God, Use Me.

On a prayer that started in grief, a knee surgery, and the answer I almost missed.

My mother had a massive stroke in 2012 when my daughter Lily was about nine years old.

From that moment forward, my life divided itself into two clear categories: everything that needed to be done, and everything that would have to wait. My mother’s health deteriorated, and she moved into a nursing home and then into assisted living. My kids were growing up fast and needed everything I had. My husband Bob was steady beside me, as he always has been. My job as a school psychologist required everything that was left.

I gave it all willingly. This is simply who I am.

Caring for a mother with advancing dementia is its own kind of long goodbye. I lived inside that goodbye for nearly a decade. In 2018, her doctors diagnosed her with stage four kidney disease, and she started dialysis treatment. Three months of it. Every single day, I drove her to the dialysis center and sat beside her in the cold sterile bay. I held her hand while she pulled at the tubes. Her dementia was so advanced by then that she couldn’t understand why they were there. I would hold her hands gently, talk to her, watch the clock, and think about everything I still needed to do before the day was over.

Mom hated every minute of it. She had told us clearly, that she did not want to be kept alive by machines. She tried dialysis for us. Because we loved her and we were not ready to say goodbye. But eventually we stopped, because she had asked us to, and because love sometimes means listening even when it breaks you.

Then COVID came and locked the doors.

For months, we could not go inside at all. When visits were permitted, we sat on the terrace outside while she came to the glass, masked and gowned and separated by more than distance. All the ordinary moments I hadn’t thought to protect; sitting beside her, holding her hand without gloves, being in the same room with the easy assumption of more time — I didn’t know until they were gone how much they had been holding me up.

We finally got back inside. Two months later, in March of 2021, she was gone.

I was 48 years old and parentless for the first time in my life.

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Grief is strange. It does not arrive the way you expect it to.

What arrived for me, somewhere in the weeks and months after my mother passed, was not emptiness exactly. It was something quieter and harder to name. A kind of stirring. A force I can only describe as her — her spirit, her goodness, the energy of a woman who spent her whole life pouring herself into other people, settling into me and pushing me forward.

I cannot explain it theologically or clinically. I can only tell you that after she died, I felt, more powerfully than I ever had before, that I needed to do something with whatever time I had left. That life was shorter than I had been living like it was. That I had gifts, and energy, and a heart full of desire to help people, and I was not using them as fully as I could.

So, I started praying.

Not a complicated prayer. Not a long one. Just three words, said in the car and at the end of long days and in the quiet moments before sleep.

God, use me.

I wanted to be impactful. I wanted to reach people. I wanted to put good into the world in whatever way I could, for as long as I had to do it, in honor of a woman who had done exactly that her entire life.

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I joined the county traumatic loss coalition and started responding to school tragedies. I became involved in the women’s commission. I started to say yes to things that scared me a little. I kept showing up in rooms where I could be useful to someone who needed it.

And I went back to school.

I had wanted to be a licensed psychologist since I was ten years old. The school psychology career gave me 25 years of meaningful work, but it kept me inside a building and a system with walls I could feel. I needed the clinical license to reach people outside those walls, outside the hours between eight and three, outside every limitation that had kept my calling contained.

So at 50, I enrolled in William and Mary’s clinical mental health counseling program. With a full-time job and a family and a life already packed to the edges, I went back to school. I learned Canvas and APA format and what an em dash is. I sat in class with people my daughter’s age, and they kept me honest and occasionally helped me find the submit button.

That was 2023. I kept praying.

God, use me.

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Then on February 10th, 2025, I had unexpected knee surgery.

A full meniscus repair. Requiring months of non-weight-bearing. A brace on my leg, crutches beside the couch, ice packs around the clock. For the first time in my adult life, I was forced to stop completely. Not just slow down. Not rest when I could find a moment. Stop. Against every instinct I have ever had.

I read six books. I watched five movies. And then I was, as I told Bob, bored completely out of my ever-loving mind.

I started watching YouTube videos about content creation, social media, and how to build something on the internet. I watched for days. I read everything I could find. I had no plan, no strategy, and no expectation of anything specific happening.

And then seven days after surgery, on February 17th, something came over me like a tidal wave.

I clicked a button and launched @themidlifebecoming on Instagram.

With no grand design. No roadmap. Just a prayer that had been building since March of 2021 and a couch and a brace and a Tuesday with nowhere else to be.

Two months later, on April 18th, I launched Midlife Becoming on Substack. Because I had so many words inside me that Instagram could not hold them all. The writing — the long, honest, personal kind was where everything I had been carrying finally had room to breathe. Eighteen days after that, I had 100 subscribers.

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Women from New Jersey, Australia, and South Africa and everywhere in between found their way to something I built on a coach and said — yes. “Me too”. I needed this.

A woman wrote to me about caring for her aging mother alone. Another wrote about the grief of losing herself inside a life that had stopped fitting years ago. Another wrote at what must have been two in the morning about the exhaustion of performing a version of herself that had never really been hers.

And I sat there, leg still elevated, still on crutches, reading their words, and I thought:

There it is. That is the answer.

Not in a school building after a tragedy. Not in a coalition meeting. Not in a clinical office with a license on the wall, which I am still working toward and will have.

On a couch. On the internet. I was reaching women I have never met who needed someone to tell them — you are not alone in this. You are not too late. You are not done yet.

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My mother spent her whole life pouring herself into other people. She cooked for everyone. She showed up for everyone. She loved without reservation and without keeping score.

She never got to see what I built.

But I believe she knows.

I believe she is part of why the tidal wave came when it did, why the words arrived faster than I could write them down, why 100 women found a page I created on a couch in seven days and said — this is exactly what I needed.

She always wanted to help people, too.

Maybe this is both of us finally getting the chance.

The prayer was never asking God to make me important.

It was asking God to make me useful.

He answered it. Just not the way I expected.

But then — He never does.

The best answers never come the way you plan for them. They come on a Tuesday in February when you are stuck on a couch with your leg in a brace, a YouTube video playing, and absolutely nowhere else to be.

That is when the tidal wave finds you.

That is when you finally have room to let it.