Confessions of a Middle-Aged Mother

No one ever told me that middle age, and motherhood, would be marked by regret. I didn’t know the “choose your own adventure” of my upper-middle class existence would come to an end sometime in my early 30s, right alongside the arrival of our three children. I didn’t understand that the years of taking new classes and trying out new possible careers—seeking to “fulfill my potential”—had an endpoint. I didn’t know a page would turn, and suddenly the choices I made would become inevitabilities. I didn’t know I would turn around to look at all the other adventures on offer and find that doorways once open were now closed tight.

The 'Year of Wine and Nachos'

We moved to a small town in Connecticut for my husband’s job in 2012, with a six-, four-, and one-year-old in tow. He started as the Head of a local boarding school, while I registered the kids for first grade and preschool, signed up for library cards, and found a pediatrician. I had recently finished a Master of Divinity degree, and I had written two books and started getting invited to speak at conferences. I gave thanks that I had a flexible job that allowed me to show up for my family and work remotely, while still using my gifts in the world. But we moved four times that first year, so my ability to actually write blog posts and essays, much less new books, slid into the crevices of my life, like Cheerios in the panels of the minivan—hard to retrieve, quickly forgotten. Soon, I was easily identifiable as the mother of those three children, and as the wife of the newly appointed Head of School, but not easily identifiable as me, the writer and thinker. Later, I called it the year of wine and nachos. 

As our kids began to grow up, I experienced the delight of our son’s curiosity and budding knowledge of the world. I reveled in our older daughter’s love for books, and our younger daughter’s exuberant approach to everything. I loved being a mom, but I worried that the rest of me was slipping away. I felt a longing for meaningful work in addition to the hours of driving carpool and showing up for the spelling bee and managing annual checkups and cutting the toenails of these three small humans. I could feel myself losing touch with the network of people who might have become thought partners and connections to generative creative opportunities. I was nudging the door shut on obtaining a PhD or becoming a school chaplain. Those closed doors became more obvious when I applied to get another master’s degree and was denied admission, or when I realized PhD programs would require uprooting our family, or when the editors I had worked with moved on to other places, and my opportunities to write seemed to dry up. 

For years, regret felt like grief, as if the life I might have chosen had been taken from me without my knowledge or consent. But I began to realize that regret is as much about limits as it is about loss, and that—with time—those limits might even provoke a sense of wonder and gratitude. 

Motherhood, Meaning, and Happiness

The experience of motherhood is not a story of the American Dream, where everything moves up and to the right on a linear course towards greater and greater achievement and fulfillment. Women looking in from the outside recognize the tension many mothers feel. One study reports that “only 32% of women believe that women who marry and have children live fuller, happier lives.” Still, a recent IFS survey of 3,000 women finds that married mothers are the happiest group of women overall. The researchers note that motherhood decreases loneliness, increases the experience of physical touch, and, “is connected to happiness and well-being through other means, including finding meaning and purpose in life.” 

It is tempting to run after the gods of self-sufficiency and success. [But] when we stop running [and] receive our limits, when we recognize that God has given us more than enough—then we can rest, and even rejoice.

With all my regrets, I am one of those women. Happy. Grateful. Living with a sense of meaning and purpose. But, for me, the happiness that has come from being a married mother did not come quickly or easily. Instead of being able to pursue all my dreams while simultaneously attending our daughter’s soccer games, I had to recognize limits on my time. I couldn’t write a blog post every day (back in the days of the blogosphere) and work on book ideas and start a podcast—and also remain available to help with homework and chat about current events with my 8-year-old over goldfish and clementines. I didn’t have to stop working, but I did need to slow down. I needed to admit my own needs. I needed to let go of an idealized version of my life and accept a life filled with interruptions and detours and unrealized goals.

The Unexpected Joy of Constraints

Two recent books have helped put words to my experience of reckoning with, and eventually receiving, my own human limits as a mother. In The Dignity of Dependence, Leah Libresco Sargeant writes, 

We are called, not to accommodate dependence as a brute, unpleasant fact, but to knit dependence deeply into our understanding of what it means to be a human being. Our ties to others are not an obstacle to self-actualization, they are the foundation for the authentic self. It is in the places we are exposed to the world, our vulnerabilities, that allow us to extend ourselves in love and receive love in return. 

In other words, the very act of slowing down to care for small humans and pay attention to their words and feelings and needs was shaping love in me and calling forth a new understanding of myself as both needy and beloved. 

In a different vein, Tish Harrison Warren’s upcoming What Grows in Weary Lands explores the long slog of midlife, in which we often experience regret and dashed dreams and a sense of languishing. She, too, exhorts us to reckon with, and receive, the limits we’ve been given. In her words, “The confinements of our life are the scaffolding required to learn to love abundantly, because love is patient.”

I’m at the other end of my 40s now, with two teenagers and a 20-year-old. I no longer wallow in the regret I once felt about all these unintentionally closed doors. As I cheer for our kids in a track meet, chop vegetables with our daughter, and field phone calls and text messages about their respective needs and wants, I feel grateful. Yes, I have mourned the loss of identity, of hopes and dreams, of potential careers. At the same time, over those years, I have hiked in the woods and learned to recognize the great blue heron my friend Anne named “Greg.” I have bundled up when it snowed, hugged them tight, and listened to them talk while we drove thousands of miles in circles around Litchfield County as they played soccer and danced ballet and shopped at the mall. 

Over time, I also connected with new thought partners and renewed old relationships in the writing world. I wrote more books and essays and even recently started podcasting. The difference is that I did all of these things more slowly, and with less fanfare, than I had once expected.

I started to believe what Psalm 16 says, that “the boundary lines have fallen for me in pleasant places.” That this life of constraints and missed opportunities is a good one. The Psalmist contrasts the life of boundary lines with the life of those “who run after other gods.” It is tempting to run after the gods of self-sufficiency and success, but, the Psalmist writes, when we are constantly striving, constantly looking for the next open door, our sorrows only increase. When we stop running, when we receive our limits, when we recognize that God has given us enough—more than enough—then we can rest, and even rejoice. My regrets have strangely turned in the direction of rejoicing and learning to love the life I have been given, a life of unexpected boundary lines and delight.

Amy Julia Becker is an award-winning writer and speaker on faith, family, disability, and culture. She is the author of four books, including A Good and Perfect Gift: Faith, Expections, and a Little Girl Named Penny, and she hosts two podcast,"Take the Next Step," and "Reimagining the Good Life."

*Photo credit: Amy Julia Becker (photo by Cloe Poisson)