Welcome to my midlife crisis. Great hair. Love your shoes. I’m halfway to 45, which is halfway to 90, which is… more than any of my grandparents got. So, here I am. Almost 45, staring down the next chapter of my life, and I’ll be honest. I don’t know what the fuck I’m doing. *If you don’t like foul language, kindly take the nearest exit. Because I fucking curse. A lot.*
“It” was supposed to be different. Different, how? I don’t know. But different. I expected to feel settled? Steady? Capable? Fulfilled? Successful? Something. But I didn’t find it; haven’t found it yet. At this point, I don’t even know what I’m looking for, I just know when I find it, I’ll know. Confused yet? Me, too.
I guess what it boils down to is I thought I’d have it all, and instead what I have is a wonderful marriage, the greatest kids ever, a couple of chronic illnesses, a less than notable writing career, and memories of over twenty years coaching youth sports. I’ve done a lot. The list of accomplishments is long and I’m proud of checking off the boxes that five-year-old Caroline made for me. She wanted to be a singing dentist, and while we didn’t make that happen, we made pretty much everything else happen. Five-year-old me Caroline wanted to be a published author. Done! MADE IT HAPPEN. Literally, I made it happen. I self-published through a vanity press in 2008, which I deeply regret, and finally this year, managed to cancel my contracts with them so that if I choose to self-publish again in the future, I can. I learned my lesson after the first two books in a five-book series and switched to CreateSpace. Self-publishing has its bonuses and I guarantee I will do it again, but it did not lead me to anything else. Nothing came of magically publishing books. Sure, people read them. The reviews are great. But like most books in the market, they simply got buried by everything else being published and marketed.
Not loving self-publishing I took to Twitter to make connections and, whoa Nelly, did I ever. I met publishing people! I worked at a small publishing house when it was getting off the ground and I never made a cent. Yippie for experience? This same publishing house gave me several publishing contracts that I knew weren’t the best idea, but having just come from a vanity press, I thought, how much worse can it get. Friends, if you have to ask yourself this, the answer is always, MUCH WORSE. It can get much worse. But that’s OK. Risks must be taken. I took the risk, and I fell flat on my face. I do not blame the publishing house. Though I’m sure I have justifiable grievances, I went in with both eyes wide open, and I knew exactly what I was getting. In my mind I thought, well, at least I’m not shelling out money up front this time. Small press for me, turned out to be self-publishing on somebody else’s schedule. I did not, do not have an agent, and I can’t tell you how dumb of a decision that was. Without anyone to represent me, I’m doing it all myself, and it’s not like I majored in marketing, contracts, or business of any kind. I read Shakespeare in college. I wrote poetry. I had grand visions of writing books and seeing my books on the shelves, but other than that I was wholly unprepared for a profession that feels much more like a fraternity than an actual business model. Who you know matters. Who can help you matters. It just does.
In 2020, the small press dropped me. Yippie for experience?
The other professional goal five-year-old Caroline had was to be a teacher. I was a head classroom teacher for exactly one year and it was, without a doubt, the greatest year ever. My boss told me, at the end of the year, that he’d never not had a complaint about a first-time teacher, but he heard not a word of negativity about me. I was good at this job. Really good. But it didn’t last for many reasons I am so not getting into here, at least for now. Just know continuing would’ve meant teaching my own child, and well, I made a choice.
That choice, as it turned out, was the right one because life was about to kick my ass in ways unimaginable, and had I been trying to teach at the same time, I would’ve broken down even more than I already have. As soon as I gave up my teaching job, my publishing job took off before crashing spectacularly. But at the time, it would’ve been insane to keep juggling the two careers. In the one year that I taught, I published two books, one from my self-pub series, and one from the small press. My brain was fragmented enough. And then life came crashing down.
My dad got sick, died eight months after, and then my mother moved two minutes away from me in the subsequent months. I’m going to talk a lot about this on this blog because this experience was more grown-up than I ever wanted to be. My relationship with the family I was born into is complicated. My father and I, as it turns out, happened to be not speaking when he received his diagnosis. I was told to behave and not cause drama so I could watch him die. Again, I made a choice. I did the dutiful daughter thing. It made my life incredibly hard. I’m not sorry for saying that. Burying parents, carrying of elderly parents, it’s a fucking lot.
While this was happening, my own children were transitioning to their next stages, college and high school. Huge changes were occurring within my own little family, and I barely had time to process any of it. I used to describe to my therapist that I was just treading water. I wasn’t living my life, I was trying to survive it. I am still here, trying to survive.
Only now I’ve added chronic illness to my climb. I’m going to talk about that a lot too. I’ve been diagnosed with Fibromyalgia, and to say that’s made my life infinitely more difficult is the understatement of the century. I am not the same person I once was. I don’t have the energy to be her anymore. I haven’t had her energy in a long, long time. When I think of how just a few years ago I was coaching five basketball teams a season, and now I can barely get through the day without a nap.
I’m having a full-blown midlife crisis. Maybe it’s self-indulgent, but I don’t think so. I’ve settled in for this crisis because life is again about to change dramatically. My youngest is off to college in the fall and then it’ll really just be me and Husband staring at each other. I hate the term empty nest because fuck all if I want to be called empty just because my children aged out of my care. I’m not empty.
I am lost, though. Wander with me?