We – Desirée and Edee – met in a writing group and discovered we had far more in common than our love of solid, razor-sharp writing and rich literary experiences. Among many other things, we are both in our 40s, infertile and barreling our way through peri-menopause. It feels like everyone around us is so much wiser about this stuff, and then we realize, “Well, yeah. They also have a good 10 years on us.” Only they actually don’t. Some of those wiser women are only 2 or 3 years older. And some of them had the same wisdom 10 years ago, back when they were younger than we are right now.
We’re the girls who showed up at prom in torn jeans because everybody else magically knew better and nobody told us otherwise. Always accidentally a day late and a dollar short. And now it seems the midlife train pulled out of the station while we were reading all the brochures in the ticketing area.
Naturally, we’re very confused and filled with questions. Thing is, neither of us takes herself all that seriously. We keep thinking we must be the only 2 nutballs laughing our way through this shit. It seems like everybody else is trying to write about finding the beauty in this phase, finding their inner zen and gracefully coming to terms and blah blah yadda-yadda-yadda. But they’re all “with-it” empty nesters trying to expound on the meaning of life. We’re just trying to figure out why the hell we pee on ourselves right after we go pee.
We’re irreverent as hell. We laugh a lot. We swear. We may or may not correctly capitalize things. But that’s how we cope with this thing called “midlife.”
We hope you’ll laugh a lot, too, as we muddle our way through this new phase together.