Letting Go Stage of Life

For so much of my life until this point, I was in the learning, growing, and maturing phases of life. I was trying out new things, scrambling to meet responsibilities with kids, and adding to my knowledge of the world and myself. Then I went through a huge phase of deconstruction when my faith and then my marriage both ended in a few years of each other. I’ve felt at a loss since then, trying to figure out when my old life of chasing new things was going to come back. It occurred to me this weekend that maybe I’m going to be doing a lot less of that as I age and a lot more of letting go.

I had heard of “empty nesting,” but of course I didn’t think it would apply to me. I had this delusion that I would just be so happy to have so much alone time, after 30 years of being constantly with my children. There are a few classes on parenting when your kids are small, but so far I haven’t seen any on letting go during the empty nesting stage. But it’s a key component of being the parent of adult children. They don’t need you anymore. And it’s really important for them to not need you anymore. (Even if they do sometimes still need you—don’t bring up that this is the case, just keep your mouth shut and do what they need without strings like asking them to call you regularly in return.)

But it’s more than that. This is mid-life, but I think it’s not a crisis for me. I think I’m learning to accept that the “cure” to hitting 50 isn’t to try really hard to be young and relevant again, to try to prove to myself that actually, I can still achieve all my broken dreams, that I matter and that the future will remember my accomplishments when I’m dead and gone. It’s to accept that I am slowly letting go of the delusion that I matter in the course of human history, and that this isn’t something to be sad about or to fight. It’s something to embrace. I don’t matter to anyone and that means I can matter only to myself. There is a joy in this realization, and a blessed freedom that I don’t think I could have seen before right now.

I am soon to be the last standing generation. My father is gone, and my mother is becoming frail. She’s the Energizer Bunny and she’s giving me a look at what I can hope for in the best case scenario, with her feisty fight to stay alive and to live her best life now that she has her own full freedom. I hope I embrace the end of my life as well as she does. I am finally starting to see that she is me, or as good a look at the future me as I’m ever likely to get. And she has embraced the kinds of problems that other people might find embarrassing. She is not embarrassed. She shrugs and thinks it’s silly to be embarrassed about growing old. Damn, she is still teaching me, when I let her.

I am letting go of who I used to be, that image of myself I clung to, the Mormon writer who would show all America who the “Shakespeares and Miltons” of our culture could be. I don’t need to prove myself to my former community anymore. I don’t need to scramble in the difficult dance of approval from both sides, national and religious. I don’t need to make younger Mette proud of me. She was who she was and I honor her, but I do not need to do what she thought I should do. I am new Mette and I have new goals. She might think they are small and desperately pitiful, but I do not. I want to be happy and live a “small” life in obscurity. I want to be myself, and this final journey of discovery is truly an exciting one. When you have no one else to please but yourself, there are some beautiful (and sometimes painfully beautiful) truths that you see in yourself. Some were there all along, and others are new. Yes, there are new things sometimes, even in the letting go stage of life.

I have let go of old friends, and found, to my surprise, that some old friends I thought would leave me didn’t. I value them more than ever. I have found new friends, but I also understand that it doesn’t mean that there is something wrong with me if friends come and go. It’s part of this letting go part of life. It is the rise and fall of the seasons, in human terms. I am sad and I grieve, and those feelings do not kill me. They hurt and then they soften.

New happiness rises, and sometimes I am angry at this reminder that even letting go does not mean the end of everything. It is a messy time of life in its own way, not the same way as it was in my twenties, but still. It is not what I thought this time would be, and part of me is angry that no one told me. But it’s possible they did try to tell me, and I would not listen. It’s also possible they did not know how to explain it to me, because the words for it are difficult and if  you do not know the bitter-sweetness of the falling side of life, I am not sure that I can explain it to you. You will always believe that it won’t be that way for you. Because you are scared of endings. I am learning not to be scared of endings.