I Didn't Expect Any of This.

On sunsets, golden doodles, middle schoolers, and the women who found me here.

I entered this space scared.

The kind that makes your hands shake a little as you hit publish. Then you put your phone face down and walk away because you cannot bear to watch what happens next. I spent time writing papers in two graduate programs, twenty-five years of applying clinical language to other people’s pain, and an entire lifetime knowing that writing was my gift — and still, when it came to this, I felt exposed in a way I had not anticipated. Naked, almost like I had walked into a room and said, this is who I actually am and then stood there waiting to see what happened next.

What happened next completely surprised me.

Women started finding me. They left comments that cracked something open in my chest. Restacking words, I had almost talked myself out of posting. They wrote back to say, me too which made me feel like I was not the only one. This is, I think, the most anyone can hope for when they decide to tell the truth in public.

Over 50 of you are here now. Fifty women who said yes; I want to read what she has to say. I have been sitting with that number quietly all week, genuinely overwhelmed by it, genuinely grateful in a way. Thank you — From the bottom of my heart.

This platform is different from the others, I felt it immediately. There is substance here instead of surface. What lies beneath is what matters, not what looks good on a highlight reel. I didn’t realize how hungry I was for that until I found it.

I want you to know who you are reading.

I am a mom. Just a girl from New York who found her home at the Jersey Shore. I am a wife, a woman trying her best every single day with a genuine desire to connect with other women and help them feel less alone. I am not a guru. I am not a brand. I am akin to a simmering pot on the stove — that is the only way I know how to describe what is happening inside me right now — this energy and excitement for life that is bubbling up and wanting to spill over the sides, and I am honestly just trying to keep up with it.

I think it started with the sunsets.

Every evening I walk our dog Nash down to the end of our street, where the bay opens up, and I watch the sun go down. Nash is our golden doodle. He is six years old, adopted in the middle of Covid when the world had gone quiet, and we needed something warm and alive in our home. He has been with us through everything since. The hard days and the beautiful ones, the losses and the celebrations, every ordinary day. He doesn’t know any of that, of course. He just knows the walk, and the smells, and the way the light changes at the end of the street. Honestly, he has taught me more about being present than most things I have read or studied. My husband teases me about the sunsets — it’s the same thing every day, Barb. And every evening I think: it is never the same thing. Not once. Different colors, different light, different feeling in the air, different version of me standing there watching it. It is the end of another day in this chapter of my life. Sad and inspiring at the same time, a brief moment that is somehow also everything.

The mornings walking the beach as the glow from the sun starts to rise up from the water. There is that particular stillness before the world gets loud again. I know that only God could be the creator of something that beautiful. I think about what it means to bring even a fraction of that light into the interactions of an ordinary day; that is precisely what I am trying to do here.

That is what I keep coming back to: Connection, real connection, not the performative kind, actually seeing people and making space for them. The cashier at the McDonald’s drive-through window who hands me my coffee every morning and just needs someone to look her in the eye and mean it when they say good morning. The middle schoolers I work with every day, kids who are struggling to put words to what they’re feeling, who are acting out because they don’t yet have the language for their pain. They need one adult in the building to sit with them and say: I see you and you have potential. We are going to get through this together. I show up for them every single day, and honestly, they give back more than they will ever know. I want to be a positive force, not in a big way but quietly and consistently. I want to show up, pay attention, and truly care for those around me.

Then there is my circle. The small group of women I hold close, my people, my constants, the ones who have been there through every twist and turn without flinching. Women who are doing extraordinary things in their own midlife; going back for college degrees in their fifties, taking on major career shifts, showing up for their lives with a courage that takes my breath away sometimes. We have a group chat that keeps me going; it is not always profound. Sometimes it is just a funny meme or a string of laughing emojis or a quick “you got this, girl” before someone heads into a hard week. But it is everything. It is the kind of friendship that holds you up without making a big deal of it, and I do not take a single day of it for granted.

And then there are my kids. My daughter is out there in the world doing great things. She is showing me what it looks like to move through life with a grace, intention, and fearlessness that I am still learning at twice her age. She does not even know she is teaching me. My son is becoming a young man right before my eyes, and he is opening up slowly and steadily. He is like a flower bud that is just beginning to understand what he is capable of. The bones are there, and I can see them clearly, even when he cannot yet. I am so proud of both of them that I don’t have words for it — just this feeling in my chest like my heart is too big for the space it is supposed to fit in.

This is what I am made of. This is what I am writing from.

The goal is connection. To the earth, to the people we love, to the version of ourselves we are still becoming. Simply taking notice of the things that make life worth living. The flower beginning to bud on the branch, the breeze on your face. The smell of the salt air. All of the small things that make a life worth living. someday, not eventually, but right now, today, in the middle of everything.

That is what I am building here. A place to notice. A place to tell the truth. A place where midlife is not something to survive but something to finally, fully inhabit.

I am so glad you are here for it.

With love from the Jersey Shore,

Barb

A question to sit with this week:

What is your version of the sunset at the end of the street — the small, ordinary thing that fills you up if you let it? And when did you last let it?