Notes From Midlife: The Pressing

I asked a former boss on her 50th birthday what advice she’d had for me at 40. “At 50, you’ll stop caring about what other people think,” she said, explaining how she started to really speak up, clearly, for herself and advocate better for others. A banner of confidence around the chest right next to a heart on the sleeve. She carried both at once. To get there, she walked through several trials and built resilience. I’ve started calling this process a pressing.

Green olives are pressed for oil until a cake of sediment forms with pieces of stems, stones and leaves. The cold-pressed, refined oil is then filtered and ready.

If each decade is a pressing, we at midlife are moving closer to our essential selves. These are the legs that carry my temporarily-able body. This is my child, swaying through first-time hardships after the new beginning of infancy. This is my home after the restlessness, I’m here instead of all the places I could have chosen to root.

Midlife is where disappointments are not theoretical. You can’t go under, you can’t go over, you have to go through. Here is when time with God often becomes quieter and more visceral.

“Its voice was not loud, but very large and deep,” Aslan says in The Horse and His Boy. The lion goes on to tell boy who is afraid and does not yet know him: “That is not the breath of a ghost. Tell me your sorrows.”

In midlife, God’s voice is large enough to become a control line in fire season, clearing the brush all the way down to mineral soil. Wide and broad, before and behind. Closer than a brother.

There’s a scene in the 90s movie adaptation of Little Women when Susan Saranden rubs the fever out of Claire Danes’ feet. There’s something about that image — working the discomfort out — that makes me want to mother and be mothered. As I work the growing pains out of my daughter’s legs in the thick dark, I want to care for her and at the same time be taken care of by my own mother.

Here in midlife we still want some part of youth, and likely always will.

When I was small, my grandparents would stand on the porch after hosting holiday meals and wave until we drove away. I looked back and sometimes they would still be waving when we were out of sight. Sometimes their hands will have dropped and they started to move towards the door. I wonder if our departure brought some relief: The quiet of the house after a gathering, a remnant of dishes on the table and balled up tissues in the bathroom wastebasket.

My grandfather used to recite the prayer of St. Francis before cutting his beloved turkey each Thanksgiving. To my young evangelical ears this moment felt too serious and formal, what we sat through before the toast when I could swallow a single kid gulp of Chianti. “Where there is despair, hope.”

I read this prayer almost every morning now, and its quiet strength convicts me in midlife. “Grant that I may not so much seek to be consoled as to console” It’s less about us, it’s more about others, and that is the right order.

Maybe we can’t understand until midlife: The present nearness of a quiet God when the worst is allowed. The way nothing would outwardly change if I walked away from faith in God, except that in gaining some sort of freedom I would drop the good gift and my longing for what is vacant would slowly thicken. How more than one thing can be wrong at once, and life goes on.

When we’re young, it’s needle-in-the-haystack hard to think about a pressing when you’re still forming into a person. I realize in midlife that in moments of trial and refining I’d been looking for magic genie God. Maybe we’re looking for something big when we need quiet affirmation. God as mother, God of sorrows, God of fevered feet.