What is the Middle?

A collaboration with Elizabeth Marro of Spark

I’m trying a new thing this week — a collaboration with the wonderful

Elizabeth Marro

, the publisher of the bookish newsletter,

Spark

. Betsy has created a warm, welcoming, and thoughtful community of readers and writers with essays, interviews and the best book recs. Check it out!

Betsy and I connected around our writing (and reading) and decided to try a swap of sorts, a cross-posting, a conversation in essays. We’ve asked ourselves the question, What is the middle?

My new post, What is The Middle: And when does it start?, can be found at Spark today (links all over this post). I will publish Betsy’s essay, When does it end?, here at The Long Middle next week. It’s been great working with her and now I’m longing for a broader conversation around these questions.

How do you define the middle?
When does it begin?
When does it end?

We’d both love to hear your thoughts, so chime in below or over on Spark.

Now, for a taste of my essay — you can head over here for the rest!

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What is The Middle?

And when does it start?

The Blue Planet, Helen Lundeberg, 1965

We tell ourselves stories about our lives, an attempt to understand and control them. We box and label the narratives, hoping to keep them tidy and contained. The Middle becomes a thing, a label on a box, as if midlife is a new room we enter. My newsletter is called The Long Middle, because I needed a place to gather the threads of this amorphous chapter. The middle of life is, indeed, long (if we’re lucky) and amorphous, resisting all attempts at boundaries and boxing.

At 59, I’m still in the middle (according to me). I was 44 when I came crashing into this room, like Kramer with the door. This is the story I tell, as that was the year I unraveled. Google says middle age begins around 40-45, so it checks out (with Google, anyway). I’ve also pegged the beginning of my midlife to perimenopause, which is what my unraveling was eventually named (the naming is important in the quest for a boxed narrative). I was there, and now I’m here. It’s a different room, this one. I was, suddenly, a denizen of the middle.

This is too simple, of course, and it’s not the whole truth. Absolutes never are, especially when we’re talking about the amorphous fluidity of life. What is the whole truth? Can we ever know? 

When I comb back through memory, I see the fraying begin in my 30s. I remember the exhaustion and the increasingly desperate attempts to keep up and resist change. Things were changing, like it or not, and I was looking the wrong way. Looking out at the big life, with all the kids and the marriage and the animals and the parents and the bills and and and … If only I was as attendant to my own shit as I was to everyone else’s, maybe it would have been easier. … More

(To read the rest at Spark, click here: What is The Middle?)

Hope to see you in the comments!
Lisa

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Things to share:

• I just picked up a copy of a book I can’t wait to read: In the Fullness of Time: 32 Women on Life After 50. The list of contributors is 🔥. Abigail Thomas, Vivian Gornick, Ntozake Shange, Sharon Olds, Edna O’Brien, on and on it goes.

• Barbara Crooker’s In the Middle is a perfect poem for today.

• Kimberly Harrington
  has written a great piece on midlife and tattoos. (It’s linked in my full essay over on Spark, but I wanted to share here, too — don’t miss it.)

• Marina Benjamin (author of The Middlepause, referenced and linked in the essay) has a new book out, A Little Give: The unsung, unseen, undone work of women. Yes, please. She also wrote the beautiful, and highly relatable, Insomnia.