Tag: family

Nine

Kristine Binder

It has been nine years since I signed the papers that officially ended my marriage. Eleven years since the whole process began. If you had shown the woman I was eleven years ago a picture of my life today and told her, This is where you’re going to end up, I would not have believed you. Actually, I probably would have laughed at you. And depending on what particular day of those eleven years you caught me on, I might have had a few other choice words for you too. But here we are.
Every year when this date rolls around, I think about what I have learned since signing those papers. You would think after nine years I would have this whole post-divorce, rebuilding-a-life thing figured out. Apparently, life did not get that memo. The list of things I continue to learn just keeps getting longer, and this year I think one of the biggest lessons has been that loss comes in so many more forms than I ever understood.
We tend to think about loss as death, and unfortunately I now understand that kind of loss far better than I ever wanted to. But there are so many other losses we don’t really talk about. There is the loss of a marriage and the family you thought you would always have. The loss of the dreams you had for yourself and others. The loss of relationships with people who are still very much alive. The loss of friendships, traditions, jobs, homes, plans, expectations and versions of ourselves we thought would be around forever. Sometimes there isn’t a funeral or a sympathy card or even an acknowledgment that something important has ended. You just wake up one day and realize that something you thought would always be there isn’t anymore.
And grief, as it turns out, is just as creative. Sometimes it arrives exactly when you expect it. Other times it sneaks up on you in the grocery store, on a walk, while driving, or because some song you have heard 847 times suddenly decides that today it is going to destroy you. Grief has absolutely no respect for schedules, plans or the fact that you just put mascara on. Rude.
Recently, I wrote about finally giving my grief a name. I call her Edith. Naming her has helped me understand that grief isn’t something I am going to conquer or eventually leave behind. Edith and I are apparently in this for the long haul, so we are learning how to live together. Some days she sits quietly in the corner and lets me get on with things. Other days she makes herself entirely too comfortable and acts like she owns the place. We didn’t choose each other, but if we’re going to be together, we’re learning to make the best of the arrangement. And maybe that’s another thing these nine years have taught me: not everything we carry has to disappear for us to keep moving forward.
Because loss comes in many forms, grief comes in many forms, but so does joy. So does happiness. And so does peace.
I think for a long time I expected happiness to look big. I thought rebuilding a life meant creating some shiny, fabulous new one that would prove everything had worked out. But some of the happiest parts of my life now are ridiculously ordinary. The sun on my face during a morning walk. Music in my ears. A really good book. Laughing with my kids. A conversation with a stranger I almost didn’t stop to have. Sitting in my own home and realizing how peaceful it feels. Going somewhere by myself and not thinking twice about it. Making plans because I want to make them and changing them because I want to change them.
There is a freedom in that which the woman from eleven years ago couldn’t possibly have understood. And I don’t just mean the freedom that came with signing those papers. That was one kind of freedom, certainly. But there is another kind that has taken me much longer to recognize.
There is a certain freedom that comes with the release of all the expectations attached to the people and relationships you lose along the way.
For much of my life, I carried a lot of ideas about who I was supposed to be. A wife should do this. A mother should do that. A daughter should be this. A friend should be that. This person expects this from me, that person needs that from me, and somewhere in all of those expectations was the person I thought everyone needed me to be. Some of those expectations were spoken. Plenty of them weren’t. And, if we’re being fair, more than a few of them were probably expectations I put on myself and then conveniently blamed on everyone else.
But when relationships change or end, something unexpected can happen. The expectations connected to them begin to fall away too. Sometimes painfully. Sometimes slowly. And sometimes with the surprising realization of, Wait. I don’t have to do that anymore.
There is grief in that. Absolutely. But there can also be freedom.
Freedom to decide what actually matters to me now. Freedom to change my mind. Freedom to stop explaining choices that don’t require an explanation. Freedom to discover who I am when I am no longer trying to fulfill a role someone else assigned me… or one I assigned myself thirty years ago and somehow forgot I was allowed to resign from if I had the wherewithal.
Turns out, there was no exit interview required.
Peace has surprised me even more. I used to think peace came when everything was resolved. When all the questions had answers, all the relationships were repaired, everyone understood one another, apologies were given and received, and all the loose ends were tied into a pretty little bow. Ya know….that big kumbaya moment. Bless my heart. That is not how any of this works.
Sometimes peace is accepting that something will never be resolved. Sometimes it is realizing you don’t need someone else to understand your side of the story. Sometimes it is loving someone from a distance. Sometimes it is finally understanding that closure isn’t something another person hands you. And sometimes peace is simply realizing that you don’t have to attend every argument you’re invited to. That one? Well, it took me far too long to figure that out.
For years I also thought healing was a destination. Surely at some point I would arrive at this magical place called Healed, plant a little flag and be finished. Nine years later, I know better. Healing is messy and incredibly non-linear. It is learning and unlearning, losing and finding, grieving and laughing, moving forward and occasionally discovering that something you thought you dealt with five years ago has apparently been sitting quietly in the corner waiting for another turn. Again, rude.
That is probably why #forwardisapace means even more to me now than it did when I first started saying it. Forward hasn’t always looked impressive. Sometimes I ran. Sometimes I walked. Sometimes I crawled. There were plenty of times I was curled up on the bathroom floor because…well… it seemed safe. And there have been times when I had to go back and pick up a piece of myself I left somewhere along the way. I used to think that meant I was moving backward. Now I know better.
Nine years later, I have a lot more compassion for the woman who signed those papers. I don’t look back at her and wonder why she didn’t know more, do more or figure things out sooner. She knew what she knew at the time. She was doing the best she could with the information, strength and courage she had. She couldn’t have known what the next nine years would bring. Frankly, if someone had handed her the complete itinerary, she might have politely declined the trip.
Because she couldn’t have known about the losses that were coming. But she also couldn’t have known about the joy.
She didn’t know how much she would laugh again. She didn’t know how comfortable she would become in her own company or how fiercely she would learn to protect her peace. She didn’t know how many wonderful people she hadn’t met yet, how many places she hadn’t been, how many things she hadn’t tried, or how many times she would discover that she was capable of something she once thought she couldn’t do. Most of all, she didn’t know that someday she wouldn’t just survive a life she never planned. She would actually LIVE it and LIKE it!
Maybe that is the lesson of nine.
A beautiful life does not have to look anything like the life you originally planned. Joy and grief can exist in the same day, sometimes in the same damn hour. Happiness doesn’t mean you have stopped missing what you lost. Peace doesn’t require every story to have the ending you wanted. Freedom can come from things you chose to leave and, strangely enough, from things you never wanted to lose. And being okay doesn’t mean everything is okay. It just means you have learned that you can carry more than one truth at a time.
Eleven years ago, I couldn’t imagine this life. Nine years ago, I signed my name and walked away from one chapter without having the slightest idea what the next one would look like. Today, I still don’t know exactly what comes next. The difference is that I no longer need to.
There will be more loss because that is the price of loving people and having a life full enough to love things worth losing. There will be more grief. Edith will make sure of that. But there will also be more joy, more laughter, more love, more ridiculous stories, more mornings with the sun on my face, more people I haven’t met yet, more places I haven’t been and more pieces of myself I haven’t discovered.
So today I celebrate nine. Not because everything turned out the way I wanted it to. Good Lord, no. I celebrate because I am here. I am upright and above ground. Because I kept going. Because somewhere along the way I stopped trying to rebuild the life I thought I was supposed to have and started living the one that was actually mine.
If you had told me eleven years ago that this is what my life would look like today, I wouldn’t have believed you.
But here we are.
And I think I’ll stay awhile.

Peace,
#tutulady
#forwardisapace

Edith

Kristine Binder

I Finally Gave My Grief a Name.
I Call Her Edith.
When I first said those words out loud, they felt strange. Almost silly. Why would I name my grief?
The idea actually came from my therapist. She suggested that instead of thinking of grief as something that is me, I could think of it as someone who simply walks alongside me. Someone who has a name, a personality, and even human characteristics. She explained that if grief became a person instead of an emotion, I could begin to have a relationship with it. Some days it might come with me. Some days I might ask it to wait outside. Some days I might leave it at home entirely. The goal wasn’t to get rid of my grief. The goal was to stop believing that grief was who I was.
So, I named her Edith.
I don’t know exactly why I chose that name. Maybe it’s because Edith feels comfortable, like someone I’ve always known. Like a distant relative whose name I heard throughout my childhood but never really knew. Someone who was always there in family stories, yet remained a bit of a mystery. Over time, though, we’ve gotten to know each other. We’ve developed a relationship. It wasn’t exactly the relationship I would have chosen, but apparently Edith wasn’t asking for my opinion.
These days, Edith feels less like a stranger and more like an old sweater. She’s familiar. Comfortable. Soft around the edges. Sometimes I don’t even realize she’s wrapped herself around my shoulders until I stop and notice she’s there. Other days, she sits quietly in the corner, barely asking for my attention at all. She’s old-fashioned, quiet, and wise. She doesn’t demand attention, but she’s never very far away. She also has absolutely no concept of appropriate timing. She’s shown up in the grocery store because I walked past my dad’s favorite cookies, in the middle of a bookstore because I found one I wanted to tell him about, and at the beach because a sunset reminded me of my mom. I’ve gently suggested she work on her timing. She’s gently ignored me.
Some mornings Edith greets me before my feet hit the floor. She reminds me that my parents aren’t here to answer the phone and Kelly isn’t going to respond to my text. She sits beside me when I read a book I want to tell my dad about, catch the scent of my mom’s perfume on an old sweater, or hear a song Kelly loved. She also has impeccable timing if I’m wearing mascara. Other days, she’s barely noticeable. She lets me laugh with friends, lose myself in a good book, or watch a sunset without whispering in my ear. She’s still there—I know she is—but she gives me room to breathe and the space to experience joy without guilt. On those days, I like to imagine she’s off having coffee with someone else’s grief.
Giving my grief a name didn’t make it disappear. It made it understandable.
Before Edith, grief felt like an unpredictable wave crashing over me without warning. Now I recognize her. I can say, “Edith is having a hard day today,” instead of believing that I am falling apart. That small shift has changed more than I ever imagined.
Instead of fighting my grief, I can become curious about it. What does Edith need today? Sometimes she needs me to cry. Sometimes she needs me to tell another story about my parents because speaking their names keeps them close. Some days she wants me to read old messages from Kelly. Sometimes she simply wants to sit quietly beside me while I drink my morning coffee. She’s actually pretty low-maintenance. Coffee, a good cry, and the occasional old voicemail seem to keep her happy.
And sometimes, she doesn’t need to come with me at all.
There are days when I leave Edith at home. Not because I love the people I’ve lost any less. Not because I’ve forgotten them or “moved on.” But because grief doesn’t have to accompany me to every lunch with friends, every outing, every concert, or every joyful moment. She’ll still be there when I get home, and somehow I think she understands.
I’ve learned it’s healthy for us to spend a little time apart. Every relationship needs boundaries, right? Besides, if Edith came to every dinner, beach day, and concert, we’d probably both be exhausted. A little space is good for us. And truthfully, she’s gotten much better about letting me enjoy the happy moments before quietly reminding me that love and grief have always shared the same heart.
Perhaps that’s the greatest gift of naming her. I no longer see grief as something that happened to me or something I have to carry alone. I see her as a companion who arrived because love came first.
Edith only exists because my people existed. She walks beside me because my parents loved me. Because Kelly loved me. Because so many others left fingerprints on my heart that time could never erase. The depth of my grief is simply a reflection of the depth of my love. I wouldn’t know Edith if I hadn’t first known them.
If I had my druthers, I never would have chosen to meet her. If I had the choice, I’d trade every lesson she’s taught me for one more call, one more hug, one more ordinary day with the people I miss. But since she’s here, we’ve learned how to be together. Like every long-term relationship, we’ve found our rhythm. She reminds me to slow down and remember. I remind her that it’s okay for me to laugh, to travel, to fall in love with life again. We’ve discovered that there is room for both joy and sorrow, and neither one has to cancel out the other.
I’ve come to believe that grief isn’t the opposite of love. It’s love searching for somewhere to go. My love for my people doesn’t simply disappear. It still exists. It still needs somewhere to live. For me, it walks beside me. It bears the name Edith.
Maybe that’s why naming her has been so healing. It hasn’t made the grief smaller, and it certainly hasn’t made me miss my people any less. But it has reminded me that grief is not a sign that something is wrong. It’s evidence that I loved deeply and was loved in return.
We didn’t choose each other, Edith and I. But after spending this much time together, it seemed only right that we learned each other’s names.
The truth is, neither of us is going anywhere.
So we’ve learned to be together. We’ve learned each other’s rhythms. We’ve learned when to hold on a little tighter and when to give each other some space. And somewhere along the way, I stopped wishing she would disappear and started appreciating why she has become a part of my life.
Because without Edith, I don’t know that I would fully understand the depth of the love I was so fortunate to experience. She’s no longer just my grief. She’s become the keeper of my memories, the guardian of my love, and the gentle reminder that the people who shaped my life are still shaping my heart.
So now I’m curious…
If you gave your grief a name, what would it be? Or maybe it isn’t grief at all. Maybe it’s anxiety. Fear. Hope. Joy. Regret. Courage.
What would happen if, instead of trying to outrun that feeling, you invited it to sit beside you long enough to understand why it came? Sometimes the feelings we spend the most energy resisting are simply asking to be acknowledged.
Maybe they deserve a name.

Peace,
#tutulady
#forwardisapace

Routes

Kristine Binder
I needed to remember that even though the people are gone, the stories are still here. The memories are still alive inside me.

There are some drives that are more than just getting from one place to another. Some roads carry memories in the pavement. Yesterday, without realizing it, I took one of those drives.
I don’t believe in coincidences. I never have. I think things show up when we need them, even if we don’t understand why at first.
Yesterday I had to take my fur-baby to the vet because he’s been limping again. The same vet who did his surgeries years ago. I had never been to this office which meant an hour drive each way, so I plugged the address into my navigation app and off we went.
What I didn’t expect was that the route would take me straight through pieces of my life I haven’t visited in years. Past the community college where I earned summer credits. Past the church where I got married. Past the YMCA where I took swimming lessons as a little girl.
Road after road that I hadn’t driven in forever somehow came back like muscle memory. Every turn familiar. Every landmark holding a story. And honestly? It was exactly what my heart needed.
At the vet, we waited for what felt like forever. Once everything was cleared and I was told it was age and arthritis….just like his momma….the vet and I were talking afterward, I could feel myself sitting right on the edge of tears the entire time. I told him I know my dog is getting older. I know that day will come someday. But not now. Please not now. And then I cried.
I told him how I recently lost both my parents and how strangely cathartic this drive had been for me. He asked where I grew up and I told him. Turns out he lives in that same small town now.
Ten years. I’ve been going to this vet for over ten years and I’m just finding this out now? Such a small world.
As I left, my GPS routed me home a different way and about a block from the vet was the marine store where my family spent so much time when I was growing up. Boats. Water skis. Snow skis. Equipment lined up everywhere. So many Saturdays with my dad walking through those aisles. So many summers built around the water. So many winters built around the snow.
And in that moment I wanted so badly to tell someone those stories. To laugh about them with someone who remembered. But the people who shared those memories with me are gone from my life now. Those memories belong only to me. That realization is both beautiful and heartbreaking.
As I drove, Grateful Dead playing through my speakers, I found myself smiling at every little thing I remembered. Each memory healing something in me. Tiny stitches closing up parts of a broken heart. It’s funny how grief works.
When your parents die, the good and the bad goes with them. They are the only people who really knew you from day one. The only people who knew every version of you. Every phase. Every family story. Every triumph and heartbreak and embarrassing moment and inside joke. And then suddenly that connection is gone. And sometimes when parents go, the connection to siblings and extended family changes too. The glue that held everyone together is gone. The person who softened tensions, organized holidays, insisted people stay connected, covered the cracks… they’re no longer here.
That grief is its own kind of loss too. The grieving of it all is layered. But like I said, I don’t believe in coincidences. I think those roads found me yesterday for a reason. I think my soul needed familiar places. Familiar turns. Familiar memories. I needed to remember that even though the people are gone, the stories are still here. The memories are still alive inside me. I carry the family lore now. I carry the history. I carry them.
And somehow that feels both unbearably heavy and completely priceless at the same time.

Peace,
#tutulady
#forwardisapace

Complicated

Kristine Binder

I recently found a necklace after my mom passed. I was drawn to its simplicity and felt comfort in wearing it, though I could not explain why it felt different or where it even came from. I put it on and have not taken it off since. Lately, I catch myself reaching for it when I am anxious, twisting it between my fingers without even thinking, and I did not really understand why.
Today, on Mother’s Day, I was looking through old photos and found one of my mom and me on my First Communion day. And there it was. The necklace. I do not remember the necklace at all, but I remember the dress vividly because my mom made it for me. I remember how proud I was to wear something she created with her own hands. Proud that my mom made it just for me. Funny that I found that photo today. Mother’s Day. 
Mother’s Day has never been an easy day for me. Not as a daughter. Not as a mother. And now, especially not without my mom here. I think there is this expectation that Mother’s Day is supposed to feel soft and warm and easy. Beautiful cards. Perfect brunches. Matching smiles in photos. Everyone calling their mom their “best friend.” And if that is your story, I genuinely love that for you. But it has never quite been mine.
I did not have the quintessential mother-daughter relationship. My relationship with my mom was complicated. Layered. Heavy at times. Beautiful at times too. I loved my mother deeply. Fiercely. I admired her more than I can even explain. She was brilliant, accomplished, talented, respected, and capable of making absolutely anything feel elegant and intentional. She taught me to notice beauty. To appreciate history. To understand that there is value in tradition, in details, in doing things well. But being her daughter was not easy.
Her expectations were always high. Sometimes impossibly high. It took me years to understand that no matter what I achieved, accomplished, fixed, managed, or became, I would never fully make her happy in the way I desperately wanted to. That realization is painful to admit out loud because I know she loved me. She did. Absolutely. But love is complicated sometimes. People love from the places they know, and sometimes the way someone loves you is not the way you need to receive love. That has been one of the hardest lessons of my life.
Still, she shaped me into the woman I am today. Both because of her love and in spite of it. Because of her expectations and despite the weight of them. I carry so much of her in me. The good. The hard. The beautiful. The impossible.
Mother’s Day itself was never really about me. It was about honoring the mothers and women in the family first and foremost. The expectation of making the day special was always there. The planning. The pressure. The responsibility of making everyone feel celebrated and cared for. It was never about me. Ever. And honestly? I know how heavy that can feel. Thus I never want my own children to carry that kind of emotional obligation for me. I do not want them to feel responsible for my happiness. It took me years of therapy to figure out that I am responsible for my own happiness. I do not want my kids to spend their lives trying to earn love or approval or peace from me. That cycle ends here if I can help it.
And the truth is, I have not been a perfect mother. Not even close. There are moments I wish I could redo. Seasons I wish I had handled differently. Choices I made from fear, overwhelm, anger, survival mode, trauma, exhaustion. None of those are excuses. They are simply truths. I have apologized to my children, and I will continue to apologize when I get it wrong because I think mothers should. I think accountability matters.
I have always done the best I could with who I was at the time. And sometimes that version of me was struggling more than anyone realized. The reality is that each of my children got a different version of me as their mother because I was a different person while raising each one of them. Youthful. Older. Wiser. More wounded. More healed. More patient. Less patient. More financially secure. More emotionally exhausted. Every child enters a different chapter of our lives, and motherhood evolves whether we want it to or not. That does not mean the love was different. It means I was. And maybe that is the part nobody talks about enough.
Mothers are not perfect humans. They are simply human beings trying to carry the enormous responsibility of loving and shaping other human beings while often still healing themselves. We are flawed and fabulous all wrapped into one complicated package.
So today, Mother’s Day holds all of it for me at once. Love. Grief. Joy. Sadness. Gratitude. Regret. Admiration. Anger. Compassion. Longing. And maybe that is okay. Maybe motherhood was never meant to fit neatly into greeting cards and social media captions. Maybe the most honest thing we can do is tell the truth about it.

Peace,
#tutulady
#forwardisapace

Becoming

Kristine Binder

There is a stage of life that no one really prepares you for, and lately I have realized that I am standing right in the middle of it.
We spend so much of our lives planning the obvious milestones. College. Careers. Marriage. Babies. Houses. Retirement accounts. The whole thing gets mapped out like a timeline we are supposed to follow. There are books, podcasts, experts, and entire industries devoted to helping people navigate those stages. But this stage? The one where the roles that once defined your life quietly shift or even disappear? That part seems to get skipped entirely.
And yet here I am.
For years I was the director of my children’s lives. I scheduled things, organized things, advised on things, and occasionally insisted on things. Now I have moved into a role that no one warned me about: audience member. I am in the stands cheering them on as they build their own lives, trying very hard not to yell unsolicited advice from the sidelines like a slightly overenthusiastic sports/stage mom clapping as loud as I possibly can at every chance I get. It is a beautiful transition, but it is still a transition.
At the same time, another role in my life quietly ended. For the past few years I was a caretaker for my parents, and when they passed away that responsibility ended in a way that left a space I had never really anticipated. When you have been responsible for others for so long, it is a strange realization to wake up one day and understand that the person you are now responsible for caring for is… you.
Caretaker of myself.
That is a role I never really planned for, and it turns out there is no instruction manual for it. No one sits you down and says, “Here’s what happens when your children are grown, your parents are gone, and you suddenly have to figure out who you are outside of the roles that filled your life for decades.”
Maybe that is why this season feels a little unsteady. Not wrong. Not sad or happy all the time. Just unfamiliar. Although, to be fair, the unsteady feeling could also be my joints reminding me that I am sixty. It is hard to say which is which some days.
Sixty is an interesting number because it sounds enormous when you say it out loud, yet somehow my brain did not get the memo. In my head I feel much younger than that. My body occasionally disagrees, but overall it is still cooperating well enough. There are a few more aches than there used to be, but nothing a little stretching, movement, and mild denial cannot handle.
And despite the uncertainty, life actually feels pretty full. I pay my own bills. I make my own decisions. If I want cheese and crackers for dinner, I have cheese and crackers for dinner and no one questions my life choices. If I want to stay up late reading, writing, or going down a rabbit hole of ideas for something new I want to build, I do that too. Some nights the house is quiet and peaceful, and other nights I am talking to the dog like he is a full participant in the conversation, which, based on the look he gives me, he clearly believes he is helping with the decision making process.
There is a certain freedom that comes with running your own life. I decide how I spend my time. I decide where my energy goes. If I want to sign up for something new, start a project, change direction, or sit with a cup of coffee and think about life for an hour, I can. There is no committee meeting required to approve the plan. There is also something deeply satisfying about realizing that the life around me is one I built myself over time, piece by piece.
And yes, I still sleep diagonally across the bed when I feel like it… unless the dog has claimed most of the mattress, which happens more often than I care to admit.
People sometimes assume that at this stage a woman must be looking for a partner, as though being single automatically means something is missing. As if there is a box on the life checklist that still needs to be filled in. But the truth is that I am perfectly content with my life as it is. I have built a life that feels full, meaningful, and mine.
If a partner ever enters the picture, they will need to be a one hundred percent value add to my life. Not a fixer-upper project. Not someone who needs to be managed, motivated, or mothered. I am long past the stage of my life where I am interested in taking on another full-time emotional renovation project. At this point, anyone who joins my life should arrive with their own life already intact.
Someone who brings joy, laughter, and partnership to the table. Someone who makes the good parts of life even better, not someone who complicates the peace I have worked hard to create. Otherwise, I am quite happy running my own life, making my own decisions, and yes… sleeping diagonally across the bed.
What I do find myself wondering about, though, is how many other women are standing in this same space.
How many of us are just a bit past the midpoint of life and realizing that there is still so much living left to do, while also recognizing that the structure of our lives has shifted in ways we never really planned for? We are no longer raising small children. Many of us are navigating the loss of parents or other loved ones. The roles that once defined us are evolving, and we are discovering who we are when we are no longer primarily responsible for everyone else.
The loss of my parents is still very raw, and grief has a way of rearranging the furniture in your life whether you are ready for it or not. Some days I feel strong and clear about what comes next, and other days I feel like I am simply doing my best to put one thoughtful foot in front of the other. But somewhere inside all of that is the quiet understanding that this is now my time to discover what my life looks like in this new space.
It is a space that many women never really get the chance to explore. Sometimes that is because they have a partner whose life direction becomes intertwined with their own. Sometimes it is because life moves so quickly that there is never time to stop and ask, What do I want now? And sometimes, if we are honest, it is simply fear. Fear of stepping outside the roles we have known for decades. Fear of the unknown. Fear of standing in a place where there is no clear guidebook.
Because there really isn’t one.
This era of life does not come with instructions. There is no neatly packaged plan for what to do when your children are grown, your parents are gone, and you suddenly realize that the next chapter of your life is largely yours to design.
That realization is both terrifying and incredibly liberating.
So for now, I am doing what I have always done when life feels uncertain. I am moving forward, learning as I go, and paying attention to what feels meaningful. I am allowing myself the space to grieve, the space to grow, and the space to imagine what this next era might hold.
And I suspect I am not the only woman standing in this place.
Which is why I find myself thinking more and more about community. About women walking alongside one another through this stage of life instead of quietly trying to figure it all out alone. Women who are still very much in their prime, still curious, still capable, still full of life, but also honest about the fact that this chapter comes with questions.
Maybe together we can help create the path that none of us were given. We can support one another as we figure out what this next era looks like, share what we are learning along the way, and build something that not only helps us move forward but also creates space for the women who will come after us.
Because while there may not be a guidebook for this part of life, there is something powerful about realizing that we have the ability to write it ourselves.
And for now, I will keep doing the one thing I know how to do.
Moving forward.
Because forward is a pace.

Peace,
#tutulady
#forwardisapace