she was visibly relieved she’d done it.

That was the one place I pushed. Everywhere else, I backed off. The apartment isn’t furnished yet; the bed we’d ordered for her was delayed, so she just walked to Mattress Firm and bought one herself, after work, problem solved. She wanted to wait to see the space with the bed in it before furnishing the rest, and she is okay with taking her time. But when I made suggestions and she said she wasn’t ready, I let it go. She reminded me, not unkindly, that she’s making her own money now, so she gets to furnish her apartment on her own timeline. Hard to argue with that logic. I also let go of the picture of her finished room I’d been quietly hoping to post. Not this trip.

What I did keep doing, the same as freshman year: thinking through the practical stuff she wasn’t thinking of yet. Some jobs don’t retire. They just get smaller.

What Surprised Me

The independence. Not in the abstract but in specifics. Buying her own mattress when the delivery fell through. Navigating a new city on public transit like she’d done it for years. Choosing to go into work instead of spending an extra hour with me, because that’s what a responsible adult with a new job does. Reaching out to new people, on purpose, because she wants an actual life there and not just an address.

Leaving Was Harder This Time

At college, goodbye came with a built-in next chapter as Parents’ Weekend was already on the calendar. This time I left knowing it would be a while before I saw her again, with nothing scheduled to soften it. That was the harder part, physically, in a way the dorm goodbyes never were.

The Job That Isn’t Retiring, Just Changing

I keep waiting to feel like some parenting job is officially over. It isn’t, not really. I’ll always be her mom, and she knows that I’m not going anywhere. What’s actually happening is smaller and bigger at the same time: I’m letting her fly.

She still calls. Mostly for advice although half the time I can tell she already knows the answer and just wants someone to say it back to her. I hope the calls for money stop soon, not because I mind helping, but because that’s the actual test: whether she can live inside her own means. So far, so good.

And here’s the honest reframe, the one I didn’t expect going in: this trip wasn’t really about her. She was already settled. She would have managed the apartment fine without me there. This trip was about me: finding peace with how I raised her, trusting that I gave her what she needed, and practicing letting go of a job I’ve held for twenty-two years.

Your Turn

If your kid hasn’t hit this exact moment yet, they will. It’s the one where you realize you’re not needed the way you used to be, and that this is the point, not the problem. The one where you have to actually believe, not just say, that you gave them the tools.

So, what’s the job you’re not ready to retire yet? And what would it take to believe you already gave your kid what they needed to fly without you?

Tell us. We read every reply.

—Amy

Subscribe now

Leave a comment

Somewhere else, a mom is standing in a dorm room that smells like new carpet, wedging a fitted sheet onto an extra-long twin mattress for the second or third time in her life, doing that thing where you keep finding one more errand to run so you don’t have to do the goodbye yet.

And somewhere else, a mom just dropped her daughter off at a sorority house for the first round of rush and is now sitting in her car in the parking lot, not driving away yet, because her kid looked more nervous than she let on, and there’s nothing left to do about it now except leave.

Different scenes. Same week, give or take. Same feeling underneath all of them.

We keep saying “back to school” like it’s a single day. A photo on the porch. A backpack. Maybe a Target run. And for the kids, in a lot of ways, it is a single day: a new teacher, a new roommate, a new room number, and then they’re just in it.

For us, it’s not a day. It’s a slow, unglamorous reset that nobody warns you about, and it takes way longer than the calendar suggests it should.

The First Day Gets a Ceremony. The Reset Doesn’t.

Here’s something we’ve said to each other more than once, comparing notes on our own kids over the years: it took a solid eight weeks, every single year, before things actually felt normal again. Not the first week. Not even the second. Something closer to two months before the new routine stopped feeling like an outfit that didn’t quite fit yet.

Nobody tells you that part. The culture gives the first day all the ceremony with the photo, the caption, the “can’t believe they’re in 4th grade / a sophomore / moving into their first apartment on campus” post. And then it goes quiet, like the transition is over because the photo got taken.

It’s not over. It’s just starting, and it’s starting for you too, not just them.

The kid gets one first day. The parent gets a whole season of trying to find their footing.

It Doesn’t Matter What Age They Are, You’re Rebuilding Something

This is the part we think gets missed the most: this isn’t a young-kid thing or an older-kid thing. It’s the same job, wearing a different outfit depending on what stage you’re in.

If your kids are still home, you’re rebuilding the actual machinery of your days; the carpool rotation, who’s driving Tuesday, whether the new after-school pickup window even works with your job. You’re relearning a whole new set of names: this year’s teacher, this year’s team parents, whichever kid your kid has decided is now their whole personality. You’re back to packing lunches and negotiating dinner around practice and figuring out, again, how to be five places at 5:45pm.

If your kids are older and heading back to campus, or further than that (new apartment, new city) the logistics look different but the job is the same. You’re the one who remembers whether the lease started or the mini fridge got ordered. You’re standing in a Target aisle with a list that used to be about backpacks and is now about renters insurance and command strips. You’re watching your kid walk into rush, or a new dorm hallway, or a first shift at a job in a city you don’t live in, and you’re doing the same thing that mom in the carpool line is doing, you’re just doing it from further away, with less to actually help with, which somehow makes it harder, not easier.

Different logistics. Same job: hold the routine together while everyone else gets to just show up and start.

The Social Reset Isn’t Just Theirs Either

You mentioned this and we think it’s one of the most underrated parts of the whole season: the new social dynamics aren’t only a kid problem.

Yes, your child is the one figuring out who to sit with at lunch, or whether their new roommate is a friend or just a stranger with a shared mini fridge, or where they fit in a rush process that can feel like it was designed to manufacture anxiety. That’s real, and it’s theirs to navigate.

But so is this: you’re also rebuilding your own social footing every fall, and almost nobody names it. The carpool crew you had last year has scattered to different schedules. The team-parent group chat you were finally comfortable in got dissolved the second the season ended. If your kid just left for college, the friends you used to run into at every pickup and every game are suddenly people you have to make actual plans with, on purpose, because the built-in reasons to see them are gone.

Something to sit with: Whose faces made up your everyday world last year, at pickup, at practice, at drop-off, and how many of them are still part of your week now that the routine has changed?

That’s a real loss, even when the reason for it is a good one. Even when you’re proud of your kid for moving on. You’re allowed to feel the loss of your own social rhythm and be happy for theirs at the same time. Those aren’t in conflict.

You’re Allowed to Still Be Adjusting in Week Six

If you’re the one running point on all of this, the schedules, the sign-ups, the packing lists, the “did you remember” texts, the version of yourself that has to seem calm even while you’re finding your own footing, you are doing real work. It doesn’t show up on anyone’s calendar as work. But managing a household’s entire transition while also quietly having your own is not nothing.

Something to sit with: If it’s taking you longer than you expected to feel normal again this year, what would it look like to treat that as expected instead of as something you should already be over?

So if it’s the third week of September and you still feel like you’re catching up, that’s not you being behind. That’s the actual timeline. The kids adjust fast because kids are built for it and because, frankly, they don’t have to hold the logistics. You do. Give yourself the same runway you’d give a friend.

Your Turn

Whatever stage you’re in this year, carpool lines, new teachers, a dorm room you just left, a rush process you’re white-knuckling through from three states away, we want to hear it.

What’s actually been the hardest part of your reset this year, not theirs? How long did it take you, in past years, before it stopped feeling like a new routine and just felt like your life again?

Hit reply. Tell us where you are in it. We read every single one.

—Amy & Stephanie

Leave a comment

We used to walk past all of it. Now we can’t get it out of our head.

Something has shifted for us. We’ve caught the decluttering bug, and it has taken over our brains.

Why Now, Though?

Before with the kids, work, the mental load of running a household, showing up for everyone else first and ourselves somewhere around never.

But when the schedule opens up, suddenly you’re standing in your own house, really looking at it, for maybe the first time in fifteen years.

And what we’re both noticing is that we finally have the bandwidth to see the space around us. Not just live in it, and we’re also finally noticing what’s in it. The stuff we’ve been stepping over, storing, ignoring, and dragging from move to move for two decades.

The Question That Changed Everything

We used to be people who held onto things. Hard.

Sentimental stuff, but also stuff that might be useful someday. Stuff that cost money once. Stuff that belonged to someone we once loved, even if we didn’t love the object itself. Letting go felt like a loss.

Now we ask ourselves: Is this worth the space?

Not just the physical space, the mental space. The tiny bit of our brain that clocks this item every time we open the drawer, every time we walk past it, every time we have to decide, again, what to do with it.

We realized clutter isn’t just a thing sitting on a shelf. It’s a thing sitting in your head too. Every object you’re holding onto out of guilt or “someday” or obligation is quietly taking up space you could be using for something else. Or nothing else. Just quiet.

Once we started asking that question, is this worth the space, physical and mental, the answer got a lot easier to hear. And a lot easier to say no to.

The Goodwill Runs

We’re not exaggerating when we say we’re a little obsessed now.

There’s a specific kind of joy that comes from loading up the car for Goodwill. Watching a bag of stuff that’s been sitting in a closet for years finally leave the house. Coming home to a shelf, a drawer, a corner that has room to breathe.

It’s addictive.

And it’s not about minimalism, or some aesthetic Pinterest board, or living out of a suitcase with twelve items. We still love our stuff. We’re just finally willing to be honest about which stuff is actually ours, and which stuff we’ve just been storing out of habit.

The Downsizing Piece

We have way too much stuff for the life we’re actually living right now.

Not hoarder-level. Just twenty-plus years of accumulation. Stuff from when the kids were little. Stuff from jobs we don’t have anymore. Stuff we bought for a version of ourselves that doesn’t exist anymore.

And some of this isn’t just about today. We’re both thinking, at least a little, about what our lives might look like down the road. Smaller homes. Simpler lives. Less to manage, less to maintain, less weighing us down when we’re ready to make a change.

You can’t downsize your life in a weekend. But you can start now. One drawer, one closet, one honest look at the garage at a time.

The Mind-House Connection

The more we clear out our physical space, the clearer our heads feel too.

We spent years, decades really, holding onto things. Old stuff. Old grudges. Old versions of ourselves. Old obligations that stopped serving us a long time ago but that we kept dragging along anyway.

Turns out decluttering your house is a pretty good practice run for decluttering everything else. The baggage. The guilt. The stuff you’re keeping around because you always have, not because it still fits.

We’re slowing down enough to actually see what we’re carrying, and asking if it’s still worth the space.

Something’s Coming This Fall

We’ve been reading, researching, and full-on obsessing about this decluttering thing for a while now, and we can’t keep it to ourselves anymore.

So we’re planning something for this fall. A challenge, some events, a chance to purge alongside us instead of just reading about it. Details are still coming together, but we wanted you to know it’s on the way, because we want you in it with us.

Consider this your heads up. And maybe start eyeing that junk drawer.

With love,

—Amy & Stephanie

What’s the one thing you’re finally ready to let go of? Tell us, we’d love to hear about it.

Subscribe now

Leave a comment

Friendship used to be built into our lives. Now it isn’t. And figuring out how to build it back is a whole thing.

The Built-In Years

Remember mommy and me classes? Remember standing in a circle of exhausted women you’d never met, all of you holding babies who wouldn’t sleep, and somehow walking out with three new friends by the end of the hour?

It wasn’t even effort. It was just proximity. Same stage of life, same sleep deprivation, same park bench at pickup. You didn’t have to work at friendship back then. It found you.

Preschool drop off. Elementary school playdates. Team snack schedules. Birthday parties every single weekend for a decade. Whether you liked it or not, you were embedded in a social structure. The other moms were your people, whether or not you would have chosen them. Same aged kids, same logistics, same chaos. That overlap did most of the work for you.

Then the Kids Grew Up. And So Did the Silence.

And then, slowly, the built-in part disappeared.

The kids got older. They started driving themselves places, or going to college, or just needing you less at the exact moments that used to guarantee you’d run into someone. No more pickup line. No more team snack schedule. No more shared logistics forcing you into the same room as other women twice a week.

The friendships didn’t end in some dramatic way. Nobody had a falling out. It was quieter than that. A drift. Fewer texts. Fewer things to talk about once the kids stopped being the connective tissue. You’d run into someone at the grocery store, have a genuinely warm five minute catch up, and then not see her again for eight months.

We didn’t even notice it happening in real time. It’s the kind of loss you only clock in hindsight. One day you just look up and realize your social calendar, which used to run itself, has gone quiet.

Starting From Scratch Is Humbling

Now, apparently, we’re supposed to make new friends. As adults. On purpose. Without a school, a team, or a stage of life doing the matchmaking for us.

And can we just say it: that is genuinely hard. Not hard in the way that dieting or scheduling a mammogram is hard. Hard in a much more vulnerable, put yourself out there way. It feels a little bit like dating. There’s an actual risk of rejection involved, and somewhere around midlife we forgot how to sit with that risk. We got comfortable. We had our people. We didn’t have to try.

Trying again means showing up somewhere new and being the person who doesn’t know anyone. It means striking up a conversation with a stranger and hoping it goes somewhere instead of nowhere. It means being willing to feel a little foolish, a little exposed, in a way we mostly stopped doing once we hit our thirties.

We didn’t forget how to make friends. We just forgot what it feels like to have to.

You Are Not the Only One Starting Over

Everyone feels vulnerable trying to make friends in midlife. Not just you. Not just us. Everyone.

We know this firsthand, because both of us moved to new cities in our early 40s. That meant we didn’t just lose the built-in social structure that motherhood used to provide. We lost the whole zip code that came with it. No decades deep friend group to fall back on. No familiar coffee shop where someone would recognize us. Just two women starting completely from scratch, in a new place, at an age where you’d think you’d already have this figured out.

You don’t. Nobody does.

And it’s not just the friendship part that’s disorienting. Midlife itself is disorienting. Your body is doing things you don’t understand. Your hormones are doing things you don’t understand. Some days your own mind feels like it belongs to someone else. And in the middle of not even fully recognizing yourself, you’re also supposed to go out and introduce yourself to strangers and hope you like each other.

That’s a lot to carry at once. We know it is.

But here’s what we’ve learned. If you can push through the fear, sit with the loneliness instead of letting it win, and actually open up (communicate, be honest, let someone see you when you’re not entirely sure who you are right now) you can build some of the most incredible friendships of your life. Friendships that hit differently than the ones from your twenties, because you’re not performing anymore. You’re just being real, because at this point, who has the energy for anything else.

That’s the whole reason Spill the Midlife Tea exists. So nobody has to do this decade alone. Not the body stuff, not the identity stuff, not the friendship stuff. All of it is easier when you’re not white knuckling it in silence.

The New Version of Built-In

The built-in structures aren’t completely gone. They just look different now, and you have to go looking for them instead of tripping over them.

The gym is a small example of this. Show up to the same class enough times and you start recognizing faces. Nobody’s planning a playdate, but there’s a nod, a “hey, you again,” a little thread of familiarity that builds slowly, the same way the park bench used to. It’s not the same as ten years of mommy and me, but it’s proof that overlap can still happen. It just has to be chosen now instead of assigned.

That’s really the whole shift. In our twenties and thirties, friendship happened to us. In midlife, it has to be a decision. On purpose. Repeatedly. Even when it feels awkward. Even when there’s no guarantee it goes anywhere.

We’re not going to pretend we’ve cracked this one. We’re still figuring out how to rebuild something that used to build itself. But we do know this much: the awkwardness of trying isn’t a sign we’re doing it wrong. It’s just what it costs to have people again.

We’ve talked about midlife friendships before, and we’re sure we’ll talk about them again. We’re not going to stop. Because at this point, friendship might be the single thing getting us through this decade. The connection, the people who get it without an explanation, the community that shows up when everything else feels uncertain. That’s not a small thing. That’s the ultimate longevity hack. Better than any supplement, any sauna session, any red light bulb. Just people, showing up for each other.

Your Turn

Have you tried to make a new friend as an adult? What was the awkward, brave, or surprisingly nice moment in that?

With love,

Amy & Stephanie

Subscribe now

Leave a comment

One of us is already living all of that. The other one got an early preview.

Amy’s youngest left for college last fall. Stephanie’s still got one more year before her last kid heads out the door, but a new house in St. Louis, bought a little ahead of schedule, gave her a trial run at what’s coming anyway. Turns out you don’t need an actual empty nest to feel the shift. Sometimes downsizing does it for you.

Stephanie: I Didn’t Know I’d Been Quiet Until I Wasn’t

My youngest doesn’t leave for another year. Technically, I’m not empty-nesting yet. But when Craig and I bought our house in St. Louis and downsized before we actually needed to, it handed me a conversation I didn’t expect to be having so soon: what do I actually want, in a house and in a life, when the answer isn’t just whatever keeps everyone else on schedule.

I learned something about myself that surprised me: I’d had opinions the whole time. I just hadn’t had the bandwidth to say them out loud.

For years I was so deep in the logistics of keeping everyone alive and functional. Schedules, work, the constant tally of who needed what by when, that the small stuff fell off my list entirely. How we decorated the house. What color the walls were. Whether the couch Craig picked out actually fit the room, or just fit his idea of what a couch should be. I didn’t have time to care, or maybe more honestly, I didn’t have time to fight for caring.

So I didn’t. Whoever had the bandwidth made the decision, and that was rarely me.

Then we bought the new house. And suddenly I had something I haven’t had in years: the mental space to actually want things. To walk into a room and think, I don’t love this rug. To realize I have a voice about our house, our life, and to want to use it, a full year before I thought I’d need to.

Nobody sat me down and said my opinions didn’t matter. It happened slowly, the way most patterns in a marriage do. I put myself last so consistently, for so long, that it became the default. Defaults are comfortable for everyone except the person tired of being set aside.

So when I started speaking up about the house, it wasn’t met with great, welcome back. It was more of a pause. A little beat of surprise from Craig, like “oh, she has thoughts about this now”.

Some days that stings. It’s easy to read it as me being difficult, when really I’m just being present. I finally have the energy to have a preference. That’s not difficult. That’s just showing back up.

I’m still learning to hold that steady instead of walking it back. Some days I manage it. Other days I say what I want and then undercut it with three qualifiers so nobody feels bad. Old habits take a while to break, even once you finally have room to break them.

I’ve still got a year of a partially full house left. Consider this my trial run, the season where I get to practice having a voice before I actually need one full-time.

Amy: I Realized I’d Been Fixing Everyone’s Problems But My Own

My timeline looks different than Stephanie’s, who’s still got a full time kid in the house for another year. Mine happened in real time. My youngest left for college last fall, and I’d left my job a few months before that, so I wasn’t just losing the kid noise, I was losing my whole structure at once. Jeff left on a business trip the day after we moved her in, and then he traveled for most of the fall. It was a long transition.

It didn’t hit me all at once the way you might expect. My girls went to school close to home, so there was never one dramatic goodbye. My daughter’s actually been back home since May, so the transition has partly reset, and I’ll get to do it all over again in a few weeks when she heads back. Empty nest isn’t always a clean before and after. Sometimes it’s a door that keeps opening and closing.

What actually surprised me, was Jeff and me. Before the kids left, we’d fallen into a familiar rut: sitting on the couch at night, both of us on our iPads, technically in the same room and not really together. Some nights we still land right back there. A quieter house doesn’t erase old habits on its own.

So we’ve had to work at it. We started playing pickleball together, though I’ll note for the record that he’s not as good as I am, which is more frustrating than it should be. We’ve been trying to get out more during the week instead of defaulting to the couch, so we’re actually interested in each other again, not just running a household together.

For years you don’t have to work at connecting. Kids and logistics do that for you. You don’t need to hunt for things to talk about when there’s a permission slip due Friday or a sporting event over the weekend. Take that away, and you find out fast whether you know how to just be with each other, or whether your whole rhythm was built around someone else’s schedule.

Mine was the second one. Realizing that is part of what pushed me to start something for myself, which is how Spill the Midlife Tea happened. I needed something that was mine, as much as I needed something with Jeff.

My version of Stephanie’s voice thing looks a little different. For years, Jeff was kind of a third kid. Fourth, if you count the dog. If he’d had a bad day at work or tweaked something at the gym, he’d come to me the way the girls did, expecting me to fix it or at least absorb it. I had nothing left to absorb with. He didn’t mean to pile on. It just felt that way when I had zero bandwidth. So now I’m working the opposite muscle: actually listening, being sympathetic, showing up as his partner instead of bracing for one more thing.

Jeff, for his part, wants a lot of this newfound time. All of it, some weeks. I love that, and I also have to manage it, because I finally have breathing room and I’m not giving all of it back. At least he took up pickleball instead of asking me to take up golf.

I’m protecting my pickle days, my weekly mahjong, girls’ nights whenever I feel like scheduling one. Jeff golfs all weekend now that we’re not driving anyone to a tennis tournament, and he still travels for work, which is fine by me. I don’t need help with dinner or homework or bedtime anymore. I get to do what I want without having to entertain him while I do it.

We’ve got more trips planned together this year than we’ve taken in a long time. I’m not negotiating for space the way Stephanie’s had to fight to be heard on the house. My renegotiation looks more like relearning how to be curious about someone I’ve been married to for twenty-five years, instead of just surviving next to him.

The Part Where We Renegotiate the Whole Marriage

An empty nest doesn’t just change your schedule. It changes the terms of the marriage, whether you planned on renegotiating them or not.

For years, so much of what a marriage runs on, whose turn it is to bend, whose interests take priority on a random Tuesday, who gets to be tired and who has to push through, all got decided by necessity. Kids needed things, someone had to give, and it usually wasn’t a fair fight because it usually wasn’t really a choice.

Now there’s no built-in tiebreaker. No practice schedule making the decision for you. Just two people with more free time than they’ve had in two decades, working out what each of them actually wants, and whether those things line up the way they assumed.

It’s not a crisis, but it is a renegotiation, and renegotiations are uncomfortable for everyone at the table.

We’re at different points and figuring this out anyway. Amy’s a year into a house that keeps un-emptying itself. Stephanie’s got another full year before hers quiets down, and got there early through a new address instead of an empty bedroom. The discomfort isn’t a sign something’s wrong. It’s a sign something’s finally being said out loud, whether that’s an opinion about the couch or a boundary about how much togetherness is enough.

Your Turn

We want to hear from you.

What’s shifted between you and your spouse since the house got quieter? Is there something small you’re finally claiming after years of letting it go, whether that’s a say in how the house looks or a standing pickleball date?

With love,

—Amy & Stephanie

Subscribe now

Leave a comment

Because for years, I’ve been talking about the next chapter. You know the one. The one where the kids are launched, the house feels too big, and you get to finally think about what you want. Where you want to be. How you want to live.

I’ve been having this conversation with my midlife friends for a while now. Over coffee, over wine, over walks. The hypotheticals. The plans. The daydreams about what life looks like on the other side of the carpool years.

Here’s what we all agree on: it’s terrifying. It’s emotional. It’s sad. And it’s wildly exciting. All at once. Sometimes in the same sentence.

I knew all of that intellectually.

Then about a month ago, something happened that made it very, very real.

The Dream (The One I’ve Had For Years)

First, let me tell you about the dream.

For as long as I can remember, Craig and I have talked about having two places to call home. St. Louis and Austin. Both cities matter to us. Both feel like us. And once our kids were both in college, it seemed not just possible but actually within reach.

That was always the plan. Our youngest finishes high school, we figure out the Austin situation, we get a place in St. Louis. Two cities. Two homes. A life that felt like it was built for exactly who we are right now, in this chapter.

I know how lucky that sounds. I know it. And I don’t take it for granted for a single second.

What We Didn’t Plan For

What we didn’t plan for was falling in love with the perfect St. Louis house a full year before we were supposed to.

But that’s what happened.

And so we jumped on it. Because that’s what you do when the right thing shows up early.

My youngest is still in high school. We’ll stay in our Austin family home at least another year. We’ll always have a place in Austin, that’s not changing. But the St. Louis house? It’s happening. It’s real. We’re doing this.

And I was SO excited.

Until I walked through it during the inspection.

The Moment It Got Real

Craig and I were walking through the rooms, doing what you do, talking about what goes where, what we’d use each space for, how we’d make it ours.

And then Craig mentioned one of the rooms. He wanted to turn it into a gym. A weight room. His space.

And something in me immediately said: no. That’s where the kids will hang out.

We tabled it. Moved on. But I noticed it.

Then a little later, I was walking through with a friend, and we started trying to figure out where the piano would go.

The piano our kids have played their whole lives. The one they still sit down at constantly, just because they love it. We couldn’t quite make it work in the space. And I kept saying it, almost to myself: “But the kids love to play the piano.”

That’s when it hit me. Downsizing isn’t just about stuff or square footage. It’s about choices.

When you move from a family home into something smaller, something that’s designed for the next chapter, not the last one, you can’t bring everything. You can’t keep every room configured the way it was when four people lived there full-time. At some point, you have to ask whose space is this now?

And I wasn’t ready for that question.

I wanted the kids to have their hangout room. I wanted space for the piano. I wanted all the things that said you are still welcome here, always, forever, this is still your home too.

And of course it is their home.

But if I fill every room with their things, their needs, their childhood, at what point does this become Craig’s and my house? At what point do I make space for who we are becoming, not just who we’ve been?

That’s the question I wasn’t expecting to ask. Standing in a house I love, trying to figure out where to put a piano, I realized empty nesting isn’t just about your kids leaving.

It’s about you deciding to arrive.

I’m Not Sure I’m Ready

And here’s where I’m landing right now. I’m not sure I’m ready for that.

I thought I was. I thought I’d processed it. I’ve had the conversations, done the talking, sat with the feelings. I thought I understood what this chapter meant.

But then I was standing in a room thinking about where my kids would hang out, in a house we’re buying for the next chapter, and I realized I’m still trying to hold onto both things at once. The old life and the new one. The family home energy and the next-chapter energy. The piano and the weight room.

Maybe that’s okay. Maybe that’s just where I am.

Your Turn

Have you been in this moment where something abstract suddenly became very, very real? Where the plan you thought you were ready for showed up and surprised you with how it actually felt?

And the bigger question: how do you start putting yourself first in your own home, when you’ve spent decades making it about everyone else?

With love,

— Stephanie

Update: We Moved In

We moved in this past week.

I love this house. I walk through the rooms and I still can’t quite believe it’s ours.

But neither of my girls have seen this house yet. Not in person. Not with their own eyes. That’s harder than I expected too.

I can’t wait for them to walk through the door. To leave their fingerprints on the counters and their opinions on the paint colors and their actual, physical presence in these rooms. For the past few days it’s been just me and Craig. And that has come with a whole new set of emotions, challenges, and stuff to figure out.

But at the end of the day, no matter how many years pass or how many times they come home, this is always their home too.

They may not live here full time. They may not even be in it all that often, especially once life takes them further away. But this house is theirs. Not just for now. Not just until they’re settled somewhere else. Till the end of time.

Subscribe now

Leave a comment

We thought we were the ones asking the questions.

Twenty conversations later, we were the ones who walked out with something to think about.

What The Pause Actually Is

The Pause is a live-taped PBS special, created and produced by Coffee Milk Media, built around the same idea we’ve been chasing since day one of this newsletter: menopause doesn’t have to be a conversation held in whispers. It brings together medical experts and real women, multigenerational and multicultural, to talk about what this transition actually looks like, not the sanitized version.

We’ve been privileged to meet several of the women who participated in the panel and have gotten to know some of them well. Watching women we already trust sit on that panel made the whole night feel less like an event we were covering and more like a room full of people already in our corner.

The special is expected to air on PBS in October, right in the middle of Menopause Awareness Month.

What We Actually Heard

Here’s the thing about asking real women a real question with a camera pointed at them: they stop performing pretty fast.

We talked to women who hadn’t hit menopause yet, women in the thick of it, women years past it. But one pattern showed up again and again, and it’s the one we can’t stop thinking about.

One woman, not there yet, just wanted someone to tell her the truth about what’s coming before she’s standing in the middle of it, blindsided.

Others, already through it, wanted the exact same thing but pointed forward instead of back. Not for themselves. For their daughters. They were done needing this information after the fact. They wanted the next generation to walk in with it already in hand.

Pre-information versus post-protection. Two different vantage points on the same transition, asking for the same thing: don’t make us find this out the hard way.

That’s not a new idea to us. That’s the whole reason Spill the Midlife Tea exists. But hearing it from strangers in a PBS lobby, unprompted, in almost the same words lands differently than writing it in a newsletter to yourselves.

Why This Felt Like More Than Content

We’ve said before that 60 days into this newsletter, we realized the corner we were building already existed; full of filmmakers, researchers, and women who’d been doing this work quietly for years, waiting for the culture to catch up.

Friday night was more proof of that. A PBS station. A production company built specifically to tell these stories. An expert panel that includes women already inside our own community. Twenty brave women who showed up on a Friday night specifically to talk to us, on camera, about a topic most of us were taught to handle privately.

The culture is catching up. We got to stand in the room while it did.

What’s Coming

We’ve got footage from all twenty conversations, and we’re not dumping it all at once. You’ll see some of it on Instagram (@spillthemidlifetea) over the next few weeks, and we’re holding more to release alongside the October premiere and our Menopause Awareness Month content so that this doesn’t feel like one night, and instead it feels like a season.

The Pause airs on Austin PBS in October. We’ll tell you exactly when as we get closer.

Your Turn

If you had been standing in that PBS lobby with a camera pointed at you, what would you have said? Are you the woman who wants to know what’s coming, or the one making sure someone else doesn’t have to find out the hard way?

Hit reply. We read every single one.

— Amy & Stephanie

Subscribe now

Leave a comment

Not the Hollywood kind. The kind where you catch your reflection in a store window, or a Zoom call, or the back of a spoon at a weird angle, and for half a second you think: who is that?

The one where somewhere along the way, without an announcement, without our permission, our bodies became someone else’s. They look different. They feel different. They act different. The skin doesn’t snap back the way it used to. The shape has relocated to new zip codes. Workouts that used to leave us refreshed now leave us limping for two days. Energy shows up on its own schedule, not ours.

And here’s the thing: we’re actually doing the work to love these bodies. The new ones. The ones that have been through pregnancies and grief and jobs that wore us down and decades of carrying everyone else first.

We’re not pretending we don’t miss some things. We’re not going to lie and say every change feels like a gift. But we are choosing to stop treating this body like a problem to be solved and start treating it like a body that’s still ours, still working, still worth being in.

And yet.

And yet there are a couple of things we are not ready to let go of. Not yet. Maybe not ever. And we’re done feeling weird about it.

The Body Acceptance Plot Twist Nobody Talks About

Here’s what nobody tells you about learning to love your aging body: it doesn’t mean giving up every single thing that makes you feel like you.

Body acceptance and vanity are allowed to coexist. We checked. It’s fine.

You can make peace with the fact that your metabolism now operates on a completely different system than it did at 30, and still refuse to give up the one thing that makes you feel like yourself in the mirror. Both things are true. You can love this body AND have a non-negotiable. You can have made real, hard-won peace with aging AND still be a little vain sometimes.

That’s not hypocrisy. That’s just being a whole person.

Stephanie: The Hair Is Not Up for Debate

Here’s the thing I will not negotiate on my hair color.

I used to get it done every six to eight weeks. Now? The grays come in faster than I can keep up with, and I am at the salon more often than I’d like to admit out loud. It costs more. It takes more time. But, I don’t care.

I have made peace with so much. The skin. The midsection. The way my body recovers from a hard workout like it’s filing a formal complaint. I have done real work to stop treating my body like an enemy and start treating it like a teammate who’s just playing a different game now.

But the gray? No. Not yet. Maybe not ever.

This is the one place I have decided to dig in. Not because I think gray hair is bad. Plenty of women wear it beautifully. But because for me, right now, in this season, this is the one thing I get to control completely. My hair color is mine. I choose it. Every six weeks, I choose it again.

And honestly? That feels like exactly the kind of self-care nobody warns you about. Not the bubble bath kind. The “I know myself and I’m not asking permission” kind.

Now, the thing I actually want to quit, and keep failing at, is Botox.

I know. I KNOW. Needles full of toxins, injected into my forehead, on purpose, voluntarily. I’m fully aware of how that sounds when I say it out loud. And I have genuinely tried to walk away from it. I’ll go six months thinking, this is silly, I’m an adult woman who should be able to look at her own forehead without flinching.

And then I catch my reflection at a certain angle, in a certain light, and the wrinkles I was so sure I’d accepted suddenly look very loud. And I cave. Every single time.

Amy: The Hair. Non-Negotiable. End of Discussion.

Stephanie and I don’t agree on everything. But on this one? We are completely, unequivocally, not-up-for-debate aligned.

The hair color is staying.

Not because I’m in denial about aging. Not because I think gray is wrong on other women, it looks stunning on so many of them and I mean that. But on me? It makes me look old in a way I’m not ready for. And I don’t have the patience to grow it out gracefully even if I wanted to, which I don’t. So. Monthly color it is.

And while we’re at it, let’s discuss the Brazilian blowout. Two, maybe three times a year. It is expensive. It is absolutely a luxury. I will continue to do it without a single ounce of guilt.

Here’s what I will say about where I actually am on the vanity spectrum right now: I think I need to do MORE, not less. My manicures got cut back to once a month because time is a finite resource and I ran out of it, but I’m over here researching builder gel because I want them to last longer and look better even when I can’t get in as often. The monthly pedicures are non-negotiable maintenance at this point (ingrown toenails are one of the most unglamorous parts of aging that nobody warns you about, and yet, here we are).

And skin? I’m starting to think seriously about rejuvenation treatments. Not because I’m unhappy in my skin, I’m actually stronger and more capable in this body than I’ve ever been, because I work harder than I ever have before. But the outside could use a little investment. I’m paying attention to my HRV and my protein macros and my sauna sessions, why wouldn’t I also pay attention to my skin?

Some people might see the contradiction there. Vibration plates and lymphatic drainage on one hand, cosmetic treatments on the other. But I genuinely don’t feel any tension about it. It’s all just taking care of yourself. The inside and the outside. The science-y stuff and the vanity stuff. None of it cancels the other out.

Nothing about maintaining yourself is as easy as it used to be. That’s just the truth of midlife. But that’s also why it feels like more of a choice now. We’re doing it intentionally. On purpose. Because we want to.

And I’m not sorry about any of it.

The Bigger Point

Here’s what we keep coming back to: loving your body in midlife doesn’t mean loving every part of it equally, all the time, unconditionally. It means knowing which battles are actually worth fighting.

We are not interested in pretending we’ve transcended vanity. We are not interested in performing self-acceptance we don’t fully feel yet. We are interested in being honest: this body is different now, we are doing the work to live in it well, and there are still one or two things we’re holding onto with both hands.

Maybe that’s hair dye. Maybe that’s Botox. Maybe it’s something else entirely for you. It doesn’t make you less evolved. It doesn’t undo the real work you’ve done to accept the rest of it. It just makes you a person who knows herself well enough to know what she’s not ready to let go of yet.

And that’s allowed.

Your Turn

We want to hear from you.

What’s the one thing about your changing body you’ve made real peace with, the thing that used to bother you and just doesn’t anymore?

And what’s the one thing you are absolutely, unapologetically not giving up, no matter what anyone says about it?

Is there something you keep trying to quit but keep caving on?

With love,

—Amy & Stephanie

What’s the one beauty non-negotiable you’ll defend to your grave? Tell us, we’d love to hear it.

Subscribe now

Leave a comment

Because that’s when it happened. That’s when the text came through: “Landed! I’m here!” Followed by twelve exclamation points and a photo of a sky I’ve never seen in person.

My daughter is in New Zealand.

Not “away at camp” New Zealand. Not “across the country for college” New Zealand. Actual, other-side-of-the-world, opposite-season, half-a-planet-away New Zealand. For five months.

She’s studying abroad, so yes, there’s a program. There’s structure. There’s a plan. But she’s going alone. She doesn’t know a single other person on that entire program, in that entire country, on that entire landmass.

She’s seventeen hours ahead of me, and a day ahead. Not twelve hours behind, not some clean number I could actually wrap my brain around, seventeen hours AND a different calendar day. Try doing that math at 4 a.m. when a text comes through and you genuinely cannot figure out if she’s about to have breakfast or already had dinner tomorrow. I have fully given up. She just lives in the future now. That’s where we’re at.

On top of all that: I have never sent a kid this far away, for this long, in my entire life as a mother. This is the record. This is the one that counts.

The Airport

She knew. On the drive there, she could tell I was struggling. (Yes, I was stress eating an entire bag of chips which she called me out on).

She told me to put down the chips and reminded me she’s been going away since she was nine. Sleepaway camp, year after year, no phone, no way to reach her for weeks at a time. And this time? She has a phone. She can call. She can text me the second she lands.

My daughter. Consoling me. At the airport.

I don’t know what to do with how that made me feel. Proud doesn’t quite cover it.

Here’s What I Didn’t Expect

She’s been planning this trip for over a year. She loves to travel. Loves nothing more than not knowing what’s around the next corner, genuinely LOVES it, in a way I never did at her age. She was so excited leading up to this that I don’t think she slept right for a week beforehand. Not because she was nervous. Because she couldn’t wait (and she somehow had a “plan” to get on New Zealand time).

I thought I knew what this would feel like. I’ve done the drop-offs before. The goodbyes at airports and dorms and driveways. I thought I had this part of parenting figured out.

I did not.

Because it is a genuinely strange feeling to be sad and not sad at the exact same time. My daughter is more excited than I’ve seen her in years. She’s living her actual dream right now, today, while I write this. And I cannot fully mourn a distance that’s making someone else this happy.

So instead I’m just sitting here in this weird, hard-to-name in-between space. Not devastated. Not fine either. Just quiet, in a way I wasn’t expecting to be quiet.

Not because I’m worried about her. But because I’m not used to the size of the gap.

(ok, maybe I’m a little worried).

The Part That Actually Gets Me

Here’s what I keep coming back to.

She is so much braver than I was at her age. So much more willing to throw herself into the unknown. I don’t know where she gets it, I definitely didn’t hand her that particular trait, but she has it, and watching her use it is one of the wildest, best things I’ve ever witnessed as a mother.

And then I remembered something: isn’t that the entire point?

She stood there consoling me instead of the other way around. The same kid who used to go to sleepaway camp with no phone and no way to reach her for weeks, now grown enough to fly to the opposite side of the planet and still pause to check on her mother’s feelings before she boards.

We’re not raising kids to be smaller, more cautious versions of us. We’re raising them to go further than we did. To be braver than we were. To do the things we didn’t have the nerve, or the opportunity, or the plane ticket for.

If she turns out better than me, more adventurous, less afraid, more willing to fly across the world to a place where she knows no one, then I did my job. That was always the goal. Even if nobody warns you how it actually feels in the moment it happens.

Where I’m At Right Now

I’m proud. Genuinely, embarrassingly proud, the kind of proud where you find yourself telling the grocery store cashier your kid is in New Zealand because you simply cannot keep it inside your body (or write an article about it).

I’m also sitting with a version of missing her I haven’t felt before. Not the ache of a bad goodbye. More like the ache of realizing how much room she’s about to take up in the world, and how little of that room will have me in it for a while. That’s new. That’s this season.

And I’m doing what I keep trying to do in this newsletter: holding both things instead of picking one. Sad and thrilled. Quiet and proud.

With love,

—Stephanie

Subscribe now

Leave a comment

Because there’s something about a big round number, 80, in this case, that makes time feel different. Not abstract anymore. Not “someday.” Just real, and right here, and moving faster than any of us would like to admit.

Stephanie: My dad turned 80 this month, and I flew to St. Louis to be there for it.

It wasn’t a huge production. Just a dinner the first night, and a luncheon with close friends and family the next day. But my husband, one of my daughters, and I all live in different states than my dad, which means it is rare for us to be in a room together at all. So rare that I almost forgot how much I needed it until it was happening.

The Night I Saw My Husband and Daughter the Way My Dad Was Seeing Them

That first night, it was just the five of us at dinner: my dad, my stepmom, my husband, one of my daughters, and me.

And at some point, my husband and my daughter started doing this bit they do, these silly voices and impressions that are entirely theirs, the kind of inside joke that only exists between the two of them. I’ve seen it a hundred times. It’s one of my favorite things about the two of them.

My dad had never seen it. Had no idea that side of them even existed.

He laughed so hard I genuinely think he might have been crying a little. The kind of laugh that takes over your whole body. And I just sat there watching him watch them, thinking: this is a moment that doesn’t happen. Not because no one wanted it to, but because we are never all in the same room long enough for it to.

That’s the thing about living in different states, different time zones, different lives. The everyday, ordinary moments, the ones that aren’t planned, the ones you don’t fly in for, the ones that just happen because people are around each other enough, those become rare. And rare things become precious fast.

The Luncheon, the Faces We Were Missing, and Learning About My Dad as an Adult

At the luncheon, my dad was surrounded by close friends and extended family, the kind of room I don’t get to be in nearly often enough.

I try, genuinely try, to make the effort to reach out to relatives I haven’t seen or talked to in a while. But trying and actually being in the same room are two different things, and sitting there looking around, I realized how long it had been since I’d seen some of these people.

And the room was also missing some faces. A few relatives who were there the last time we all gathered like this have passed away recently. It’s still hard to wrap my head around. Nothing is promised, we all know that, we say it all the time, but knowing it and feeling it in a room that used to be fuller are two very different things.

And then, in the middle of all of that, the joy, the gaps, the people I don’t see enough, I got to just sit back and watch my dad with his friends. Listen to stories about him growing up. Stories I’d never heard. Versions of him from before I existed.

There’s something so specific about learning who your dad was as a person, not just as your dad. Hearing him be someone’s best friend, someone’s partner, someone’s person. As an adult, getting to learn your parent as a whole human being instead of just “Dad” is its own kind of gift. One I didn’t expect to feel so deeply at a birthday luncheon.

The Thing We Keep Getting Wrong About “Someday”

We are constantly straddling two timelines in midlife. We’re watching our kids grow up faster than we can process, and we’re watching our parents, and the people who love them, get older, and fewer, faster than we’re ready for.

Both timelines are moving. Neither one waits for us to catch up.

Sitting in that room, missing the people who weren’t there anymore, watching my husband and daughter make my 80-year-old dad laugh until he cried, I kept thinking: none of these moments were guaranteed. Not the dinner. Not the luncheon. Not one single laugh. But how many of us have skipped things. Birthdays, visits, calls because we thought there would be more time?

There might be. There also might not be.

We’re not saying this to scare you. We’re saying it because we needed the reminder ourselves. Showing up isn’t always convenient. It isn’t always easy to clear the calendar or book the flight or use the vacation days on a trip that’s “just” a birthday party. But convenience was never really the point.

Why We’re Taking This So Seriously Right Now

If you’ve been reading along, you know we talk a lot about the physical stuff. Bone density, protein, moving our bodies, all of it. And we mean every word of it.

But here’s what this trip clarified for us: the physical stuff was never just about the physical stuff.

We’re not doing the gym thing and the protein thing and the brain-work thing purely because we want to look good or hit some wellness goal. We’re doing it because we watched a room full of eighty-year-olds and realized: this is coming. For all of us. The only question is what kind of shape we’ll be in when it gets here, and how present we’ll be able to be for the people who show up for us.

That’s the physical piece. But standing in that living room, we realized the emotional and spiritual piece matters just as much, and we talk about it far less.

Because what we saw that weekend wasn’t just a man who’d taken care of his body for eighty years. It was a man surrounded by people who genuinely wanted to be there. People he’d nurtured relationships with, decade after decade, showing up for them the way they showed up for him now.

That doesn’t happen by accident. That takes the same kind of intentionality we talk about with our bones and our brains, just pointed at our relationships, our presence, our willingness to actually be there instead of just meaning to be.

We’re taking care of ourselves now, physically, yes, but also emotionally and spiritually because we’ve seen, up close, how fast this all goes. We want to be the people who show up. And we want to still be around, in every sense, to be shown up for.

What We’re Taking From This

Stephanie: I came home from that trip lighter and heavier at the same time. Lighter, because I got an entire night of watching my husband and daughter make my dad laugh harder than I’d ever seen, and an afternoon of hearing stories about who he was before he was my dad. Heavier, because the room at that luncheon had gaps in it that didn’t used to be there.

But mostly, I came home certain of one thing: I want to keep showing up, even when it means a flight, even when the five of us are rarely ever in one place. For my dad. For the people I love. For myself, too, because taking care of this body and this mind and this spirit is its own way of showing up, for the years still ahead.

With love,

—Amy & Stephanie

What’s one way you’re being more intentional these days, with your time, your health, or the people you love? Tell us. We’d love to hear it.

Subscribe now

Leave a comment

A few weeks ago I told you about my pre-50 checklist: the colonoscopy, the DEXA scan, the estate planning, the therapy, the job, the newsletter. All the ways I was trying to show up for myself before the clock ran out on my 40s. Some of it was practical. Some of it was proof. All of it was me finally paying attention.

And now I’m here. 50. Officially.

Honestly? It feels exactly like I hoped it would. Which is to say: clear.

Here’s the thing nobody warned me about 50: it comes with a very low tolerance for nonsense.

I have a standing mahjong game on my calendar. The clicking of those tiles is like a dopamine hit for me. And it does not move. Not for a meeting that could have been an email. Not for a volunteer obligation I said yes to out of guilt. Not for the reflexive, lifelong habit of putting everyone else’s schedule ahead of my own.

The game stays. I show up. End of story.

Your calendar is a values document. Mine used to say: everyone else first, always. I'm rewriting it.

Same goes for pickleball. It's on the schedule like a non-negotiable appointment, because it is. Not because someone told me to exercise. Because I want to. Because I like it, even in the Texas heat. Because choosing things I actually want turns out to be a skill I have been dramatically underusing for about three decades.

I’m not going to pretend I’ve fully arrived at the “hell yes or no” standard. I still feel the pull. The guilt. The old, deeply grooved instinct to say yes before I’ve even asked myself if I want to.

But here’s what’s different: I pause now. For the first time, I check in with myself before I respond. My family still matters. My work still matters. The people I love still matter enormously. But I’m on the list now. Near the top, actually. And that is genuinely new.

I spent years, decades really, being very, very good at taking care of everything and everyone. I was competent. I was reliable. I showed up. And somewhere in all of that, I lost the thread back to myself. Not dramatically. Just gradually. The way erosion works, you don’t notice it until you look back and the landscape has completely changed.

50 isn't a crisis. It's a correction. A long-overdue return to myself.

What the checklist taught me, and what turning 50 confirmed, is that paying attention is the whole work. To your body. To your calendar. To the gap between the life you're building and the one you've been defaulting into.

I know which rooms drain me now. I know which obligations are real and which ones are guilt wearing a blazer. I know what I need to feel like myself: the mahjong tiles, the pickleball court, the conversations that go somewhere real. It took 50 years to get here. I’m not apologizing for that. I’m just not wasting what I learned.

This isn’t a reinvention. I’m not a different person. I’m just done waiting for permission to be this one.

Your turn. What’s the thing on your calendar that doesn’t move anymore? Or the question you’ve started asking yourself before you say yes? Tell me. Hit reply or drop it in the comments. I read every single one, and I have a feeling we’re all further along this road than we let ourselves admit.

-Amy

Subscribe now

Leave a comment

And walking out of that room, we were reminded of something we already knew but needed to feel again:

Community isn’t a nice-to-have in midlife. It’s the medicine.

We opened with a show of hands.

How many of you have woken up at 3 a.m. in the last month. Not because of a baby, not because of work stress, you just woke up. Wide awake. For absolutely no reason.

Almost every hand went up.

Then: keep your hand up if you had any idea that was associated with perimenopause.

Most hands went down.

And then: keep it up if you had someone to call. Someone who got it. Someone who said “oh my gosh, me too.”

That’s the one that got us. Because the women with their hands still up? They’re doing better. Not because they have better symptoms. Because they have each other.

Stephanie shared her frozen shoulder story. Sixteen months of brutal pain, a small army of specialists, almost surgery. Nobody connected it to perimenopause. Not one person.

Recently, she ran into one of her acupuncturists at a social event. And at the exact same moment, they both said: “Did you know frozen shoulder was a symptom of perimenopause?”

Stephanie’s take: “I’m so old, I went through perimenopause before anyone knew what perimenopause was.”

We laughed. And then we didn’t. Because it’s funny until it isn’t.

If even one woman had said, “Wait, is it your shoulder? Because mine did that too,” everything would have been different. Not the symptom. The suffering.

That’s the thing about perimenopause that nobody tells you: it doesn’t just show up as hot flashes. It shows up as a frozen shoulder. As anxiety you’ve never had before. As brain fog so thick you can’t remember a word mid-sentence. As teeth that suddenly feel different. As a rage that comes out of nowhere at 7 p.m. on a Tuesday.

And if no one in your life is talking about it, you assume you’re losing your mind. You white-knuckle it. You Google things at 3 a.m. alone in the dark.

When the truth is: the woman next door is doing the exact same thing.

Here’s what we keep coming back to, and what the research actually backs up: when women stop feeling alone in this, something changes.

They start advocating for themselves. They start learning more and therefore asking better questions at the doctor. They start connecting dots they couldn’t connect before. They start healing differently.

No prescription does that. Community does.

And the science is genuinely wild on this. A Cornell University study published in 2025 found that people with strong, sustained social connections showed slower biological aging at the cellular level. They had less inflammation and better markers across the board. Not people who hit the gym every day (though that matters too). People who had other people.

The landmark Harvard Study of Adult Development, one of the longest-running studies on human happiness ever conducted, found that the people who reported deeper, warmer relationships in midlife were healthier, happier, and lived longer. Not the people with the most money. Not the people with the best diets. The people with the best relationships.

And a 2020 study tracking women specifically found that better social integration in midlife is directly linked to longer lifespan and a greater chance of what researchers call “exceptional longevity,” surviving and thriving well into your 80s and beyond.

Your girlfriends, it turns out, are not just good for your soul. They are measurably, provably, good for your body.

But here’s the thing. This isn’t just about perimenopause. This is about all of it.

Midlife is a lot. The identity shifts. The body that feels unfamiliar. The career questions. The aging parents. The kids who need you differently now. The version of yourself you’re still trying to figure out.

And so much of it, too much of it, gets carried alone.

We have been conditioned, somehow, to white-knuckle hard seasons in private. To say “I’m fine” when we are very much not fine. To assume everyone else has it more together than we do. To not want to be a burden. To save the real stuff for our journals, or our therapists, or more likely, 2 a.m. when we’re lying awake next to someone who’s somehow still asleep.

But here’s what we’ve learned, and what we keep relearning: the women around you are going through it too. The same 3 a.m. wake-ups. The same quiet fears. The same moments of “wait, is this normal? Am I normal?”

They just haven’t said it out loud yet.

And the moment someone does, the moment one woman says the thing she’s been carrying, something shifts in the room. You can feel it. Every single time.

Here’s what we want you to actually think about. Not just nod at, but really think about.

The quality of your friendships matters more than the quantity. Research has consistently found that friendship quality has a stronger relationship with wellbeing than friendship quantity. You don’t need 50 people. You need a few who really see you. The ones who don’t make you perform okayness. The ones who let you say “I’m not fine” without flinching.

Friendships in midlife require intention in a way they didn’t before. When we were younger, friendships happened by proximity. School, work, neighborhoods with kids the same age. Now you have to choose them. You have to do the work. Make the call, send the text, show up even when it’s easier not to. The women worth keeping in your life are worth the effort of keeping them.

Being isolated isn’t a personality trait, it’s a season. We have both been there too. So many women come to us and say they feel lonelier in midlife than they ever expected. And we want to be really clear about this: that is not a “you” problem. Midlife is a transition that often reshuffles our social worlds. Kids get older, jobs change, friendships drift. The loneliness is real, but it’s not permanent. And it is absolutely not something you have to stay in.

Vulnerability is the price of entry, and it’s worth it. The friendships that sustain us in this season are the ones where we’ve been brave enough to go first. To say “me too” before we knew if the other person would say it back. To show up as the whole, complicated, slightly unraveling version of ourselves. Not the polished one.

We’ve felt it at our own events. We walk into a room of strangers and walk out feeling like we’ve known them for years. At lunches that stretch half the day because nobody wants to leave. Not because we don’t have places to be, but because we are finally saying out loud the things we’ve been carrying.

We’ve gotten the texts afterward: “I haven’t felt that seen in years.” We’ve read the replies: “So glad I’m not the only one.” We watched it happen at the summit Sunday, a room full of women who came as individuals and left as something more than that.

That is not small. That is everything.

So here’s what we want you to do with this.

Think about who your person is. The one you can text at 3 a.m. The one who says “me too” without flinching. The one who gives you the word for something you’ve been suffering through without a name.

Hold onto that friendship. Invest in it. Grow it. Because that woman is not just your friend. She is part of your healthcare.

And if you don’t have her yet, or if midlife has left you feeling more isolated than you expected, we want you to know: that is more common than you think. And it doesn’t have to stay that way.

The women you need are out there. Sometimes they’re in a summit room with their hands up. Sometimes they’re in a newsletter comment section. Sometimes they’re standing right next to you, carrying the same things, just waiting for someone to go first.

Go first.

If we could say one thing to younger women, to girls, it’s this: the women around you are not your competition. They are your greatest resource. We figure that out in midlife. Imagine if we knew it sooner. Imagine what we could have done for each other.

As we’re just past our six-month mark with Spill the Midlife Tea, we want to say thank you. For joining this community. For saying “me too.” For validating our experiences and each other’s. We all need each other. And we are so genuinely grateful to be part of this with you.

Midlife is not for the faint of heart. But it is so much better when you’re not doing it alone.

We’re not going anywhere.

Your Turn

We want to hear from you.

Who is the woman in your life who has gotten you through a hard midlife moment? The one who gave you a word, said “me too,” or just showed up?

Have you ever suffered through something in silence? A symptom, a fear, a life transition, only to find out later that the women around you were going through the exact same thing?

And if you’re feeling isolated right now, like you’re white-knuckling this season on your own, just tell us. There’s a seat for you here. Always.

Hit reply or drop a comment below. We read every single one.

Because this community isn’t just about surviving midlife. It’s about finally, finally not doing it alone.

With so much love,

— Amy & Stephanie

Subscribe now

Leave a comment

It was beautiful. It was restorative. It was gelato every night, wine with lunch, and long dinners that stretched on for hours the way only Italian dinners can. I walked everywhere. I laughed a lot. I came home with a balsamic vinegar that I’m not sharing with anyone.

And then I landed back in Austin and pretty much fell apart.

Seven hours of time difference. A body that had no idea what time it was. Waking in the middle of the night, fully alert. And then up again at 4am with eyes open, brain on, absolutely ready for a day that hadn’t started yet.

Here’s the thing though, it wasn’t entirely new.

The 4am wakeup was already a feature of my life before I got on any plane. I’ve been doing this for a while now, surfacing in the early hours, unable to settle back down, starting my days before I ever intended to. I’d been telling myself it was fine. Manageable. Just one of those things.

The jet lag just stripped away the last fig leaf I had been using to pretend otherwise.

It is not fine.

And if you’re a woman in perimenopause, there’s a good chance your sleep isn’t fine either, and an even better chance you haven’t fully admitted that yet.

You’re Not Imagining It. Your Biology Changed.

Here’s what we are learning about what is actually happening when you can’t sleep in perimenopause. It’s not a willpower problem and it’s not anxiety (well, it might also be anxiety, but that’s not where it starts).

Estrogen and progesterone don’t just regulate your cycle. They regulate your sleep architecture. Progesterone in particular has a calming, sedative effect; it helps you fall asleep and stay there. As those hormones fluctuate and decline during perimenopause, so does your ability to do either of those things reliably.

At the same time, melatonin, the hormone that signals your body it’s time to sleep, naturally declines with age. And fluctuating estrogen makes that decline worse.

Then there’s cortisol. Your stress hormone is supposed to follow a predictable rhythm: high in the morning to get you going, tapering off through the day, low at night so you can rest. In perimenopause, that rhythm gets disrupted. Cortisol can spike at night, particularly when your estrogen and progesterone are destabilized, which is why so many women wake up between 2 and 4am feeling not groggy and half-asleep, but alert. Activated. Like their body decided it was morning.

It didn’t decide. It just lost the signal.

Stephanie’s 3am. And my 4am.

I know Stephanie is awake at 3am because that’s when I get the best Instagram Reels from her.

Funny ones, sometimes. Relatable ones, always. Which tells me that somewhere in her brain at that hour, there is still enough executive function to scroll and recognize something worth sharing, but not enough calm to fall back asleep.

Her mind races. That’s how she describes it. She wakes up and it’s like someone turned the volume all the way up. The mental to-do list. The thing she forgot to do. The cortisol spike hits and the brain interprets it as: now is the time to solve all the problems.

It is not the time to solve all the problems. But try telling that to your nervous system at 3am.

Mine looks different. I wake up at 4am and I’m just done sleeping. Not groggy. Not halfway there. Done. My body has decided the day has started, and no amount of lying still in the dark convinces it otherwise. I had been chalking it up to having a lot going on, to being a generally busy person, and to stress, except I didn’t really think I was all that stressed.

That’s the part that’s been the hardest to sit with. The jet lag forced me to look at it squarely: this has been a thing for longer than I’ve admitted. And the stress driving it might be bigger than I’ve been willing to name.

Two different presentations. One underlying story.

Why It Matters Beyond Being Tired

Here’s what we need to say plainly, because it’s easy to minimize sleep loss the way we minimize so many things that are happening to us: this isn’t just about being tired.

Poor sleep in perimenopause is both a symptom and an accelerant.

When you’re sleep deprived, your body produces more cortisol. More cortisol disrupts sleep. Which produces more cortisol. Which means the hot flashes feel more intense, the brain fog thickens, the anxiety gets louder, and the weight is harder to shift. Every single one of those symptoms gets worse when your cortisol is chronically elevated and your body isn’t recovering overnight.

Poor sleep also affects ghrelin and leptin, which are the hormones that tell you when you’re hungry and when you’re full. When you’re not sleeping, your body produces more of the hormone that says eat and less of the hormone that says stop. I have to keep reminding myself that that’s not a lack of willpower. That’s biology doing exactly what it was designed to do when it thinks you’re under threat.

The sleep deprivation you’ve been treating as a minor inconvenience is quietly making the rest of perimenopause harder. And you deserve to know that.

What We’re Learning to Stop Saying

“I’ve always been a terrible sleeper.”

“I just don’t need as much sleep as I used to.”

“Once things slow down, I’ll be fine.”

“It’s just stress.”

We’ve both said versions of all of these. They are adaptive stories, the kind of thing you tell yourself when something is wrong and asking for help feels like one more thing to manage.

But the thing is: perimenopause sleep disruption is real, it’s documented, it affects somewhere between 40 and 60 percent of women in this transition, and it is not something you just push through. It’s something you address.

Where We’re Starting

Neither of us is here to give you a list of 47 things to optimize your sleep. You have enough lists.

But I do want to be honest about something, because honesty is the whole point of this newsletter: coming home from Italy and facing those 4am wake-ups head-on made me realize I need to work on my stress. The stress I didn’t think was stress.

You know that kind, the low hum you’ve been living with so long you stopped hearing it? The full calendar, the mental load, the always-being-available, the thing where you’re technically fine but you haven’t taken a full breath in six months? That kind.

So here’s what I’m committing to, and I’m telling you because I want you to hold me accountable:

• Movement that’s genuinely restorative, not punishing: walks, not just workouts. Moving to lower cortisol, not spike it further.

• A real wind-down boundary: screens off earlier, reading a book instead before bed. I know. I know. But I’m actually doing it.

• Talking to my practitioner: about the early wake-ups specifically, not just mentioning it as an aside and moving on.

• Naming the stress out loud: in this newsletter and in conversations with people I trust. Because what you don’t name, you can’t address.

I don’t have this solved. I’m in it with you.

Because this is the thing about sleep: it’s not a luxury. It’s not a reward for getting everything else done first. It’s infrastructure. It’s the thing your body uses to repair, regulate, process, and reset. And right now, a lot of us are trying to do the hardest work of our lives while running on chronically broken sleep.

That’s not a personality trait. That’s a problem worth solving.

Your Turn

We want to know: what does your sleep actually look like right now?

Are you like Stephanie? Wide awake at 3am with a mind that refuses to quit? Are you like me? Up at 4am like your body just decided the day started without your permission? Or are you somewhere else entirely?

And if you’ve found something that actually helps, I genuinely want to know. I’m taking notes.

Tell us. Hit reply or drop a comment. We read every single one.

Because if there’s one thing we’ve learned in building this community, it’s that the moment you name something out loud, you realize you’re not the only one. And that matters.

Even at 4am.

—Amy & Stephanie 🤍

Subscribe now

Leave a comment

Two fairly private women, putting our lives on the internet. Our health stuff. Our work stuff. Our identity crises. Our weird frozen shoulders. Our grief and our messy, beautiful, confusing midlife chaos.

And you showed up.

You showed up in our DMs and our comment sections and our text threads. You showed up as strangers who found us online and wrote to tell us you hadn’t felt this seen since you were up at all hours with a newborn. You showed up as old friends who, outside of this newsletter, might never have brought up the things we were talking about.

You showed up and said: I feel so seen.

Same. We feel so seen by you too.

So today, for our six-month milestone, we’re not writing about perimenopause or longevity or boundaries. We’re writing about this. About what it’s meant to do this. About what surprised us, what scared us, what cracked us open, and why we are not stopping.

The Moment It Became Real

Stephanie: The first time it hit me that we were actually doing this was the day we went live on social media. The place that I have so many mixed emotions about its mere existence.

Amy: Mine was different. We screened The [M] Factor 2, a documentary about perimenopause, and so many people showed up. People we didn’t even know. Strangers who had found us and made time in their week to come be in a room with us. That’s when I thought: this is real. We’re building something.

We asked ourselves: what reader response meant the most?

Stephanie: It was the stories that resonated with the hard stuff. Especially around toxic work experiences. So many people wrote to us about their own versions of it, and it made me sad that this is so common. That society has normalized this kind of treatment. But it also made me feel something else: relieved that we are creating this forum for discussion. Because if it’s happening to this many people, then at least we’re not carrying it alone. And at least by naming it, maybe we’re giving someone else permission to name it too.

Amy: I kept hearing the same three words over and over: “I feel seen.” That’s it. That’s the whole thing. That’s why we do this.

Because here’s what we know about midlife women: we have been keeping so much to ourselves for so long. The health stuff. The identity stuff. The grief. The confusion. The rage. The loneliness that shows up even when your life looks full from the outside.

Midlife is not for the faint of heart. And it has been way too quiet for way too long.

Every time someone reads one of our articles and says “this is exactly how I was feeling.” That’s the whole point. That moment of recognition. That exhale. That “oh thank god, it’s not just me.”

It means the world to us. Every single time.

What We Didn’t See Coming

Stephanie: The vulnerability of it. We are both pretty private people. Sharing our actual lives,our health scares, our job gains/losses, our family stuff. All on the internet, for anyone to read? That was weird. It still is sometimes. But it also needed to be done. Because that vulnerability is exactly what creates connection.

Amy: Building an audience is hard. Genuinely hard. And staying true to our values while we do it. Not chasing algorithms, not compromising what we’re about to go viral. It’s a constant commitment. We’re not going to stop making that commitment. But I won’t pretend it’s easy.

The good stuff that blindsided us? How immediately we found our people.

Messages from women we’ve never met who said “thank goodness you’re here”. Texts from friends who suddenly opened up about things they’d never mentioned before. Topics that had been sitting in silence for years are finally getting airtime.

The loneliness of midlife is real. The community that’s possible once you start talking about it is also real. We’ve gotten to watch that happen in real time, and it’s been something.

What’s Resonating

Two things have hit harder than almost anything else we’ve written.

The first: perimenopause and menopause. The symptoms. The confusion. The way our bodies change in ways nobody warned us about. The frozen shoulders and the brain fog and the dentist visits and all the stuff doctors don’t connect for us. Women are HUNGRY for this information. Still. Even in 2026.

And the grief articles. We wrote about grief and loss, the kind that comes with midlife transitions, the kind that doesn’t always have a name. The response was overwhelming. Women wrote to us saying: I didn’t have words for this until now. That’s everything.

And the community. We keep coming back to community because our readers keep coming back to it too. Sometimes we still get surprised by how much it matters. How much we all need each other. How profoundly isolating midlife can feel, and how quickly that changes when you find your people.

How This Changed Us

Stephanie: I was never a writer. I did not come into this thinking of myself as someone who writes. But something shifted. Now, when something big happens in my life, or something small but heavy, I start writing about it. Just for myself. And I feel better. I process differently now. I understand myself differently. That was not something I expected. It’s been one of the best surprises of this whole thing.

Amy: I came in maybe a little naive, too excited to be scared. Now I feel more vulnerable. But I also feel more determined than ever. And something else: Stephanie and I are even more aligned. Everything that happens to us is potential content because it’s all relevant. We share more with each other, and ultimately with you. We’re building something together, and that’s changed us both.

Here’s what six months of Spill the Midlife Tea has taught us, above everything else:

This matters. The conversations happening in the quiet, in doctors’ offices where women get dismissed, in homes where women are suffering symptoms they can’t name, in careers and identities and empty nests and aging parents and all of it. Those conversations deserve to be louder.

To You

If you’ve been here since the beginning, thank you. You took a chance on two women you didn’t know, talking about things that don’t always get talked about. You are the reason we kept going on the hard days.

If you’re new here: welcome. Pull up a chair. We’ve got a lot to talk about.

Six months in. Still figuring it out. Still showing up. Still spilling.

Midlife is not for the faint of heart. But it is, it turns out, a lot better when you’re not doing it alone.

With so much love,

—Amy & Stephanie

Your Turn

We want to hear from you. What’s the moment you felt most seen by something we wrote? What topic do you want us to go deeper on in the next six months?

Subscribe. Join us. Please.

Subscribe now

Leave a comment

It’s what happens when the calendar hits late May and suddenly everything is due, graduating, moving, ending, beginning, or requiring your presence with a dish to pass. It has the emotional weight of December with none of the twinkle lights.

For Amy, this May meant a college graduation, family flooding in, dorm moveout, a cross-country move to coordinate, a vacation to leave for, and work and volunteer commitments that didn’t pause for any of it. For Stephanie, it’s the familiar whirlwind of school wrap-up season with finals, end-of-year activities, and the divide-and-conquer chaos that somehow still exists even when your kids are older.

You know the feeling. Everything is happening at once, and you are running in every direction to meet it.

Here’s What’s Different Now

In our 30s, we had one speed: go. We were on the hamster wheel constantly, always in fight-or-flight, and we just stayed there. It was exhausting, but it was familiar. Our bodies adapted to the load, or at least they stopped complaining loudly about it.

That’s not what’s happening now.

Now, when the stress hits, we can feel the shift. Because we’re no longer running at that baseline level of overdrive, our bodies notice when we cross back into that territory, and they push back. Hard.

Stephanie wakes up at 3 a.m. running through her to-do list. Amy starts talking a mile a minute, like she’s trying to fit everything in before the window closes. And then there’s the stuff we didn’t immediately connect to stress: the inflammation showing up in labwork, the anxiety that didn’t used to be there, the inability to concentrate through a crunch the way we once could.

The recovery time has changed too. It used to be a day or two to bounce back. Now? Stephanie is tired for days. Amy isn’t sure because she hasn’t made it to recovery time yet.

Perimenopause Isn’t Helping

Of course, none of this is happening in a vacuum.

Stress and perimenopause are not separate stories. They are deeply, frustratingly tangled. Stress amplifies anxiety. It tanks sleep. It throws gasoline on symptoms that might otherwise be manageable.

When your cortisol is elevated and your estrogen is shifting, your body has a message, and it’s not subtle: This is enough. We can’t take anymore.

The tired-and-wired feeling so many of us know? That’s not a personality trait. That’s a nervous system that has been asked to do too much for too long without adequate recovery, and that was true before perimenopause made everything louder.

What’s Actually Working

We’ve tried a lot of things. Here’s the real report.

What’s stuck: Movement. For Stephanie, the gym has been a non-negotiable for 20 years. Even her husband could tell within a few missed days by her mood alone. For Amy, it’s walking and sauna, though she has to fight for the time to do them. Pickleball and mahjong have also made the list, not because they’re wellness habits exactly, but because joy and community turn out to be genuinely restorative. Who knew fun was medicine?

What hasn’t: Meditation (Amy cannot quiet her mind long enough, the to-do list follows her in). Heavy weight lifting (Stephanie knows it’s good for her bones and brain, but cardio is what actually changes her mood).

The unconventional method both of us are endorsing: Chocolate. We’re not taking questions.

The Boundary Era

Here’s something we’ve both been learning, at different speeds and with varying degrees of grace:

You have to stop tolerating things that cost you more than they give.

For Stephanie, this arrived as a lot of said no’s. Years of people-pleasing, finally unwound. At first it felt bad. Now it feels like a non-negotiable. There’s a limited amount of energy available, and she’s done spending it on people who don’t return it.

Amy is still working on it. But she’s noticed something: when you do disappoint someone to protect your own capacity, most people actually understand. A lot of what we’ve treated as high-stakes obligations turns out to be less immovable than we made it in our heads.

What would we tell our 40-year-old selves?

Stephanie: Take care of yourself. You are the only one who will put yourself first. Just do it!

Amy: Not much is as important as we make it out to be in our heads.

Joy and Grief at the Same Time

One more thing about Maycember:

On top of everything else, some of us are carrying something heavier. Amy is watching her kid graduate from college and move across the country. It is a proud, beautiful, wanted thing. It is also a grief. Those two things are both true at the same time, and holding them simultaneously while managing all the logistics and keeping up with work and remembering to drink water is its own kind of exhausting.

Midlife stress isn’t just about the to-do list. It’s the to-do list plus the identity shift plus the empty nest plus the aging parents plus the perimenopause symptoms plus the quiet, relentless question of who am I becoming and am I okay?

We think midlife women are uniquely bad at asking for help with this. Partly because our baselines are so high we’ve stopped recognizing the load as abnormal. Partly because we were raised to handle it. Partly because we’re genuinely not sure anyone will show up if we ask.

Some of us are getting better at it. Slowly. Imperfectly.

Your Turn

What does Maycember look like for you this year? What’s the thing that’s quietly pushing you over the edge?

And more importantly: what’s one thing you’ve given yourself permission to stop doing, or start doing, to protect your energy this season?

Hit reply or drop a comment. We read every single one.

We’re tired too. We’re in this with you.

—Amy & Stephanie

Subscribe now

Leave a comment

Because the last few weeks, we’ve been sitting in the heavy stuff. Intentionally. Grief is real, midlife grief is real, and we meant every word we wrote. We’re not sorry we went there.

But this week? This week we need to talk about joy.

Pure, unfiltered, no-agenda, nowhere-to-be, nobody-needs-anything-from-us joy.

Because a few weeks ago we had a day. That kind of day. The kind you don’t plan for and can’t manufacture and only happens when the right people end up in the right place at the right time.

And we spilled so much midlife tea that it completely filled our cups.

What Happens When You Just... Show Up

Picture this: a gorgeous day just outside Austin. A group of women we have known made up of some new friends, and some older friends. No kids. No spouses. No pets. No to-do lists. No one needing anything from anyone.

Just us.

Coffee first. Then lunch. Then drinks. Then dinner. Then more drinks and cupcakes too. Then that magical part of the night where nobody wants to leave and nobody does and you just keep going.

We laughed until we cried. We cried until we laughed. We talked about things that don’t come up in a 30 minute coffee catch-up. The past. The future. The stuff we don’t say out loud enough.

We got to be. Fully, completely, unhurriedly be.

And here’s what we realized: we didn’t know how starved we were for it until we had it.

The Friends We Made in Midlife

The friends we have gathered in our 40s and 50s. They are something else.

We didn’t grow up together. We didn’t go to college together. We didn’t really raise our kids with many of them. We don’t have decades of shared history baked in from childhood. These are women we met in the last ten years through neighborhoods, jobs, kids’ activities, random connections, PURE LUCK.

The depth. The ease. The knowing of each other.

At one point during the day, someone brought up what it would have been like to know each other back then. Whether in college, in high school, in our 20s. We went around imagining it. Showing each other who we were. The version of ourselves before life happened. Before midlife happened.

And there was something bittersweet and beautiful about it. We can’t go back. But we also wouldn’t trade the women sitting at that table. The ones we’ve become, the ones who found each other exactly when we needed to, for anything.

The friendships you make in midlife are underrated. Wildly underrated.

There’s a specific kind of intimacy that comes from meeting someone when you already know yourself a little. When you’re past the performance of your 20s. When you’re showing up as the real, imperfect, figuring it out version.

These women know us now. And now is actually pretty great.

The Question That Changed Everything

Stephanie: At some point during the evening, someone posed a question to the table.

If you could live anywhere, anywhere in the world, where would it be?

And we went around. And it was glorious. People named places that sound like a dream: sun-drenched coastal towns, European cities with cobblestone streets, somewhere warm and slow and beautiful where the pace of life matches the pace you actually want to live at.

We got dreamy. We got specific. We talked about views and weather and food and what it would feel like to wake up there.

But as we went further around the table, the answers started to change. Not in the location. In the why.

What kept coming up, what everyone kept circling back to, wasn’t a place. It was a feeling.

Close to each other.

That’s what we actually wanted. Not just anywhere beautiful. Anywhere beautiful together.

A cul-de-sac. (Okay, that was my specific dream, and I’m standing by it.) All of us, close enough to walk to each other’s doors. Close enough to share a bottle of wine on short notice. Close enough that proximity itself becomes the luxury.

There were tears. Real ones. Because in that moment we all recognized the same thing at the same time. It’s the people. It has always been the people. The place is just the backdrop.

What a Day Like This Actually Does

Amy: I’ve been thinking about why that day felt so different. So necessary.

Part of it is the uninterrupted time. The kind of conversation you can only have when nobody’s phone alarm is going off in 20 minutes. When you’re not watching the clock. When there’s no next thing.

Part of it is the permission. Permission to just exist without producing anything, managing anything, or being needed by anyone.

But mostly? It’s what happens when you let people really see you.

We talked about things that don’t fit in normal life. Dreams that feel embarrassing to say out loud. Fears you don’t want to burden anyone with. The version of yourself you’re still becoming.

And nobody flinched. Nobody changed the subject. Everyone leaned in. That’s the thing about the right people. They make you feel less alone in your own story.

We talk a lot about midlife as a season of loss, the grief of what’s changing, what’s ending, what’s different now. And that’s all real. But days like this one are the other side of that coin. The part we don’t say enough.

Midlife is also when you finally know who your people are. When you stop wasting time on relationships that drain you and start pouring into the ones that fill you. When you have enough life behind you to know what actually matters.

And what actually matters is this. Women sitting outside on a beautiful day, laughing until their faces hurt, talking until the night gets late, not wanting it to end.

The Thing About Joy

We’ve spent a few weeks talking about grief. And we’ll probably go back to the heavy stuff again, because that’s real life and we don’t look away from it.

But here’s what we want to say today. Joy is not the absence of hard things. Joy is what you find in the middle of them.

It doesn’t require perfect circumstances. It doesn’t require everything to be figured out or resolved or healed. It just requires showing up. Being present. Letting people in. It requires a day outside with women who make you feel like the best version of yourself.

And when you find that? When you stumble into that kind of day, that kind of moment, that kind of fullness? You don’t take it for granted. Not at this age. Not after the grief. Not after everything. You sit in it. You drink it in. You let it fill your cup all the way to the top.

And then you write a newsletter about it so everyone else knows this is possible. This is available. This is what midlife can look like on its best days.

The Drive Home

On the way home, we didn’t have to say it.

Both of us have uprooted our lives. Different cities. Different chapters. Decisions that weren’t easy and didn’t come with guarantees. The kind of moves that make you wonder, for a while, if you did the right thing.

And sitting in that car, after that day, with the kind of quiet that only comes after a really full day with really good people. We both felt it. At the same time. Without a word. Look what we built.

Not the houses. Not the careers. Not any of the things you can put on a list. The people. The community. The life that showed up around us because we showed up for it.

You uproot yourself and you hope. You trust. You do the scary thing and you build from scratch and some days you wonder if it was worth it. And then you have a day like that one. And you know. It was worth it. All of it. Every bit of it.

Your Turn

We want to hear from you.

When did you last have a day like this, a day of pure, unscheduled, no-agenda joy? What did it look like?

What fills your cup? Not what should fill it, but what actually does?

Tell us. Hit reply or drop it in the comments. We read every single one.

Because this community isn’t just about surviving midlife. It’s about finding the joy in it. And sharing it with each other.

With love,

---Amy & Stephanie

Subscribe now

Leave a comment

Not the hot flashes. Not the brain fog. Not the way your body suddenly requires three days of recovery after one glass of wine.

We’re (still) talking about grief.

Not the kind that comes with a funeral or a formal ending. The quieter kind. The kind that sneaks up on you when you’re standing in the grocery store or watching a younger mom wrangle a toddler in the parking lot and you feel this sudden, inexplicable ache in your chest.

The grief of the life you thought you’d have by now.

Here’s the thing nobody tells you: by midlife, you’ve accumulated a lot of it. The friendships that faded. The career that zigged when you thought it would zag. The version of yourself you were so sure you’d be. The kids who grew up faster than anyone warned you they would. The body that just... changed.

Neither of our lives turned out exactly the way we planned. And we mean that literally and figuratively. We both ended up in Austin, a city neither of us had mapped out for ourselves. We both left behind the lives we thought we were building. We both had to start over in ways we never anticipated.

And that’s not a failure. That’s just life doing what life does.

But we don’t talk about it enough. So today, we are.

Stephanie: On Luck, Grief, and the Things Nobody Told You About Adulthood

When I look at my life as a whole, really look at it, I am very damn lucky. The general shape of it, the family, the life I’ve built, the people in it, isn’t too far off from what I always dreamed it would be. The details are different, sure. But the bones? Pretty close.

And I think that’s worth saying out loud, because a lot of midlife grief content skips straight to the hard stuff. So let’s acknowledge it: some of us got pretty close to what we wanted. And we can hold that with gratitude and still grieve the parts that went sideways. Both things are true.

But here’s the thing I genuinely did not see coming: how hard it all is.

Not in a dark way. In a “why did no one mention this” way.

When I was younger, I watched the adults around me and assumed they had it figured out. They seemed certain. Capable. Like they knew things I didn’t. I thought that’s what growing up felt like you just arrived at knowing.

Friend, you do not arrive. There is no arrival. Adulting is hard. Parenting is hard. Working is hard. All of it, in ways I genuinely wasn’t prepared for. And there are blessings woven through all of it too. Enormous, overwhelming blessings. But the challenges? Real. And nobody handed me a manual.

That gap between what I expected and what I found, that’s its own kind of grief.

The Friendships

Some friendships fade and you make peace with it. Others just stop. One day the calls are gone and you’re not sure when or why. And the work friendships, the people you spent more waking hours with than your own family, who vanish the moment the job ends? That one stings in a way nobody warns you about.

Because you’re not just grieving the person. You’re grieving the era. The version of yourself that existed in that friendship. That’s a real loss.

The Kids Growing Up

This one I was not prepared for. At all.

The little people who used to run to you like you were the only thing that mattered in the entire world are now just... people. With their own lives and opinions and sense of who they are. Which is beautiful. That’s the goal. And it is still grief.

But here’s the grief that snuck up on me in midlife, the one I wasn’t expecting. Now that I have more time to reflect, I find myself looking back and keeping score on myself. I wish I hadn’t yelled as much. I wish I’d been more patient. Less stressed. More present. I replay moments and think: I could have done that differently.

My kids are beyond amazing. I am so proud of them I could just scream. And yet here I am, still kicking myself. Did I do this right? If I had done that differently, would we be even closer? Would things be easier for them? I know I’m not alone in this. But I also know it’s not healthy and it’s something I’m actively working to let go of.

That grief? It needs to stop. We were doing the best we could with what we had. The energy, the knowledge, the bandwidth we had at the time. Being hard on your past self for not knowing what you only know now isn’t accountability. It’s just cruelty with a softer name. And we’re working on letting it go. Both things, recognizing it and releasing it, have to happen together.

The Body

Can we also talk about grieving our bodies? Because I think we don’t name this one enough.

Our bodies don’t feel the way they used to. They don’t look the way they used to. Things that were easy are harder now. Things that were automatic require intention. And that’s before you factor in any actual health challenges that may have come up along the way.

That is a loss. A real one. And it deserves to be grieved, not just managed or optimized or powered through.

You’re allowed to miss the version of your body that didn’t require this much attention. That’s not vanity. That’s just honesty.

What Grief Actually Looks Like (For Me)

Here’s what I’ve learned, naming it helps.

For a long time I was just... feeling things. Sad sometimes. Wistful sometimes. A low hum of something I couldn’t quite identify. And then at some point I started calling it what it was. Grief.

And something shifted when I did that.

When you call it grief, you give yourself permission to feel it. You stop trying to logic your way out of it or remind yourself how lucky you are or push it down because other people have it worse. You just let it be what it is. A loss. Something worth mourning, even if no one else can see it.

You sit with it until it passes. Because it does pass. Not all at once, and not forever. But it moves through you when you let it.

Whether it’s a job, a friendship, a season of life with your kids, or just the body you used to live in, giving it the name of grief is what makes it possible to actually process it.

You’re entitled to these feelings. That’s not weakness. That’s being a human being who has lived enough life to have things worth missing.

But Here’s the Other Side

And you know what? The surprises that went the other way are real too.

Having a family. Building independence. Creating a life that actually feels like yours. The blank slate that midlife quietly hands you. I could not have imagined this. I genuinely could not have imagined it.

This new freedom. The permission to finally ask: what do I actually want? Not what does everyone need from me, not what am I supposed to want, but what do I, actually, want?

That question is available to us now in a way it wasn’t before. And that is nothing short of extraordinary.

I thought by now I’d have it all figured out. And I can tell you with complete confidence: I absolutely do not. Not even close.

And I am happy living each day anyway. Maybe because of it.

Amy: On Relocating, Reinventing, and the Life That Wasn’t in the Plan

I never thought I would live anywhere but Chicago.

That was the plan. The assumed plan. The plan that was so obvious I never even said it out loud, because why would I? Of course I’d be in Chicago. My friends were there. My family was there. My whole sense of who I was and where I belonged was rooted in that city.

And then life had different ideas.

When we relocated to Austin, it forced me out of the life I knew and into something I had to build from scratch. New city. New friends. New jobs. A completely different version of what daily life looked like.

And I want to be honest with you: I grieved that. I grieved it quietly, and sometimes not so quietly, and sometimes in therapy, which is the only reason I can articulate it now.

The Things I Thought Would Be Different

I thought my girls would be very close. That was just assumed too. I had a sister — we fought, sure, but it felt like a particular kind of fighting, the kind where you always find your way back. I assumed my girls would have that.

They’re just very different people. They process the world differently. They process each other differently. And watching that unfold, not being able to fix it, not being able to make them into the siblings I imagined they’d be? Well, that’s a grief I’m still sitting with. I’ll leave the details there, because some things aren’t mine to share publicly. But the feeling? I imagine some of you know it.

I also thought I’d have a big career. The kind where you stay with one company for decades, build something, become someone known for something. That’s not how it went. The relocation scrambled all of it. And I’ve had to make peace with the fact that the career I have now looks nothing like the one I mapped out, and also that I’m genuinely excited about what I’m building.

Both things are true. That’s the whole thing, right? Both things are always true.

How I Actually Sit With Grief (Spoiler: Not Well, At First)

I am a huge avoider.

There. I said it.

Most of my life my default move has been to throw myself into something else. Work, mostly. If I was busy enough, I didn’t have to feel it. That strategy served me terribly, by the way. Not recommended.

Therapy has helped. A lot. It’s given me language for things I was feeling but couldn’t name, and it’s helped me understand that avoidance isn’t the same as moving on. It’s just... postponing.

I’m working on it. I bought a journal. It’s sitting across the room staring at me right now. We have a complicated relationship. But I see it. And someday I’ll open it. That counts as progress, I think.

What I’ve learned the hard way is that there’s no shame in mourning the losses. None. It’s not weakness. It’s not ingratitude. It’s actually a part of healing. You can’t move forward from something you haven’t let yourself feel.

What’s Surprised Me on the Other Side

Here’s what I didn’t plan for: I’m really happy here.

I have made friends in Austin who feel like family. The kind of friendships I didn’t know you could build in your 50s but apparently you can, and apparently they can be just as real as the ones you’ve had for decades.

My girls stayed close for college and still got to be on their own and grow.

That wasn’t the outcome I feared when everything felt uncertain. It was better.

I’m starting a new, big job with a local company that I’m genuinely excited about. And we’re building this community, Spill the Midlife Tea, which is filling my cup in a way I didn’t anticipate.

I thought by now life would be easy. Almost on autopilot. That’s what I imagined adulthood looked like from the outside when I was younger, people who had arrived, who weren’t still figuring it out.

But that isn’t real life. And I do believe now: if we aren’t growing, we aren’t really living.

The plan was Chicago. The reality is Austin, and new friends, and a new chapter that I couldn’t have written for myself because I didn’t have the imagination for it yet.

What We Both Want You to Know

Nobody’s life turns out the way they planned. Nobody’s.

There are always twists. Some small, like the career that went sideways, the friendship that faded, the city you ended up in instead of the one you imagined. Some big, like the health diagnosis, the losses, the ending you didn’t see coming. Some literal, like you actually end up somewhere completely different from where you started.

And that’s also what’s kind of incredible about life, when you can get far enough from the hard parts to see it clearly. You never know what’s coming. The best things that have ever happened to us were not in the plan.

So yes, grieve the parts that went differently than you hoped. Name it. Sit with it. Give it the weight it deserves.

And then look around at the life you actually built.

It’s not the one you planned. But it’s yours.

Your Turn

We know we’re not the only ones carrying this.

What’s the thing you’ve had to grieve in midlife that surprised you? The one you didn’t expect to feel so much about?

Is it a friendship? A version of yourself? The way your kids grew up faster than you were ready for? Your body? A dream that quietly dissolved somewhere along the way? A city you left behind?

And has anything turned out better than you planned? We want to hear that too.

Hit reply or drop a comment. Every story matters here. Especially the ones we don’t talk about enough.

With love and a healthy amount of feelings,

— Stephanie & Amy

P.S. We’re spending all of May on the grief nobody talks about. This is just one room in a much bigger house. We’re going through all of it. Together.

Subscribe now

Leave a comment

Stephanie: Twelve years as in-house legal counsel at a private equity firm. There almost from the beginning. Never complained, never missed a beat, left family vacations to close deals.

Amy: Eight years building and leading a customer success organization at a SaaS company. Started before the acquisitions, watched four other teams fold into hers, built a team of 15 people who trusted her completely.

Both of us left those jobs in the last year or so.

And we’re going to tell you what that was actually like. Not the LinkedIn version. The real one.

The Day It Ended

The endings were different. But they both left a mark.

Stephanie: In twelve years, I had never raised an issue, never complained, never brought a problem to management. I was loyal in the way that women of our generation were taught to be loyal, with everything, quietly, indefinitely. The day I finally spoke up was, I realize now, my last real day there. I didn’t know it at the time. That’s the part that still sits wrong.

Amy: Mine was abrupt too, but the feelings were more complicated. I was shocked. And then, almost immediately, I was relieved, because as much as I loved my team, I had been miserable for a long time. A few days later the anger came in. It’s still there, honestly, when I let myself think about the way they handled it. Unprofessionally. After eight years.

My husband told me that once I stopped working there, he liked me again.

That sentence hurt to hear. And also, he wasn’t wrong.

The Identity Part Nobody Talks About

Here’s what we didn’t fully understand until it was gone: the job wasn’t just a job. It was a significant piece of who we were.

Stephanie had been a lawyer for 25 years. She had literally never not worked. Her youngest daughter was four years old when she started at that firm. The math on that is staggering. More than a decade of her family’s life, her children’s childhoods, her own sense of self, all threaded through that place.

Amy led with her title. She was proud of it. Proud of the company, proud of what she’d built, proud of the team she’d grown. When someone asked what she did and she had no current answer, the first time she said “unplanned/forced retirement” out loud, making it a joke before anyone else could, that was the moment it became real.

Neither of us had a clean answer to the question who are you now?

And that question, it turns out, is not a small one.

We Handled It Completely Differently

This is where our stories diverge. And we think that matters, because there’s no one right way to grieve a career.

Amy didn’t really grieve it. She celebrated the exit, or tried to. She was too angry to grieve. She played pickleball. She played mahjong. She walked. She discovered, maybe for the first time in years, that she had hobbies, or at least the bandwidth to find some. She eventually took a part-time job at a clothing store just to have somewhere to be. She was lonely in a way she hadn’t expected. Not sad about the job. Lonely because the job had been her community, her structure, her entire daily world.

Stephanie was in shock. The kind of shock that doesn’t fully lift for a while. What made it harder to process: they never fired her. Never asked her to leave. But the day she voiced her complaints, the tone changed. Her responsibilities were quietly stripped away. The message was clear, even if no one said it out loud. Another job offer came quickly and pressed her to start. So she did, because that’s what you do, because stopping felt impossible, because who was she if she wasn’t working? She is still processing it, eleven months later. She still dreams about that place. Sometimes good dreams. Sometimes bad.

How can I miss it, she asked herself, when they treated me so poorly?

That question is grief doing exactly what grief does.

What It Cost Us (The Part We’re Only Now Reckoning With)

This is the section that was hardest to write.

Stephanie left family vacations to close deals. The stress made her physically sick. She was less present for her kids than she wanted to be. Not because she didn’t love them, but because the job demanded everything and she had been conditioned to give it.

Amy wasn’t a nice person during those last years. She knows that now. She was unhappy, deeply so, in a way she couldn’t fully name while she was in it. She was resentful of being undervalued, of being treated as less than she was worth. And that resentment came home with her. Her husband felt it. Her family felt it.

Both of us gave those jobs more than they deserved. More than they ever gave back.

And the version of loyalty we’d been taught, work hard, keep your head down, give everything, and you will be taken care of, turned out to be a story that wasn’t true. Not for us. Not for a lot of women.

When Stephanie finally said, after five years without a raise or recognition: I haven’t been compensated fairly, the response she got back was: Why didn’t you ask?

Twelve years. And that was the answer.

What We Know Now

Amy knows she needs boundaries. Not as a buzzword, as a practice. No job will put her first, and she’s made peace with that. But she is going to put herself first. She recently started a new role, negotiated to keep it part-time, and protected what matters. The job works for her life now, not the other way around. Oh, and also, what goes around, comes around.

Stephanie knows she will never stay silent again when something isn’t right. The old operating system, stay quiet, work hard, trust that loyalty will be reciprocated, is gone. What replaced it is something sharper and more honest: nobody is looking out for you but you, so you had better start.

Both of us are grateful for what those jobs gave us. Real skills. Real growth. Amy built something, a team, a function, a culture, that she’s proud of. Stephanie practiced law for 25 years and became formidable at it. Those things are real and they belong to us, regardless of how it ended.

But we are also, finally, honest about the cost.

Where We Are Now

Spill the Midlife Tea exists, in part, because of these job losses. Not despite them.

Amy needed something that was hers. Not a company’s, not a title’s, not contingent on someone else’s decision about her value. This community is that.

Stephanie needed somewhere to put the things she’d been carrying quietly for too long. This is that too.

We started this because we were building toward something, yes. But we were also, honestly, healing from something. And we’ve found that those two things can be the same project.

As we were preparing this article, we asked ourselves to finish this sentence honestly. We’ll leave you with both answers because we think they’ll land differently depending on where you are.

Stephanie: I thought losing that job meant I was facing a change so big I wasn’t sure I could handle it. What it actually meant was, time to move on. Better things are coming. And I will never again stay quiet when I’m being treated poorly.

Amy: I thought losing that job meant I was losing everything. What it actually meant was, I am now free to do what I want to do, on my terms.

Your Turn

We know we’re not the only ones who have been here.

Lost a job or left one, and then stood in the quiet wondering who you were without it. Performed okay-ness for everyone around you while something underneath was shifting. Grieved a role that wasn’t even good for you, because it was still yours.

If that’s you, past or present, we want to hear it.

What did the job cost you that you’re only now starting to name? And what did losing it, eventually, give you back?

Hit reply or drop a comment. Every story matters here.

With honesty and a lot of hard-won perspective,

— Amy & Stephanie

P.S. We’re spending all of May on the grief nobody talks about. Career grief is just one room in a much bigger house. We’re going through all of it.

Subscribe now

Leave a comment

I’ve known this day was coming for four years. I’ve planned for it, paid for it, cheered for it. And now that it’s actually here, I find myself doing something I didn’t entirely expect: grieving it.

Not because anything went wrong. Because almost everything went right.

The Moment I Keep Coming Back To

Jamie was in preschool. It was the first week of drop-off, the transition from the mommy-and-me class where I sat on a tiny chair and pretended to be helpful, to the version where they actually wanted me to leave.

She was apprehensive about me going. So was I, honestly.

I was gone maybe an hour and a half. When I came back to pick her up, most of the moms had gathered outside the classroom. But the kids had moved to the gym for the end of class, so we waited.

And then they started rounding the corner.

First came a set of twins. Their mom was running late — just a few minutes, nothing dramatic — but those kids were hysterical. Completely undone by her absence, and I tried really hard not to be judgemental.

And then came Jamie.

Strolling out. Chatting with her friends. Relaxed and happy and completely fine.

She didn’t even see me at first. And then she did.

And she broke into a run and flew into my arms.

She was fine without me. And she was so happy I was back.

I didn’t know it then, but I’ve been holding onto that moment for twenty years because it said everything. She was okay on her own. And she still wanted me. Both things. At the same time.

That’s been the whole job, hasn’t it?

The Grief Nobody Warned Us About

We talk a lot about the grief of perimenopause; how the body changes, the identity shifts, the season of life that’s closing behind us whether we’re ready or not.

But this one? The graduation grief? Nobody really warned me about this either.

It doesn’t feel like loss in the way we usually talk about loss. Jamie is healthy. She’s thriving. She has a whole life in front of her that I cannot wait to watch unfold. There’s so much pride in this moment that it almost drowns out everything else.

Almost.

Because underneath the pride, there’s something quieter. A tenderness that’s hard to name. The particular ache of watching a chapter end that you loved. Even the hard parts of it. Especially the hard parts of it.

I’m grieving the little girl who ran into my arms in that school hallway.

I’m grieving the version of myself who was needed so completely, so constantly, that I sometimes forgot where she ended and I began.

I’m grieving the season where my most important job was also the most obvious one: show up, be there, don’t be late to pickup.

And I know, I know, that this next chapter is going to be beautiful. For her and for me. But knowing that doesn’t make the grief smaller. It just makes it more complicated.

What Relief Actually Looks Like

Here’s the thing I feel a little guilty admitting: there’s relief in this too.

Relief that she made it. College wasn’t easy for her, or for us, and watching her cross that finish line is going to feel like exhaling after holding my breath for four years.

Relief that she found her people, her path, her sense of who she actually is, which is something you hope for your kids but can’t engineer for them.

And yes, okay, some relief about the tuition situation. I’m not a saint.

But the relief I feel most is the hardest one to explain. It’s the relief of knowing the goal worked. That the preschool drop-off moment wasn’t a one-time thing. That she has, in fact, grown into someone who can stroll out of the gym with her friends, happy and confident and okay.

She doesn’t need me the same way she used to. And that was always, always the goal.

Both Things Are True

This is what midlife keeps teaching us, in topic after topic, emotion after emotion: it’s not either/or. It’s both/and.

You can be wildly proud and genuinely sad. You can feel relief and loss in the same breath. You can celebrate the chapter that’s starting and mourn the one that’s ending. You can be so glad your daughter is fine without you and also wish, just for a second, that she still needed you to stay.

The grief doesn’t mean something went wrong.

Sometimes the grief is the proof that something went right. That it mattered. That you loved the season fully enough to feel its ending.

And if that’s what’s sitting in your chest right now, not just about a graduation, but about any door that’s closing in your midlife, you’re not being dramatic. You’re being human.

We’re Going Here All Month

This is the first of several pieces we’re writing in May about grief in midlife. Not the kind with funeral programs and casseroles, though that grief is real too, and we’ll get there.

The quieter kind. The kind that lives in transitions. In empty bedrooms and changed job titles and friendships that drifted and identities we outgrew and roles we played so hard for so long that we forgot they weren’t permanent.

Because we’ve noticed something: when women finally name this grief out loud (not just the hot flashes and the hormone panels, but this) something shifts. The loneliness of it breaks open a little. And underneath? There’s almost always hope.

Not the toxic-positive kind. The real kind. The kind that comes from actually sitting with the loss instead of skipping past it.

We’re not skipping past it this month.

Your Turn

Are you in a season of transition right now? A graduation, an empty nest, a career change, a relationship that shifted, a version of yourself you’re letting go of?

What are you grieving? And what, if anything, are you starting to hope for on the other side?

Hit reply or drop a comment. We read every single one.

And if you’re not ready to put it into words yet, that’s okay too. Sometimes just knowing someone else is feeling it is enough.

We’re feeling it right here.

With love (and a lot of feelings),

— Amy

Leave a comment

Subscribe now

Not all at once. Not in a moment I can point to. More like a slow shift, the way the light changes in a room without you noticing until suddenly it’s different and you can’t remember when it happened.

There’s more quiet in my life now. The kids are more independent. The noise that used to fill every corner of every day has gradually, steadily pulled back. And in that space, in that quiet I didn’t even realize I’d been waiting for, I’ve started to actually hear myself think.

I’m not sure I knew how much I needed that until I had it.

When Did We Stop Having Time to Think?

There was always something the last few decades. A role to fill, a deadline to meet, a person to take care of. We were so deep inside the doing and the managing that there was genuinely no space to ask the bigger questions like who am I, separate from all of this, and what do I actually want?

I hadn’t asked. Not really. There was never time. I’m not sure I was ready. Some things need distance before you can look at them clearly. Midlife has a way of handing you that distance whether you ask for it or not. The noise quiets. The roles loosen. And suddenly you’re left with something you haven’t had in years. Yourself.

Learning to Sit With It

I won’t pretend the quiet was entirely comfortable at first. There’s a reason we stay busy. Busy means you don’t have to sit with the things you’ve been outrunning. The old wounds, the regrets, the questions about who you are when you strip away the roles you’ve been playing.

But I’ve been sitting with it. Slowly, imperfectly. Processing things I never had space to process. Figuring out what I actually want this next chapter to look like. Figuring out who I actually am. It’s uncomfortable work. It’s also the most interesting thing I’ve done in years.

And Then Something Unexpected Happened

I just spent a week back in St. Louis, and it was one of those weeks that gave me more than I expected.

The week was a mix of dear friends from law school. Friends I’ve known since elementary school. Women I met and bonded with instantly when our kids were babies. The ones who showed up at your door and just got it, no explanation needed. And my cousin, who is really more like a sister, who was in town and stayed with me for a few days.

Different eras of my life, all in the same week. And something about that was unexpectedly clarifying.

There was also an unexpected moment I’m still sitting with. I ran into people I used to work with. I hadn’t seen them since my last day in the office almost a year ago. I walked past a building that holds a lot of years of my life. Seeing those faces, the warmth was immediate. All the good came flooding back for a second. And then, quietly, a sting. A reminder that some chapters don’t close the way you hoped they would. I thought I’d processed more of that than I apparently have. Still more to sit with. And that’s okay.

I went in feeling pretty good about the internal work I’d been doing. The thinking. The processing. The slow, quiet excavation of self.

And then I sat across from people who have known me for decades. The ones who were there, who saw me before I became any of the things I’ve spent the last twenty years being. Something clicked into place that I hadn’t expected.

They filled in gaps I didn’t even know were there.

What You Can’t See Alone

There are things you can only learn about yourself from someone who knew you when.

Not because they’re smarter than you, or because they have some special insight you lack. But because they were standing at a different angle. They saw the version of you that you were living too close to see clearly.

Talking with my cousin, going back through old stories/memories, asking questions about our grandparents and where we came from, I kept having these small moments of recognition. Oh. That’s why I’m like that. I never put those two things together before.

Or a friend would say something offhand. A memory, an observation, a small detail, and it would land like a piece of a puzzle I’d been working on alone, in the quiet, for months.

That’s what people who knew you when can do. They don’t just reflect you back to yourself. They add context you couldn’t have gotten any other way. They make the picture more complete.

You can do a lot of inner work alone. But there are some gaps that only other people can fill.

This Is What Midlife Can Be

I don’t think we talk enough about this part.

We are starting to talk about hard stuff. The hormones, the body changes, the identity questions, the grief of seasons ending. And all of that is real and worth talking about.

But there’s this other thing that midlife offers, if you’re willing to receive it. Space. Time. Permission to finally go inward in a way you couldn’t before. The chance to actually know yourself, maybe even for the first time.

And when you’re doing that work, and you find yourself in the company of people who carry your history, people who can hand you pieces of yourself you didn’t know you’d lost, it’s something.

It’s really something.

I came home from this week more myself than I went. Not because anything dramatic happened. But because the quiet work I’ve been doing got a little richer, a little more textured, a little more complete.

Some of it was warm. Some of it stung a little. All of it was necessary.

And I think that’s what this season is for, if we let it be.

Your Turn

Have you noticed more quiet in your life lately, more space to actually think? What are you doing with it?

Is there something from earlier in your life that you’re finally having the time and distance to process?

And have you had the experience of an old friend handing you a piece of yourself you didn’t know you were missing? A conversation that filled in a gap you couldn’t have filled alone?

-Stephanie

Subscribe now

Leave a comment