All you need is

What's holding us back? Also: Weekend dinner outfit and my new favorite past time.

Hi Midlifers:

The following is a metaphor (metaphor?) for my entire approach to life:

A group text arrived earlier in the week from a mom of one of the 7 (or 8?) boys my son lives with off campus at Penn State to start planning a party at the house over graduation weekend.

The mom who is spearheading the event shared that her family would bring a folding table and cornhole boards, along with a platter of sandwiches, cups and plastic tableware, topped off by cookies and homemade pasta salad.

Texts from other moms offering everything from a tent to tamales to tequila began to pop up and I started to rack my brain to come up with something to add to the ever growing menu of party platters.

Then I unlocked in my brain what I think is the ultimate party move: a platter of Chick-fil-A nuggets. I mean, showing up with a mound of those is a real power move.

But then, I got sidetracked. I started Googling catering options at the Penn State Chick-fil-A . I tried calling the soon-to-be-graduate to ask him what he thought but he didn’t pick up even though I could see he was at home. I thought about calling his older sister for validation but stalked her location and saw she was at the office.

And then I got distracted by doing actual work for my job.

A little while later, another text arrived from a family who will be bringing more cornhole boards, folding table, fruit and veggies and A CHICK-FIL-A PLATTER.

Eventually, after even more googling, I discovered I could get a platter of mozzarella sticks from Wegman’s and when I finally spoke with my daughter and told her the story, she said, “Yeah, that’s okay. But showing up with Chick-fil-A would have been baller.”

Friends, this is a parable for my life (PARABLE not METAPHOR).

Over the course of almost SIX decades, I have had some really clever ideas. Maybe one a decade? Hard to quantify. In fact, hard to even remember what any of them were.

In the mid-Aughts, I was enamored with the writings of some moms on the internet telling their very real (and often funny) stories and really wanted to jump of the new “blog” bandwagon. But, what would I call it? And, how did you even start? The details for getting it off the ground felt like a giant obstacle. And then on a spring break with another family, I mentioned I wanted to start a blog and the other dad we were with was like, “You’re going to be a BLOGGER?”

And then I realized how dumb that was and let the really strong urge I had to share my stories about parenting young kids fizzle and finally arrived on the blogging scene along with every other jabrony and got lost in a sea of mommy voices.

And then during my tumultuous divorce a few years later, I found solace in Bikram yoga and had the idea of writing a memoir based on the 26 poses I’d cycle through during each 90-minute very-hot class. I’d done some experimental writing and came up with ideas to match a pose to my life and talked about it a lot. But I never fully pursued writing the actual book. And then in 20212, I saw another writer had published the same memoir, Poser.

Listen, I don’t need my therapist to diagnosis “fear” as the culprit here. Maybe there’s also a side of “low self-esteem.” And that all comes from a bunch of hidden wells deep inside me that I’m only just beginning to understand.

I’ve been thinking about all this a lot after bingeing the HULU series “Dying for Sex” last week. In it, a 40-something woman is diagnosed with stage 4 breast cancer and immediately leaves her broken marriage and goes on a sexual journey and ends up healing the trauma from her past. But in the end, it is way less about sex than it is about finding your voice and living the life that you want to live and figuring out how to love yourself. And friendship. That’s a huge piece of it, too.

Personally, I am not interested in embarking on a sexual journey. At least not right now. But I am super invested in finding my voice and living a life that feels authentic to me. And I’m also not interested in watiting until I get some terrible diagnosis to start making those things a reality.

I don’t think I’m alone. I think a lot of us Midlifers are finding ourselves in the In-Between — smack dab in the middle of two chapters. The one we’re just emerging from saw us in the throes of raising our families. Doing all the things we were supposed to do. Consumed by the lives of our children as we ushered them through high school and college and slowly, gently, launched them out into the world.

And now we have this whole new chapter staring at us. There are so many blank pages waiting for us to fill in. And in this chapter, we get to be the main character.

Boardwalk life advice.

The other morning, I started my walk down the boardwalk and saw that someone had written, “All you need is,” with an arrow pointing toward the ocean. And maybe that’s the truth, too.

Re-reading all this, I see that I have made the leap from chicken nuggets to sex and stage 4 breast cancer to existential angst and finding meaning in life.

But I think where I’m going with this is that I’m discovering who I want to be, after a lifetime of wanting to be who other people needed me to be. Does that make sense?

I look around. I read. I watch shows. And I see pieces of things I want in my life. Deep friendship. The freedom to say what I mean and mean what I say. Showing up for a party carrying a tray of Chick-fil-A nuggets. Maybe an apartment in Manhattan. I dunno. These are things I’m thinking about.

What about you? Are you standing in between chapters? Or have you made the leap and started to write a new story?

Please share. :) Tell me us how to do it. LOL

Signs of spring on Jersey Shore

In other news, spring is springing here on the Jersey Shore. This week, walking around town, I saw all signs pointing toward warmer days. The town turned the sprays back on in the middle of the lake separating my town from its neighbor. The Little Free Libraries are back on the boardwalk.

I take almost as many pics of her as I do of my dog.

And the lilacs that I pass on my morning march are just perfect right now. I always stop to press my nose right into those lavender petals and breathe deeply and wait for their fragrance to hit my brain, and then I make a silly sound to my dog and act like I just won the lottery. It never gets old. In fact, there won’t be time. In a week, they’ll be withering and no longer giving off that scent.

Stop and smell them while you can and think of the jackpot you just won.

shoes: Nordstrom/jeans: Mother Hustler/sweater: Old Navy/blazer: Uniqlo

What I wore to dinner

I went out to dinner last night with my girlfriend, Kelly (hi, Kelly!) and threw on that Uniqlo blazer I bought a while back and just have to say I loved it. It’s def finding its way into my suitcase to go to Paris. Want to know what else I’m packing (or thinking about packing?)? I wrote about it in this week’s The Weekend Log.

What I’m watching

Okay, John Hamm. I’ll watch.

I did not want to like this show because I’ve got a beef with Hamm after seeing a pic of him and his wife. She’s so young. It was so annoying. However, despite the personal gripe with the actor, his new show on AppleTV, “Your Friends & Neighbors,” is much better than I expected. More complex. Also, fun. Fine. Watch it.

WTF, The Last of Us?

Are we really supposed to keep watching after last week’s INSANE episode? My older son, who’s played the game, assures me it will be okay. “Stick with it,” he texted earlier this week. I guess?

Way more than sex.

As stated above, this show is about so much more than sex. But it also does have a ton of sex, or sexy and inappropriate content. It’s probably not for everyone.

Ding. Dong.

Um, there exists in this weird world a doorbell you can press to let a fish inside some canal in the Netherlands to lay eggs. You can learn all about it here and just start watching for fish here. It might be my new favorite past time. So much healthier than the news right now.

That’s a wrap

As always, if you have a second to click the little heart below or even comment to say hi, I would be so grateful. The algorithm gods will gobble it up and (perhaps) keep pushing me up the Substack ranks.

See you next Sunday,

xoAmy