Beauty on the Backroads

Stories of grace for life's unexpected turns

regret

How I thought it would be

I had a birthday last week, my 39th. I remember when I turned 29 and then 30, I had this sort of desperate feel to my life. At 29, I was three weeks away from getting married. At 30, I had an almost-two-month-old. These were monumental, life-goal type of events, and I remember feeling like once I hit 30, that was it. Life was over. I was officially old.

Annie Spratt via Unsplash

Almost 10 years later, I laugh at my younger thoughts. At 29, I wanted to cling to my 20s, or the thought of them. They were full of fun and friends and discovery and adventure. For a few years, I would not admit to my real age. I was 29 plus one or something like that.

Now that my 30s are almost behind me, I’m mostly relieved to have survived them. Motherhood to two kids 20 months apart might have been the thing that broke me all on its own but the last decade also saw our marriage crack straight to the center and we’ve spent years repairing the rift. There was grad school (for my husband) and the letting go of what we thought our life might be. There was financial struggle and a move. And while I wouldn’t call our life stable yet (will it ever be?) I don’t feel the same kind of desperation I did back then.

Bear in mind, my life is not really what I thought it would be at 39. I thought we would have our own house by now. I thought I would be some kind of “success” or that as a couple at least one of us would be working in a profession for which we earned degrees. I thought I would feel more like I had it all together. I thought the feeling of desperation, of clinging to the past, to the life I once had, would overwhelm me. I thought maybe I’d have some kind of mid-life crisis. I thought life would be more like the middle-class American dream.

And it’s not that my life doesn’t bear some resemblance to some of those things, but if I told my 29-year-old self what the 39-year-old version of herself would be, she have laughed and dismissed me as a lunatic.

At 39, I know better who I am and what I want, even if it doesn’t make a lot of sense. I’m not longing for the good old days of my 30s because they weren’t all that good. I know I’ll have challenges in the next 10 years (by the time I’m 49, my oldest could be in college–what?!) but all I feel is free and sure and accepting. Yes, there are times I still wish we had a house of our own, that we could measure our success by our professional lives, that our life didn’t sometimes look like failure when compared to others our age.

But I’m not sorry for who I am now, even if I do feel a bit like a late bloomer. At 39, I feel rich in the things that matter most: friends and family, purpose and passion. I ran 1.8 miles on my 39th birthday and I’m prepping for a 5K with my daughter. It is one evidence of health. If you could see inside my mind, there would be a change there, too.

I no longer fear 40. I don’t want to put too much pressure on myself, but I want to make a sort of wish list for my next decade: the things I’d like to do, see, experience, become. Not a bucket list, necessarily, but something that gives some intentionality to my 40s. I feel like my 30s happened to me and I spent a lot of time reacting and playing catchup. I want to set the tone for my 40s. I know I can’t control everything that will happen to me in the next decade and that’s not exactly what I mean. It’s just that I feel more capable of saying ahead of time: This is how I’m going to be, this is the direction I’m going to keep moving, no matter what happens.

Sebastian Molineras via Unsplash

My 30s felt like clawing my way up a hill I desperately wanted to climb only to find myself back at the bottom. The last 10 years drained me mentally, emotionally, physically and at times, I didn’t want to attempt the climb again.

Not so now. In my 40s, I don’t want to see falling as failure, setbacks as stop signs. I want to dig deep and find the grit I know I’ve got inside of me. To give myself grace when things don’t work out like I planned. To look around at the beauty of the moment, even if I’m stuck on a proverbial hillside and the top seems so far away.

Life doesn’t feel as much like a race anymore. It’s more like a stroll. I want to fill my days with beauty and meaning, even if I’m doing things I don’t like. (I’m looking at you housework.)

In my 30s, I thought I had to accomplish a lot of stuff to matter in the world.

Now, I see that my very existence matters in the world, and I want my life to reflect that. I don’t have to get somewhere in life to make a difference. I can make a difference right here, right now. (And making a difference might not look like much. Maybe no one will even notice.)

And I could be wrong about all of it. Maybe my 40s won’t be what I thought. Still, I feel more prepared than ever to face the uncertainties and maybe even welcome the surprises.

When music takes me back in time (and I'm not sure I want to leave the past)

We’d been away from church for a couple of weeks, and I always forget how dry and empty I am when we go through a stretch like that where we’re traveling on Sundays or visiting family. I think it’ll be no big deal and when we’re finally back with our church family it hits me. Then, all of a sudden, I find myself sobbing in the middle of singing. Tears of gratitude to be back. Tears of sorrow at my own pitiful state. Tears of joy because I am safe and there is hope.

I’m learning to never leave home for church without some tissues tucked in my bag because I’m sure to need them if I don’t have them.

So, it was all of those things that had tears streaming down my cheeks at church on Sunday. But it was something else, as well.

It was the songs themselves. And the older I get the more I believe that songs are a portal to another time and place. If a book can sweep me into another time and place, one I’ve never lived, then songs have the same power to connect me with my former self.

Joshua Earle | Creative Commons | via unsplash

Joshua Earle | Creative Commons | via unsplash

Our song time opened with one we sang at church camp, where my husband and I served as staff to high schoolers who were dealing with a lot of the same issues we struggled with as 20-somethings. That song was followed by one that broke me in college, just a year or two after I’d opened my life to Jesus’s leading.

And in an instant I was no longer in the middle of sanctuary in the middle of winter crying with my husband by side and children nearby. I was sweating in a simple chapel in the woods, surrounded by teenagers jumping, shouting, passionately declaring that God was the cry of their heart. I was flat on my face in the basement of a college chapel, undone by my sin and the love of a King who would sacrifice Himself so I could live. I was a girl again, a decade or more younger, with fresh hopes and dreams who couldn’t imagine knowing any other life than one that had Jesus in it.

Snapped back to my present state, I cried again, wondering where that girl had gone. She had no idea what was to come, and had she been given a clue, I think she would have ignored it as impossible. I cried because there are days I want to be that girl again. To believe the best. To still have hope and dreams. To be passionately pursuing the God who changed everything.

And there are days I would never want to be her again because she was so naive and unaware of the world around her. Of the hard realities of life. She knew little about what it means to persevere, to forgive, to endure. Hers was a simple faith that didn’t always ask questions. She was motivated by good behavior and what others thought and her grown-up counterpart wouldn’t trade the faith she has now, as hard as it is, for what she had before.

The girl who sang those songs years ago and the woman who sings them now, they’re one. I cannot be who I am today without that girl from long ago. Even if I sometimes pity her. Even if I sometimes wish it could all be different.

But I can’t go back. I can only go forward. And words like this spur me on:

There is a kind of bravery born from understanding that what lies in front of you is merely the end result of every choice you’ve ever made, and there is nothing left but to follow that path to its end. (Billy Coffey, In the Heart of the Dark Wood, p. 348)

And,

I was learning the secrets of life: that you could become the woman you’d dared to dream of being, but to do so you were going to have to fall in love with your own crazy, ruined self. (Anne Lamott, Small Victories, p. 101)

This is where I find myself when the tears pool and my present self fades. When I remember who I was and compare her to who I am. I am needing to leave the old behind, to follow this path to its end, even if it’s not the path I would have chosen, and accept the pieces of myself that I want to hide and dismiss, those places where I see only wrong and not enough and different.

I want to love my “crazy, ruined self.” The me I was and the me I am now.

This is what I want from the year ahead. This is what I mean when I say I want to be “whole.”

What was the last song that took you back to another time and place?