What is The Middle and When Does it End?

A guest post from Elizabeth Marro

Lisa Renee

and

Elizabeth Marro

May 26, 2023

This week, I’m posting the second part of my collaboration with

Elizabeth Marro

. In her essay below, she addresses the question, “When does the middle end?” You can read the first part, my essay about the middle and its beginning, here.

Meet Elizabeth Marro

I met Elizabeth through her wonderful Substack newsletter,

Spark

. I found myself reading and commenting regularly and, before long, we were in conversation. Go check out Spark now, if you haven’t already, for great essays, interviews, book recs, and more.

Elizabeth is also the author of Casualties, described as a “heartbreaking and insightful debut novel about the wars we fight overseas, at home, and within our own hearts.” She’s currently working on a second novel and is a volunteer for So Say We All, a literary and performing arts organization in San Diego dedicated to helping people tell their stories. You Hold, I'll Pull is one of her performances with the organization (definitely click that link, it’s so good).

Here’s a link to

Spark

, followed by Betsy’s essay, “What is the Middle? And when does it end?”

What is The Middle?

And when does it end?

By Elizabeth Marro

*The sunlit room*, Carl Vilhelm Holsøe, 1922

“The middle (assuming it isn’t your end) is a pinnacle of sorts. A place not to stop the clock, but to pause and look forward and back, survey the past and imagine a future beyond the fog. The middle is aging and movement, as we watch the calendar pages fly. It’s arbitrary. If you’re not busy being born, or dying, then you’re busy living. That’s the middle. We live and, if we’re lucky, it’s long. Only you can tell the story. Maybe let it out of the box.” - Lisa Renee, “What is the middle? And when does it start?”

I am sixty-six. In less than two months, I will be sixty-seven. Everytime I think of this, I feel a bump, as if I’ve tripped over a threshold. It occurs to me that while I was “busy living,” I may have edged over the border from middle age to whatever is next. Google informs me that I am right: even the most optimistic estimators of when middle age begins and ends suggest that 65 is the upper limit.

I’m feeling a lot of feelings: afraid, wistful, hopeful, grateful, anxious, eager, determined, resilient, fragile. I’m also a little pissed off which, as we all know, is one of the stages of grief. The good news: I think I’ve moved past denial.

The last time I felt a bump like this was around the year I turned thirty-six. That year, I understood that I was no longer young. At the same time, I was not old. I’d made enough mistakes, taken enough risks to have gained some useful knowledge about myself and the world around me. For me, that year marked the beginning of a growth spurt.

After eighteen years of single parenting, floundering through schools and jobs, and living out of sync with most of my contemporaries, great swaths of time and energy opened up. I was in the best physical shape of my life. I was single without a child at home, conditions that felt better some days than others but nothing I would trade away without a very good reason. I had a huge open space to fill with the writing I’d deferred for years. I had my health and the feeling of decades ahead of me. My forties and fifties brought a new marriage, a big move, rich friendships and, when I was 60, I published my first novel. The middle, for me, was full of beginnings.

The years between thirty-six and now have also brought pain, loss, adjustments, compromises, and subtle but relentless reminders that bodies don’t last forever. Neither do the people we love. Long-held, unexamined assumptions have taken a hit. The big ones: people are basically good, there will come a day when life is more fair than not, and it will happen in my lifetime (yes, in the body of a middle-aged woman, the heart of a small child continued to beat). I clung to the notion that, in the end, everything would work out just fine. Films like The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel (“Everything will be alright in the end. So, if it’s not alright, it is not yet the end.”) were made for people like me, or at least the person who was picking her way through the last ten years of what I will now call my “middle,” that period of being “not young” and “not yet old.”

If you, like Jane Fonda, buy into the idea of dividing life into thirds, I have every reason to look forward to my “final third” because, like Jane, I have lived a privileged life. I am healthy, have decent medical care, and have never had to worry about a roof over my head or where my next meal was coming from. There’s a good chance she’s right that, all things being equal, I will have another thirty years. My grandparents and parents lived into their eighties and nineties and they suffered from health issues that have, so far, bypassed me. I love the work I do now and want to do more of it for as long as I possibly can.

A certain amount of hubris is required to dice a life into stages that we enter and leave. As Lisa pointed out last week, there are no guarantees that we will get a “middle” as it is currently understood. I can see the attraction of those boxes and labels, though. I have always liked the feeling of knowing where I am and what I can expect, or at least the idea of that sort of order. And there is no denying that “bump” I felt as I stumbled over the threshold into middle age, and the one I feel now as I pause here.

I feel a sense of loss. I loved the years from thirty six, when I was “not young but not old,” to now, at nearly 67, when I am not young and at least standing on the verge of old. I loved all the growth and the promise of the past three decades. Will I love what’s coming next as much? It occurs to me that if I dropped dead tomorrow, I will still have had the same three decades that have given me so much. I just wouldn't get to be old. Some days, and only for a few minutes at a time, I think that might not be so bad.

When I look ahead I see a lot of shadows. As much joy as the middle years have given me, they have also left me less naive, a little more tired, a little less certain about what my body and mind can achieve in whatever time I have left. Even if I resist the idea of being boxed and labeled as old, there are insidious reminders that others are happy to do it for me. The year I received my first Medicare physical was the year that the doctors stopped asking questions about my diet and general health and told me that I was “lucky” — I would not ever have to have a pap smear again, unless I wanted to. I realized that if I wanted to stay healthy on my terms, I would have to work a lot harder. The thought, briefly, made me tired. Then it made me mad.

I’m mad about other things, too. I hoped to arrive at this stage and find the kind of freedom that comes from not caring how others see me, or minding that many simply don’t see me anymore at all. The other day I said hello on a walk to three different people of varying ages. The only one who said “Hi” back had white hair and stooped shoulders. I’ve been waiting for the moment when I feel old but, in the meantime, others are waking up to their middle years. A trace of resentment flared briefly when I read this about women in their early forties who are crossing that threshold. I felt, unreasonably, as if they were pushing me ahead, replacing me. Finally, I looked forward to being a whole lot less self-conscious and wearing those vintage dresses that have been hanging in my closet for years or maybe even going full-cliché and donning a big floppy purple hat. I’m not there yet.

Are these feelings a product of the times and the world around me, or is it my age? It can be both of course. I suspect that once I take a good hard look at my fears, doubts, worries, resistance, I will also see that they are the same I’ve carried one way or another my entire life. When I cast my gaze backwards from the pinnacle of almost-sixty-seven, I will see behind me the woman who found a way through them to get this far. I must trust she will not fail me as I move on to whatever is next.

The Long Middle

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