By Angela Williams Glenn 
I stood in the airport. Outside the window was the plane that would take me home—a place and a scene I’d been in many times in the past 20 years.
Yet there’s something different here in the middle of life. We write about the beginning of life with babies and small children, and the end of life when we say goodbye at one’s passing, but why aren’t we writing more about the middle?
Because at 44, I’m standing here in the messy, chaotic beauty of the middle of life. Ahead of you, the future can feel scary and uncertain. Behind you, the lessons learned and realizations gained can be painful.
I’ve recently said goodbye to the last of my grandparents’ generation, and now the anxiety and worry creep in, where you realize your parents and aunts and uncles are getting older. Their health isn’t what it used to be. Why do they have to get old too? How do I do life without them? I’m not ready to take the lead.
Your children are gaining their wings and freedom, and with that comes a whole new abundance of worries and anxieties. Will they be safe? Will they make the right choices? Why is everything I say and do lately so wrong? Being a mom is the hardest and best thing I’ve ever done. It gave me my highest of highs and left me in the lowest of lows. I went from feeling as if I was never going to be alone again to sitting in the depths of loneliness. It completed me and felt like it would destroy me at times. It molded and made me, and in the next moment broke me. It’s the most heartbreaking, breathtaking contradiction I’ll ever live.
Standing here in this airport isn’t just the location between my two homes. It’s the place between my past and my present, where I still have so many questions about which direction to take in the future. Your children don’t need you as much. Your parents are aging. Retirement isn’t so far off anymore. You have choices to make, and while at 18, 21, and 25, that seemed exciting and endless, now you understand how fleeting time really is and all the implications that come with the different choices you make along the way.
Whether you want it to or not, time marches on. It waits for no one. With the choices and moves of our past behind us and the uncertainty of our future ahead of us, we stand here in the middle, clinging to our babies and our parents, afraid to let either of them go.
by Mary McConville 
by Amy Keyes 
by Keri Forsythe-Stephens 
