What is Age?

On the Beauty of Temporal Disorientation

“Make Way for Ducklings” sculpture in Boston, MA. Photo by Sergey Konstantinov on Unsplash

I am standing in the quad in the middle of a New England college, and my teenage daughter is looking at a building where she might take classes next year. The winter chill makes her breath puff as she breathes, and when a sliver of light catches her face just so, I gasp, because for a second, I can’t tell which one of us I’m seeing.

I was seventeen once. I walked across quads like this one, felt that same electric possibility humming through everything around me. And now I’m here again, but from the other side of time. I’m the mother watching her daughter stand at the beginning of something vast and unknown, and I’m also somehow still that girl, all at once, all in the same moment.

“Middle age.” I used to hate that phrase. I feared it. It was something to resist, because the inside of me still felt young.

But recently, “middle age” has been settling differently. It’s not resignation. Maybe more like peaceful, almost delighted recognition.

In the past, I would stress over the invisible rules that women in their 40s and 50s absorb: Use makeup to cover your blemishes and wrinkles but pretend you only use good moisturizer. Dress youthfully, but not too youthfully because you’re actually old. Be natural but also be Reese Witherspoon.

As if our worth depended on performing the right kind of aging, a socially aesthetic and approved script.

But what if there isn’t a script?

What if middle age is about standing in multiple moments at once, holding your daughter’s future and your own past and your present self all in the same breath. Watching her begin, while you continue. Choosing how you want to show up—in your clothes, your face, your life—not because anyone expects it, but because you finally understand that you get to decide.

I don’t know exactly when it shifted for me. Maybe it’s been happening slowly, the way seasons change before you notice. But standing here, watching my daughter consider her next chapter, I feel something inside me relax. It’s not the frantic grip anymore of trying to hold onto youth, but the serene power of occupying my own age fully. Of being here, now, in this body, in this life, exactly as I am.

She turns and catches my eye, smiles.

And I think: This. This strange, suspended moment where past and future meet. This is what age is.

This newsletter is, and will always be, free. If you’d like to support my writing, please consider buying one of my books for yourself or a family member or friend. Thank you.