I was on my way to the store for cotton balls and paper bowls, reason enough in this claustrophobic age of COVID, to venture out. I was just putting on my coat when my phone sounded a new text message. It was my niece, Hanna. She wanted to know if she could call me in a few minutes to discuss something. Of course. I wondered what was wrong. Was it a problem with her daughter’s first week at school? Maybe another health scare for her dad? It turned out not to be about my great niece or my brother. Instead, she was worried that she was starting to go through pre-menopause. She was only forty-two and wanted some validation, it seemed, from a genuine old person. I assured her that she had called the right place. Next, I tried to convince her, in my most forceful yet nurturing feminist voice, that childbearing is but a small, brief aspect of who she is as a woman. Still, she said, she was saddened by the possibility, as if this were the beginning of the end. I told her that once we give birth, our job of letting go begins. We are preparing ourselves for something greater. And she was poised at that precipice, ready to begin and enjoy the full flower of her womanhood.

Did I believe these things? You bet your ass I did. But apparently I wasn’t very good at propagating them. My niece had a single child, now eight years old, whose life she had spent the better part of a decade overseeing. Now I was telling her it wasn’t important. But of course that’s not what I meant. I meant that she had a lot of good years left and a lot to accomplish beyond the act of procreating. After all, any loser can create a baby. What’s important is what follows, being the kind of woman that any daughter would admire and hope to emulate.

She said she felt she was running out of time, but she didn’t know for what. No, I insisted, this is your time. Whatever you want to do or be, now is the time to do it. Was I just an empty bag of platitudes? What had I done since giving birth some forty years ago? There was no question I’d done some things that I thought were spectacular in my life. I’d travelled the world,  written books, fallen in love, and started my own nonprofit to make a difference in the world. I couldn’t complain. Yes, I thought, I wasn’t just giving lip service. I really believed what I said.

And though I might embrace these ideas, it was pretty clear that society as a whole did not. Hence her sense of mourning. I couldn’t discount the way that she felt. Losing the capability to reproduce, though not the end of life, was the end of an era. And it had been a joy-filled era. I wouldn’t trade my own daughter’s beginnings for anything in the world. But it was also a limiting and burdensome era. One could only exist on mommy-hugs for so long. And, in my estimation, eighteen to twenty years was just about the right length of time to be tethered. Beyond that, motherhood was a life-long journey and one worth taking. But at some point, a woman wants and deserves more.

Ideally, I suppose, a young woman would sow her wild oats before marriage and children come along but it doesn’t always work out that way. Too often, we move from carefree childhood to adult responsibilities in the blink of an eye. We meet someone. We fall in love. We get married. Voila! There it is. The beginning of having obligations and mortgages and children to raise. And there is profound satisfaction to be had during these years, to be sure, but no more flying-by-the-seat-of-your-pants fun. No more blue horizons. No more endless possibilities. We suddenly feel that our lives are charted out from here to the grave. I will be a mom and then a grandma. I will be a spouse and then a widow. I will do what I’m supposed to do from here on out.

But au contraire! We mustn’t waste those middle years, those in between wiping little noses and minding the grandkids. That is our time to soar. So many women I have met feel unneeded and under-valued once their kids are in school and starting to experience the beginnings of an independent life. Friends. The mall. Basketball practice. This is the stuff of youthful exuberance. And none of it requires mom. Except possibly for a ride to said events.

And what of all the women who have chosen or been destined not to have children? We all wind up one day with a life to fill up. We can either sit on the couch and watch soap operas or we can take the world by the horns. I recommend the latter.

Hanna, it seemed, was not just experiencing a change in the tidal flow of her life. She was on the verge of that full-on midlife crisis that overtakes us all at a certain point. It should be noted that most men are to a large extent exempt from this passage. Or, if they go through it at all, they choose to cope by having affairs and buying sports cars. Women, on the other hand, are faced with the exigency to fully reinvent themselves.

My hopes for Hanna were expansive. She could finally take time to turn her lifelong love of animals in a new direction. She could go back to school and turn it into a career. She could engage in meaningful volunteer work for some worthwhile cause. Or she could choose to see something of the world that had as yet been hidden from her as the child of a small town. She could go on gambling junkets and anthropological digs and bigfoot expeditions. I hoped she would realize and act on the new reality of the world being her oyster. I firmly believed that the biggest mistake in life is to waste time. We often hear how life is short and, believe me, as a woman of a certain age, I can attest to the logic of that truism.

So it would remain to be seen how Hanna would fill up her best years. As the crazy aunt, I could only sit back and watch. But I hoped it would be sensational and important and audacious. I hoped she would find the wisdom to act authentically.

As for myself, I went back to the task at hand. Bringing home those paper bowls and cotton balls. It occurred to me that people in the store probably saw an older woman dithering around the paper goods aisle comparing prices of the premium brands versus the store brands. They saw someone with a bum hip and a few too many pounds. They saw someone who spent way too much time in the cat toy section. They saw someone who they didn’t really see. I was, I thought with probably too much pride, an author and a traveler and a thinker of outrageous thoughts about human nature and race and justice. I was a person who planned trips around UFO sightings and who had long conversations with her dogs. I was a person who had made being different into a science and who had suffered for her art. I was an individual. But I was also, by virtue of my age, a person unremarkable and anonymous.

Perhaps I could invite Hanna along on my next crazy adventure, be it a trip to Chaco Canyon to see the ruins or a run down to Vegas to try my luck. But no, I thought. I had my own daughter to relate to and encourage. I had my own interests and priorities. I had my own problems. I hoped Hanna would find her way among the false gods of should-ness and appearances. I hoped she would thrive. And, truly, after all of my diatribe, I didn’t have all the answers after all. She would have to find them in her own time, in her own way.

Linda Caradine is a Portland Oregon based writer whose work has appeared in numerous literary journals including The RavensPerch, Summerset Review, Free State Review, Cobalt Review, Adelaide, Drunk Monkeys, 45th Parallel, and others. Her first book, a memoir, is scheduled for publication in April 2023.