There is no linear evolution; there is only a circumambulation of the self. – Carl Jung
The early stirrings arrived before I turned 40. I had a young child. On the surface, life was beautiful, functional and full. I was working from home in tech alongside my husband’s web development business, raising the kiddo, and doing what was needed for that householder phase of life. Nothing really looked like “crisis” from the outside. My life was good, and I knew that. But I was still crawling out of my skin a little.
And that is part of what made my midlife disorientation so hard to name…. Because no matter the goodness, I felt super restless…
Not because I wanted to escape my life. I loved my people. I loved much of what I had built. But something else in me was asking for expression. I suppose I wanted more of my own thing, my own voice. A way to bring what mattered to me into the world more publicly and more truthfully.
For years, I had been holding a private ceremonial space, a women’s circle that took an enormous amount of creative energy. I loved it. It fed me deeply through my son’s early childhood and elementary school years, and while I was building websites to earn a living. The circle gave form to the part of me that needed ritual, story, and soul.
But I kept hearing a voice that said it was time to call it quits on facilitating the circle, this beautiful creation of mine… and I questioned that voice a lot. I wondered if I was being wise, or avoidant, or just tired. Honestly, I could not tell. But the whisperings persisted, “Pause this, and see what arises in the empty space.”
So, I did. Because often, (always?) I need to actually make the choice, before I know if it is the “right” choice, or where it will lead me, beyond right and wrong.
At some point, the question that arose in the emptiness was: what if I could do ceremonies people are already having? Weddings. Funerals. Marking thresholds. What if I could bring my love of ritual and story into ordinary human moments, and maybe even earn a living doing it? That was when I began building my public-facing ceremony work, and slowly but surely, I left web work behind.
It did not arrive as a dramatic rupture. It arrived as a steady, insistent pull. I wanted to belonged to myself again, even while mothering, partnering, and tending home-front responsibilities.
For a long while, I thought: this is it. This is my next act. This is the work that will carry me to the end of my days. I was around 42 when I launched my ceremony business, and I really felt like I had faced midlife well. I got raw, I listened, and eventually I acted. Cool. Done.
So yeah, for over a decade, I have stood in front of thousands of people, holding ceremony, telling love stories, marking thresholds, helping people find language for the moments that matter. It was beautiful work. It still is. And yet, here I am in the midst of yet another, “something else is asking for attention” kind of place. And I am unraveling a big part of my life, and reweaving a new tapestry yet again.
I live my life in widening circles
that reach out across the world.
I may not complete this last one
but I will give myself to it.I circle around God, around the primordial tower.
I’ve been circling for thousands of years
and I still don’t know: am I a falcon,
a storm, or a great song?-Rainer Maria Rilke
Another Threshold, Dammit: When My Son Left Home
When I was fifty, my son left home for college, all the way across the country.
His dad and I packed the car together. I made my son a killer playlist for the drive. Bought snacks. Hugged them both goodbye. Watched the car disappear down the street. What happened next could not have been more cliché.
I collapsed onto the kitchen floor, sobbing. A full-bodied kind of grief that just consumed me. I went into my son’s room, breathed in his scent, grabbed the teddy bear he’d had since birth, threw myself on his bed and cried some more.
At some point, instinct took over. I went outside and made offerings to the earth and prayers to life, not because I had planned to, but because something in me needed ritual.
I was in grief, yes. But I was also overwhelmed with gratitude. That we had made it. That he was safe. That he was well. That we had gotten him all grown up and off to college.
What surprised me most that first year wasn’t the grief, or gratitude. It was the total disorientation.
Even after years of soul work, even after creating a meaningful and successful body of work that was truly my own, even after reminding myself regularly since his birth that my job was to let him go, I felt as though the true north of my inner compass had shifted again.
For eighteen-ish years, so much of daily life had revolved around: What does the kid / family / home need? And when that organizing principle vanished, there was a real and unexpected emptiness.
That first year after he left, I read around fifty books. In hindsight, this was probably a sign that I was struggling (reading is my favorite escape), and also that I was doing the only thing I knew how to do: trying to stay steady in a suddenly unfamiliar landscape. Don’t get me wrong, I also appreciated the quiet, the lack of mess, the freedom…
But there was a lot of uncomfortable emptiness too. And in sitting with that new emptiness, I found that desires I had postponed for years grew harder to ignore.
The Longing for Quieter Work
The call to work one-on-one with people had always been there for me.
Long before I had a website, or Jungian training, or a more cohesive container for this work, I had already been drawn to the intimacy of sitting with one person inside a ritual space. When I began holding ritual spaces for groups in my 30s, I also brought people in for one-on-one work. It was quieter then, less public. But the thread was there. Since I was around 35, I always thought 1:1 work would be a part of work, but life got in the way, and I did what was necessary in the moment.
But when my son left, in “late” midlife, I found myself holding a lot grief and regret around the path not taken: the missing master’s in psychology, the licensed counselor route, the more officially sanctioned road. I had skills. I had experience. I had decades of ritual work, listening work, symbolic work, and deep conversation in my bones. But I had not been externally validated in the tidy, patriarchal-approved way.
After more than a decade of very public ceremony work holding large threshold moments, I began feeling the pull toward that quieter thread again. I longed for more intimacy, more spaciousness. The kind of work where I could sit with one person at a time and listen for what was moving underneath the surface.
Not brand-new work, exactly. More like an old and familiar desire still asking for attention. And that longing became impossible to ignore after my son left home.
The nest was empty. I was looking at my life thinking: I have a lot of life left. What do I want this next act to be? Or the next-next act? (Or whatever freaking number act we are on now, because apparently life does not come with a clean, linear, table of contents.)
When I created my wedding work, I really thought I had built the thing that would carry me all the way through not just midlife, but way beyond. And then, eventually, I realized: oh shit, maybe not. Not because the business had failed… But because I had changed… and a new/old longing was clamoring for attention.
Honestly, there was (and still is) a part of me thought, “Are you nuts? You want to start over, again?!?” But like… darn it, I could not ignore the deep desire I was feeling to work 1:1 with folks. The vision / feeling that kept coming to me was not necessarily excitement about shifting my career, or starting again, or building something new. The vision that I kept having was simple: me, working with an individual, and how much I really wanted that.
Menopause and the Fire That Stays
Menopause was part of this threshold too. I cannot honestly say it was horrible for me, but symbolically, it was enormous.
For decades, my body had been moving through this monthly rhythm, this “offering in service of life.” Bleeding, cycling, creating, releasing. Whether or not I was consciously thinking about it that way, my body was carrying the reminder of my creative capacity.
Then that monthly rhythm began to lessen, and then — poof! — it was gone. And something about that felt less like an ending of creative energy and more like a change in its direction. As if the creative fire that had been moving outward for so long was now staying in my belly. All mine.
It was asking: What is this creative energy for now? What do I want to make? What is mine?
At one point, I signed up for a pottery class. Not because I had some great lifelong passion for pottery… I did not suddenly wake up needing to become Potter Jen. But I could feel creative energy moving, and I knew I needed to do something with my hands.
Sometimes midlife does not announce itself with a grand vision. Sometimes it says: go make a bowl, and see what happens.
Midlife Moves in Circles
What I came to understand is that there isn’t a place you arrive at in midlife. There has not been a point where I can say, “Sweet. I’ve finished. Thank god that’s over.” (I mean…. yet. I am hoping to feel pretty well done with the middle passage by the time I am 90. 😉 )
For me, midlife has been a series of thresholds: building a private ceremonial practice, listening to the call to train as a minister, leaving one creative form behind so another could emerge, building a public, income earning ceremony practice, grieving the end of daily mothering, moving through menopause, reckoning with paths not taken, and listening to the call toward quieter one-on-one work.
None of these thresholds was separate from the others. They were all part of the same larger movement: the life I had built asking to be honored, released, reimagined, and deepened.
This is why I don’t think of midlife as one crisis or one reinvention.
I think of it as a series of invitations. Some subtle, some tough, some very beautiful. . . And some that leave you crying on your kid’s bed with a teddy bear in your arms.
If you are moving through your own midlife threshold and want a more practical frame for this work, you can read more about my midlife transition coaching.