Out of the Dark …

It’s been a few weeks since my husband purchased curly willow branches at the local grocery store’s flower shop. And for weeks, I glanced at twisty branches going up and up to the ceiling, a mere silhouette in my mind’s eye. They drank water, but slowly. Yesterday, I locked my eyes on it for no particular reason. The new green was so evident, so unlike the twisty brown branches, I don’t know how I didn’t see it before. I pulled the branches out, and the vase was full of new roots. I stared at it, and I saw … me, and frankly, many other women in their midlife space. I’m there with you in that dark chrysalis—a place where I thought that everything that had grown and meant to grow, already had.

It is often men who show up with an expensive car, a boat, or some ridiculously priced power tools, start running shirtless (not a good look in most cases), or get a mistress, when midlife finds them unawares. Not women. Something emerges inside us, something that had gone dormant while our whole person was preoccupied with childbearing and child-rearing, housekeeping, and sometimes building careers.

Dormant, not dead.

And then, seemingly out of nowhere, perhaps from the deepest recesses of our memory, our whole person, it (whatever it is) grows.

New. Green. Vibrant.

It makes sense, the most life-altering event in a woman’s life is not what comes from the outside, but what emerges from within us—another human being. It is only fitting that our transformation is internal first and foremost. We dream again, we plan again, we prepare for Act II. After all, it is not a caterpillar that emerges from the chrysalis but a butterfly. Take to the skies, my friends.