Five Midlife Decisions Ahead of Time

I read a quote that stopped me in my tracks, it said, “Ten years from now, you’d give anything to be this age again, this healthy, this cute, and have this time again. Go do something that makes you proud of yourself today.” If you’re a mom whose children are starting to become more independent, you might be wondering what life will look like ten years from now. It can be hard to imagine when you’ve lost yourself in mothering. But if you’re interested in still finding purpose,  maybe it's overcoming loneliness, or setting yourself up for success with coping with empty nest syndrome, and embracing life to thrive after children leave, then you’re going to love this episode.” 

Stevie Nicks said it best… “well i’ve been afraid of changin’ / cause I built my life around you / but time makes you bolder / even children get older / and I’m getting older too…”

These lyrics speak to my soul. They did even when my kids were young. I can remember imagining how hard it would be to be at that place where your kids are no longer in your day to day, and it made me feel kind of melancholy.

But lately I’ve been thinking about the line “time makes you bolder.” Is that actually true? And if so, what does that look like?

How can time make us bolder? Has this actually been true  Or has the opposite been true? Can you think of someone you admire who time made them bolder and you look up to how they approached their second and third acts of their life? 

I know for me, For so long, my kids have become the main characters in my life. Have you done this too? My days revolved around their schedules, their needs, and my brain space was completely occupied with what I needed to help them learn, their worries were my worries. I wouldn’t change any of that, but now - it’s time to be the main character of my own life again, but not knowing where to start feels scary. 

Many women feel overwhelmed with this shift that comes at midlife, this second act. 

Some good news a mom I greatly look up to shared with me, and I want to share it with you: if you have successfully launched other good humans into the world, you’re probably more capable than you know - you are highly capable, - and you can successfully launch yourself into this new chapter. 

Thought number one: I can give the same loving care and attention I gave to my children, to myself, and now is the time to do that. 

What we want to do is give ourselves the same loving care and careful attention we gave our children, which may feel foreign, it may feel cringy even, especially if you compartmentalized your own needs for the sake of your kids. But midlife is the time to decide you are worthy of care and attention and nurturing and you get to go all in on this.

Moms have superpowers they’ve developed over the years, when they’ve made their kids the main characters. If you were to sit down and write a list of the skills you’ve acquired from your mothering: things like driving kids to their numerous activities, being responsible, making sure they were fed, had clothes and a nice room, I’m betting that’s where your mind will go - but I want to invite you to look at it through the lens of superpowers: think of it like this: you took really good care of your children, you gave it a lot of thought, you put your heart and soul into it. 

The same responsible feeling you felt for making sure they were thriving can shift into being responsible for yourself. 

• Did you always make sure they were on time to school in the morning and they learned to follow through with their commitments? Now, you can create commitments to yourself and make sure you follow through with them the way you made sure your kids did. If school became hard for your kids, you got them the help they needed. You didn’t just let them give up or quit on themselves. And same goes for yourself. 

• In the beginning, were you the one who got your kids up in the mornings, made sure they had a routine so they could face their day prepared? Did you go to their Parent Teacher Conferences? Did you put bandaids on their skinned knees? Did you teach them how to have hard conversations with friends and how to learn new skills and how to not be afraid to try new things like an art class, a dance class, a new sport?

• How can you give that same kind of loving care and attention to yourself now? Because guess what?! You can. You get to do that now. It’s no different. If one of your kids were to come up to you and tell you they are having a hard time adjusting to junior high and they need help figuring out how to make the most of it, would you put your brain to work and your heart to work and help them figure it out? Or with high school? And same with you with midlife. 

If you’ve raised other humans, you’ve got experience and gifts to give back to yourself now and to the world. Do not discount those traits you’ve acquired. Transfer those skills and those traits to you. You get to be the main character. This is not selfish. This is beautiful. And your kids will admire you and look up to you when they see you respecting yourself and showing them what growth and thriving look like in midlife. 

It’s okay if you feel a little overlooked or struggling to feel your place in the world again now that you’re no longer mothering full-time. 

The first half of your life was just the warm-up in the best of ways. You still have a full life to live. This is your time. How are you going to spend it? Feel all the feels, and then decide ahead of time, decide now how you want the next chapters to look. 

And so, one of my favorite tools to help me be the hero of my own story is to believe new things are possible, believe new things I haven’t believed before. 

We do this with our kids all the time, right? If a kid comes up to us and says:

• Junior high is the worst. My hormones are raging and my friends are drama.
• It’s too late for me to become good at it, everyone else is so much better…

I bet you’d have a lot you’d want to say to your kid if they were saying that to you. 

And the same thing is true for ourselves. Be onto yourself with what your brain is telling you. 

And one of the things I’ve noticed a lot of us believe about midlife, some of the common beliefs I hear:

• Midlife is hard because it’s a time where women become invisible.
• Perimenopause is hard, I’ll never feel as good as I did before.
• It’s too late, if I haven’t done it yet, I’lll never do it.

Some of these thoughts we’ve absorbed as just fact, we may have heard them from people we admire and we may not even realize that those thoughts are just some people’s experience, but they aren’t everyone’s experience, and so that means they are optional. But maybe We think they're an observation of reality. 

Some of those thoughts I’m playing with and trying on, and I’m turning them upside down,  playing with believing new things are possible about midlife, things I haven’t believed before. I’m trying them on right now, and I’ll tell you it’s a lot more fun!   - kind of like how we try on clothes to see if it fits right, if it feels good, we can do the same with thoughts. 

I want to be the hero of my own story. I want my kids to see my doing that in a sincere, genuine way, with effort and purpose. And you can too.

Thought number two is your relationship with your grown kids is just going to get better and better. Your ability to love your children as they get older, and their spouses as they come into your life, could just improve and grow, over time. How much we love our kids does not depend on their choices. It depends on our capacity to love, how capable we are of loving people even when they disappoint us. I see myself getting better and better at my capacity to love my children as they continue to grow into their own, because I’ve seen this to be the case in other areas, and so I want to apply it to my grown children, and really visualize myself being the person who is loving and grounded.

If I can believe my capacity to love is just going to improve and get better and better with time, if I can visualize myself being a person who loves big, then I’m going to see that my Love is not going to be about telling my kids what to do. My Love is going to look different. There’s going to be a lot more trust than there has been when they were little. 

Sometimes we’ll choose to be disappointed in our young adults children’s choices. But often, The disappointment comes from the script we’ve made up about our kids and how our kids should follow the script we wrote for them. 

I used to be in plays and musicals when I was younger. Perhaps that is the only time it is appropriate for humans to follow a script, when you’re in a play on a stage, or a musical and someone has written your lines for you and you are playing a part. Otherwise, life doesn’t follow a script. 

If you can only be happy if your kids follow your script you’ve made up for them, if your grown kids make good choices, or if they marry good people who fit into your family, then it’s going to be really hard to be happy. 

And your capacity to love your kids is going to be really small.

We want our capacity to get bigger as we get older, not smaller.

So you’ll want to increase your capacity to love and trust. 

I have to challenge my own script I subconsciously wrote, because it’s there. Maybe your script sounds a little like mine? 

I actually wrote down my script for each child that I’ve been operating from, and I don’t know where I learned this script, but I did. For example, my boys are going to graduate seminary, they are going to go on missions for my church for two years, they are going to come home super spiritual, spiritual giants, they are going to marry sweethearts of wives who are like daughters to me and those daughter-in-laws are going to love me like their own mom, maybe even more than their own mom! Haha, and they are going to have the cutest babies, and I’m going to get to plan all these fun family holidays and vacations and sunday dinners with my adult kids and their families, and they are going to love me and look up to me and I’m going to be my grandchildren’s favorite grandma. 

Wow Danielle. That’s quite a script. What happens to my happiness if it doesn’t turn out this way? 

Well I’ve already decided. I’m deciding ahead of time that my love is going to look different. I’m deciding I can trust them to write their own script and I can still love them, in fact I can get on board and love them even more and I can let fear dissipate. Here’s what I know, and maybe you know this too: God wants even more than I do for my kids to grow and learn the things they need to learn, and so I can turn it over. I can trust their path is going to be their path. 

I can pray for God to show me where to step in or step back, and I can trust that this is going to get clearer with practice, and my relationship with my grown kids is just going to get better and better. 

One big reason I can trust is because I really believe in this favorite prayer I’ve adopted years back, I want to share it with you. It goes like this: “God, I need you to transform my parenting to be what this child needs at this time. As you tell me how to show up, I promise I’ll follow your lead.” That is my favorite motherhood prayer of all time. You might want to write that down and adopt it for yourself. I’ll say it again: “God, I need you to transform my parenting to be what this child needs at this time. As you tell me how to show up, I promise I’ll follow your lead.” 

Because your relationship with your grown kids is just going to get better and better.

Number Three: A great midlife is determined by the dreams in my heart I commit to, but not necessarily arrive at. 

A big part of the fun of life is anticipation and working towards something we don’t currently have. For me, it’s reach and impact with my coaching work, as well as making music as a singer/songwriter and sharing that with people and seeing how happy they become. I have dreams in my heart of how many people I want to reach and how much of an impact I want to make with the work I do, both in coaching and as a music teacher with my music studio, with this podcast, and with my own singer/songwriter work. 

I’ve recently set higher goals for myself and I’ve carved out the weekly hours to put the time in to nurture and work towards those dreams in my heart. But I’m not super set on hitting those numbers as much as I am committed to working consistently and showing up for them. 

I’ve learned that when we pay attention to our potential, we light up and it can feel expansive and create excitement. If we shut down our potential, all kinds of mental health problems can bubble up. Our belief in what we can create and what the future holds can make our current circumstances more fun, more enjoyable. We thrive when we’re able to cultivate some anticipation and some potential in ourselves. 

So setting goals at this time in your life matters. And in some ways, it is about giving yourself permission to reinvent yourself and say yes to those dreams in your heart that you put aside while prioritizing your children. 

I chose to put my singer/songwriter career on hold when my children were in their older grade school years and junior high. There is a big gap in my time in the studio as a recording artist. I have no regrets about that. I went all in on being a mom and I knew I needed to do that for my own reasons. It’s not what everyone else should do. But now, I’m feeling a pull, a calling and an urgency almost, to get back into the studio. And the cool thing is, as I’ve learned to trust the timing of things as I’ve learned to partner with God on that, now my own daughter is a music production and sound engineer, she’s got this skill set that she’s excited to utilize, and I never knew that was going to open up for me when my kids were younger. 

But my point is, midlife is a great time to say yes to yourself, if you didn’t do it before. You get to say yes, now. 

If you’ve waited to set goals for yourself, you might feel a little rusty. Remember that feeling we all can relate to, when you were younger, and school was about to let out, and the thought of summer break ahead? Remember how it used to feel a little scary to think of a whole day or week with no plans…. But then it becomes fun with some intention. Did you let your summers happen to you? Did you learn how to make summers more intentional? 

I like the example of when school gets out and you have a whole summer to look forward to. The anticipation of summer, the anticipation of the free time, and the carefree feeling is often where the magic is. Not in the actual calendar itself, but in the imagination and the anticipation of what summer can be like. That’s where the magic and the fun is.

And that’s what is possible for all of us as we enter midlife. It’s not necessarily the goals that we commit to, but the anticipation of what we hope to learn and how we’ll grow along the way. 

Midlife is the time to Listen to yourself now. The more you listen to those inner stirrings, the less you listen to others. Your unique voice, she want’s to come forth and be heard. She has dreams in her heart. You have the time now. Don’t distract yourself or buffer yourself away from you, the real you. 

Number Four, growing older is a blessing. Yes, there are some hard things that come with it too. I don’t turn a blind eye to those things, but for the sake of focusing on what I want to grow in this time in my life, I prefer focusing on what a blessing it is to have made it to the age I am, to get to see what I get to see in my children’s lives, to get to see - on a spiritual note - some of the prophecies I’ve read about growing up as a little girl being fulfilled from the scriptures, I find all of these things to be exciting. 

I hear a lot, from both my younger adult clients, and my older clients, how scary the world is becoming. And believe me, I’m familiar with the scary prophecies too…. There are things happening on a macro level that are not my favorite, that bring up a lot of uncertainty and it can be hard to know what to plan for when the world is heading in a direction that feels scary. 

But two things can be equally true. It can be true that the world is changing in scary ways AND the world is evolving toward a better outcome. And as I grow older and see these things unfold, what a blessing it is to be a witness of it. 

If growing older is inevitable, we might as well consider it a blessing and not argue with it. Here’s the thing - and I’ve taught you this before, maybe you’ve heard me say this before - choose your hard: There’s the hard of fighting against growing older. Or there’s the hard of growing older inevitably, and owning that along with its discomfort there is growth. Either choice has its own version of hard. So if you’re going to choose which version of hard you’re going to operate from moving forward, why not choose the hard that comes from the blessing of growing versus the hard of feeling like you're stagnating and not going anywhere? 

And I would offer, when people say, “do I have to choose, I don’t want to…”  they don’t want to choose, that by not choosing, you’ve already made a choice. You’re choosing to ignore or you’re choosing to take the reins on what is inevitable anyway. 

But the real reason why we want to choose to see getting older as a blessing is that it keeps us operating from a place of alignment with our purpose for being alive, which is to make the most of the time we’ve been given. And so there’s something so beautiful about viewing getting older as a blessing, and not wasting our time we have. Time is a precious thing. It’s the only thing we can’t get back. If we lose money, we can always make it back. But if we lose time, it’s gone. I saw that with losing my mom at a young age, not getting to see her grow old, and feeling like I was robbed of getting to go through life with her, not getting to enjoy her. My kids, they get to see me get older, and I am a blessing to them. So viewing the time we have as a blessing will motivate us to continue to grow, to create, to contribute, and to make the world a better place than we found it with the time we have left. When we say yes to that, we feel more alive and more excited.

Number five: It’s my job to build my own community, and that can look however I want it to. 

Dealing with loneliness in life after kids can be tackled by creating successful partnerships and collaborations, whether in a business endeavor, friendship circles, artistic outlets and community, walking or tennis or yoga circles, maybe you have a friend or a group of friends you travel well with. I’ve found this to be true in the last couple years, and my brain is alive with all the places I’d love to visit with certain friends whom we travel well together. I didn’t know how fun this could be until I tried it. 

Get purposeful about your social connections. A groundbreaking Harvard Research Study found that happiness as we navigate all of life’s challenges with aging is highly correlated with the number of your social connections. 

I hear often, and I’ve said it myself, it’s easier to make friends when you’re young. What if that is just a made-up story? What if it’s actually easier, the older we get? It’s worth considering. 

Building your community will take some practice. Practice doesn’t make you perfect, but it does make you competent and confident. When starting out doing something new, whether building a new friendship, taking a new class or starting a new business, things will feel messy, clunky at first, and you will make lots of mistakes. Give yourself grace to be a beginner and keep going anyway. The more you do something, the consistency will build your confidence and competence.

Bonus Thought: Be okay with changing your mind and pivoting along the way. 

You may find your dreams in your heart or your goals have shifted. Be okay with changing your goals as you clarify your values. Maybe you dreamed of building your dream house, but your husband has health challenges and stress would put him over the edge with the building process, it’s okay if your dream changes given the circumstances you’re dealing with. Maybe you dreamed of learning French but instead you learn ASL in order to better help a family member or a friend who has deafness challenges. When it feeds a bigger purpose that also aligns with your heart and your values, that’s when you know you’re on the right path and it’s okay to pivot. 

If you’re committed to making the most of your midlife, to growing into this new chapter, I promise these five thoughts to think will set Future You up for some fulfillment and excitement, and you will be an inspiration to everyone who knows you, they will want to be around you and you will be a magnet of goodness. Trust me, my friends. So all of you go out there and start enjoying your midlife chapter more. 

Ten years from now, you’d give anything to be this age again, this healthy, this cute, and have this time again. Go do something that makes you proud of yourself today.

Alright, that’s what I have for you today. I love you all so much, I feel your love, and I appreciate our Dare Greatly community, seriously the coolest people, so many heroes of their own story here. And I hope you’ll come to the website and join our newsletter and stay tuned for all the good things going on there. 

Let me know if you come up with some midlife thoughts to think that feel good and true and right for you, and let me know how you are practicing believing them. Often I learn as much from you as you do from me and I love that. 

Have a great day.

Take care of each other out there.

See you next time. 💛