This essay is part of the Between Chapters project, inspired by the book. What chapters are you between? How did you get from one chapter to another? Share your story here.

What Chapter Are You…

Leaving:

I am no longer wandering or aimless.

In:

I’m in the “questioning all of my career and life choices” phase of midlife (and that stage of grief after losing my beloved dad).

Entering:

I am a seeker: intentional and hungry for joy.

“I need to build a house for him,” I told my husband every morning the week after my father died. Every night, I dreamt of walking through open houses with my dad, the way we had when I was a child and teenager. In my dreams, we were looking for a home for him. When I woke each morning, I tried to sketch what I had seen. I was trying to design the perfect place for him, wherever he was.

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I was six years old when my dad designed our family home. In the blueprints, he drew every bedroom, bathroom, and corridor. He placed a swinging door between the dining room and the kitchen because, as he put it, “You shouldn’t have to cross the house to get from the dining room to the kitchen.” Then he would make me imagine carrying heavy platters of food. “You don’t want to travel far.”

Architecture was only a hobby for him. On weekends, he built entire worlds: train sets with towns arranged around them, and dollhouse rooms for my sister and me. During phone calls for his day job as an attorney, he doodled floor plans. I copied him.

“Don’t forget a powder room and a coat closet — both near the front door,” he reminded me when I was eight. “Rookie mistake, forgetting those. And every house needs a mudroom, where kids can take off their shoes and leave their backpacks. Combine it with the laundry room and put it by the back door or off the garage.”

He had firm beliefs. “Contemporary houses are cold.” “Living rooms are wasted space. The American family isn’t that formal anymore. If a living room already exists in a house, close it off, design built-in bookshelves, and turn it into a library or home office. Great rooms are the perfect combination of family room and living room.” He was also a big fan of entry courtyards and double-sided indoor/outdoor fireplaces.

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I took it all in as I drafted. My staircases looked like ladders. Nothing was to scale. This made him laugh, but never in a mean way.

Late on Sunday afternoons, after temple services and Packers games were over, my dad and I drove around Milwaukee visiting open houses. We weren’t looking to buy; we were looking for fun. If he couldn’t see a powder room and a coat closet upon entry, or a mudroom near the garage, he knew we were in a poorly designed house. And he said so.

The houses he designed always made sense. They connected and flowed seamlessly from room to room. The houses I designed were at first influenced almost entirely by my father’s preferences. Then I branched out, drafting small cabins intended for Door County, the lake town in northern Wisconsin. “I love this loft idea,” he would say to me. “Great use of space.” Or, “Is that a built-in wood dining table and booth on the backyard boat dock? Nice!” He always paid such close attention.

When I visited him in his nursing home — a cold, disconnected space with the facade of a colonial home — as he slowly died of Parkinson’s disease and dementia, I retold my dad our house-design stories. He was only in his early 70s when he became nonverbal. “Remember that house in Bayside with carpet on the walls?” He would give me one of his rare but coveted half-smiles of recognition. I know he remembered.

For five years, we watched this giant of a man be slowly dismantled by disease. The injustice of his illness wrecked me. He had worked so hard his entire life, but never got the chance to enjoy the retirement he’d earned. After his death, I drifted through days in a fog of grief, unable to fathom that my dad was no longer in the world. I felt almost childlike in my confusion. “Where is he?” I would murmur to my husband. “He needs somewhere to be.”

A few months later, during a particularly rainy winter in Los Angeles, I arrived at the stage of grief where I began questioning all of my life choices, including the one that had led me away from architecture. I had wanted to be an architect for most of my childhood and teen years. One year, I asked for and received a drafting desk for my birthday. I memorized the names of every swatch in the books my mom brought home from the local fabric store.

After drawing houses, I would furnish them in my head. The summer before my senior year of high school, I toured a few colleges with excellent architecture programs, but at 18, committing to a career felt impossibly premature. So I chose a strong liberal arts college. In becoming well-rounded, I drifted away from my early passion. Twenty-five years later, and especially now that my dad was gone, I felt as though I had given up on a dream before even officially trying.

I became a writer, which has its own similarities to architecture. In both, you create something out of nothing. I build with words. When I sketch a house or craft an essay, I can feel my heart rate quicken. My face flushes a bit. It has always been this way.

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Like my dad, whenever I doodle, I doodle floor plans — guest houses, artist studios, pool houses, even stables. I have crushes on houses. After a trip to Palm Springs, I became infatuated with midcentury modern style and read everything I could about Jack Meiselman and Bob Alexander. It finally made sense to sign up for an online architecture course at the local college.

“Oh, we have so many beautiful things to see!” the teacher, a slightly older woman barely able to contain her excitement, exclaimed on Zoom. It was the online version of a giant lecture hall course, my first meeting of Introduction to Architecture, and I already knew my father would have loved it. I had to stop myself from searching the hundred little Zoom boxes for his face.

“Let’s get started!” the teacher said, and I felt something stir in my chest.

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The class was a feast for the senses: textiles, furniture styles, color chips, columns, coffered ceilings, and carved walls. We learned bits of architectural trivia, like how a red door on a house now means “welcome,” but once meant, “We have daughters of marriageable age.” Like an early version of Match.com. My dad would have gotten a kick out of that.

During the first weeks of my online class, I took notes and wondered if I was subconsciously taking them for him. I imagined us talking on the phone after each class: “What did she mean by adaptive reuse?” I imagined him making bad jokes after the textiles class, like “God DAMask!”

I knew he would have fallen in love with Spanish-style architecture, with its yellows and blues for sun and sea. He would have laughed, as I did, at words like Churrigueresque, which the teacher described as “like frosting on the front of a Baroque building.” In my head, I was giving him the second act he deserved.

As much as I enjoyed it, the class became difficult to attend, even virtually. It was only one night a week for 12 weeks, but my husband was working long hours, and my preteens needed me at night. Often, I would half-listen with one earbud in and the other out, trying to stay connected to the lecture while still hearing my children.

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I began to resent the homework. I didn’t have time to write four term papers about houses when my own house seemed to be crumbling around me. As heavy rains doused Los Angeles, our roof started to leak in three places. Then a pipe burst beneath the house. My days became consumed by roofing estimates and research into pipe materials to replace the corroded ones beneath us. My nights were spent awake, listening to rain drip into bowls and pots in every bedroom.

Right after I dropped the class, my eleven-year-old daughter drew intricate floor plans for a four-story school. She said she had learned by watching me. She was so proud of the amphitheater and the smaller black-box theater, the indoor pool and two-story library, the science lab separate from the robotics lab. It was her dream school, she said.

I knew in that moment where my dad was. He was right there, watching my daughter with me.

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I’m not sure I want to be an architect anymore. Maybe architecture was an excuse to be close to my dad when I was growing up and, now, a way to be closer to the memory of him. My home as an adult abides by so many of his beliefs: our living room has more than one purpose; our kitchen is next to the dining room; there is a coat closet and powder room near the foyer. I know that to build a home, you need patience, connection, and flow. I have also learned, on my own, that rainy seasons come and go, but slate roofs are the best protection, copper pipes are worth the expense, and our children benefit from us paying close attention.

Last night, with my daughter watching beside me, I sketched a two-story traditional house to all of his specifications: an entry courtyard, a double-sided indoor/outdoor fireplace, and a place, wherever he is, for my dad to keep warm.

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This essay is part of the Between Chapters project, inspired by the book. What chapters are you between? How did you get from one chapter to another? Share your story here.

What Chapter Are You…

Leaving:

Helping others find their voices while my own work happened quietly behind the scenes.

In:

Learning that visibility requires grieving the safety of remaining unseen.

Entering:

Playing and having fun!

I expected writing my memoir to be the hardest part. I didn’t expect publishing it to feel like grief

For the past five years, Radical Return has lived quietly beside me. It has taken shape as drafts, paintings inspired by dreams and psychedelic journeys, drawings layered with memory, choreographed dances filmed in places that became part of the story, voice memos captured before an insight disappeared, and conversations with trusted friends. Long before it became a memoir, it became a way of living. The medicine journeys, artwork, and dances belonged to a small circle of people who helped me shape them with care. Soon, they will belong to anyone who picks up the book.

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As my publication date approaches, people keep asking whether I’m excited. I am. But excitement isn’t the feeling that catches me off guard. Grief is.

We often think of grief as belonging to death, to illness, to losses we can clearly see. But there is another kind of grief, quieter and less visible, that arrives not only with endings but also with becoming. Radical Return tells the story of reclaiming my body after experiences that taught me silence. It also names systemic issues within my profession that too often remain hidden. Writing was an intensely private act. Publication turns that private act into a public offering. The closer October comes, the more I realize I’m mourning something I hadn’t expected to lose: anonymity.

For nearly two decades, I have worked as a psychologist and psychoanalyst. My profession values listening more than speaking. My work has been about making space for someone else’s story while remaining in the background. I am deeply comfortable being the witness. A memoir asks something entirely different. It asks me to become the one being witnessed.

What I didn’t realize is that this invitation would not end with the book. Until this year, I had spent fifty-eight years happily living under what my friends jokingly call a “social media rock.” I built a career without Instagram. My days were filled with patients, supervision, teaching, training, and writing. Recording videos of myself or thinking about algorithms simply was not part of the plan. Then I learned what every first-time author eventually learns: writing the book is only half the work. If you want readers to find it, you have to show up.

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At first, social media felt incompatible with who I was. It seemed performative and self-promotional. But instead of talking about myself, I began interviewing people whose lives intersected with my memoir: psychologists, psychedelic therapists, artists, choreographers, filmmakers, energy healers, and friends with remarkable stories. To my surprise, I loved it. The interviews reminded me why I wrote Radical Return in the first place. They were not about selling a book. They were about curiosity, generosity, and creating conversations that extended beyond my own story.

Then the comments started appearing: “We want to hear more from you.” Each time, I felt both touched and exposed. I know how to ask thoughtful questions. I know how to help others find language for experiences they cannot yet name. I’ve spent my career illuminating other people’s stories. Learning to trust that my own voice belongs in the conversation feels different.

As I’ve sat with that discomfort, I’ve realized it is not really fear. It’s grief: the grief of losing anonymity, of surrendering the illusion that privacy guarantees safety, of knowing that no matter how carefully I write, someone will misunderstand me. It is the grief of wondering whether people I love will recognize themselves in stories that were never meant to indict them, and of accepting that some relationships may shift simply because I chose to tell the truth.

There is another grief I hadn’t anticipated: responsibility. Once your voice reaches beyond your own circle, it no longer belongs only to you. Readers bring their own histories, hopes, and wounds. Some will find themselves in these pages; others will not. Some may disagree with me completely. That is no longer mine to control. There is something both terrifying and tender about releasing work that was born in solitude into the hands of strangers.

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As publication gets closer, I find myself thinking less about reviews or sales than about identity. The woman who wrote this memoir in private cannot accompany it into the world unchanged. She needed privacy, trusted readers, and the freedom to change her mind before the words became permanent.

The woman stepping into this next chapter is learning something different: that visibility is not the same as self-promotion, that sharing your own story can create permission for someone else to tell theirs, and that stepping forward does not mean abandoning the work of witnessing. It means becoming willing to be witnessed, too.

Maybe that’s true of every meaningful transition. From the outside, these moments look like beginnings. From the inside, they often feel like endings. We celebrate the courage it takes to answer a calling, but we talk much less about what we have to grieve in order to live it: the safety of remaining unknown, relationships that may change, identities that no longer fit, and the responsibility that comes with having a voice.

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Perhaps that is the quiet work of every new chapter: not simply turning the page, but thanking the person who carried us through the last one.

As I step into this next chapter, I don’t feel fearless. I feel grateful: grateful for the psychologist who spent years helping other people find their voices, for the writer who protected these stories until they were ready, and for the woman who believed that listening was enough. She carried me this far. Now it’s my turn to trust that my own voice belongs in the conversation, too.

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This essay is part of the Between Chapters project, inspired by the book. What chapters are you between? How did you get from one chapter to another? Share your story here.

What Chapter Are You…

Leaving:

Having little kids at home during the day.

In:

Stay at home mom, raising big kids.

Entering:

Parenting elementary, middle, and high school kids all at the same time.

Gone are the days of double strollers and sippy cups. Gone are the days of diapers and wipes. Gone are the tiny toes, little hands, sticky faces, and high chairs. Gone are the naps, binkies, and blankies. Gone are the middle-of-the-night feedings and snuggles. Gone are the days that seemed never-ending, when my recovering body was exhausted and overworked.

I didn’t think it would happen, but it did.

Independence arrived quietly, then took over. Good-morning hugs are no longer automatic.

And I miss it.

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Now we are in the days of teenagers and big feelings. Now we are in the days of homework, fitting in, and finding their way. Now we are in the days of counting down until moving on and growing up.

It happens too fast.

That’s what they said.

I just nodded my head and rolled my eyes. Did they know the day I had? Potty training was a nightmare. Someone skipped a nap. Someone had an ear infection. The demands. So many demands.

The crying. The endless crying.

Did we lose the binky?

I wasn’t sure I had another day like this in me. And yet, somehow, I did.

But you know what?

It happened.

The realization snuck up on me at 11 p.m., as I scrolled through old photos.

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How was that six years ago?

I finally allowed my heart to grieve, something I wasn’t prepared to do. I didn’t realize I was living in a chapter that was about to end.

I never imagined I’d miss those ordinary days enough to give them a name: the gone days.

I wish I could have held onto those little hands just a little longer. Read Snuggle Puppy one more time. Carried my tiny baby in a sling on my chest again.

I was blessed to do these things five times over. Even knowing that my last time would be the last, I still wasn’t prepared.

Now, sitting at the park watching my children play, I cry over feelings I didn’t know were waiting for me. I cry at a park they will soon outgrow.

I’m somewhere in the middle years now, with children in elementary, middle, and high school. Their needs are different, and that’s okay. My heart feels different too. Maybe it’s called being seasoned. Maybe it’s called getting older. But when I see a double stroller or a baby in a carrier, I think of the days that are gone.

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It terrifies me.

Because the days I’m living now will become the gone days too.

To experience both is a blessing.

A gift.

If you’re still living inside the days I now call gone, try to cherish them.

You won’t know they’re gone until they are.

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This essay is part of the Between Chapters project, inspired by the book. What chapters are you between? How did you get from one chapter to another? Share your story here.

What Chapter Are You…

Leaving:

Practicing law, running a business, and raising four children on my own.

In:

Becoming a full-time writer and loving my new role as "Nana.”

Entering:

Choosing what really matters to me.

Dear You,

I want to tell you something.

But first I want to smell you, to feel your tiny body nestled in the crook of my arm, to be awed by the length of your fingers and toes, wondering where they came from.

I want to rub the soft bit of black fuzz on the top of your still cone-shaped head, the softest thing I have ever felt.

And I want to fly to a magical place where you must have been imagined, and be connected to you through generations.

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Wake up, so I can stare into those blue eyes, deep and serious, flickering open and closed as you toy with the idea of becoming fully alert, part of this world.

How does love begin? How does it form? The heart needs no instruction; its beating is enough. Love is building with each look, each breath, each touch.

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There is something other worldly about you. I am transported to a faraway place — the moon, perhaps — where there is no gravity and we are allowed to float.

I want to know your two-day-old thoughts, stored in that majestic forehead, the yet unformed eyebrows, already furrowed when you are agitated.

I want to tell you something about this world you have been brought into: its harshness, its unfairness, its disappointments. But I won’t. There is time for the lessons I wish you didn’t need to learn.

Today I want to tell you about sunshine, the feeling of giddiness and warmth when you step outside and the sun greets you with a hug, inviting you to stand under its umbrella of light.

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Today I want to tell you about strawberries, the sensation you have when you pick up the red dimpled fruit, take a bite, and are taken to a land of deliciousness, juice dripping onto your fingers, daring you to lick it off.

Today I want to tell you about how satisfying it is to be immersed in a book, the characters as real to you as friends or family, the worlds strung together in ways that cause you to stop and gasp, their impact so unexpected. I want to tell you about stories that you couldn’t have imagined taking you places, deepening your understanding of the world, making you laugh or cry, but always making you want to stay, to hear more in this sacred place that is always available to you.

Today I want to tell you about the ocean, the thrill of standing at its edge in disbelief at how grand it is, sand getting stuck between your toes, reminding you how integrated with nature you are. Today I want to tell you about looking out at the horizon, knowing that something is beckoning you from the distance, waves rolling up and melting your fear, the refreshing tinkling of cold water splashing while original thoughts fill your mind as you take it all in, better for having been there.

Today I want to tell you about laughter, how giggles are contagious and spread like wildfire and what an explosive release it is to laugh with your whole body, a reminder in the moment that life is worth living. How sometimes, when you laugh so hard that tears come to your eyes, you recognize another emotion, another possibility on the heels of laughing, a nuanced intersection between joy and sorrow that tugs at your heart.

Today I want to tell you about my dad, your great-grandfather, for whom you are named. He was my North Star, my moral compass, and made me feel as loved as I want to make you feel now. He was a reminder of my own goodness and worth, a place of belonging, the only man I knew whose thoughts, actions, and words aligned and in whose love I felt safe and confident. He would have loved you beyond words.

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There’s so much to tell you, little one. But I want to listen even more: to hear what makes you you, what rocks your world, what brings you to your knees, what comforts you, and fills you up. I want to be there to hear about it all.

You are the one to carry on the family name, to make your mark. When I feel your tiny body against mine, I am brought back thirty-four years when your father was my baby and I looked into his eyes and became whole, agreeing in that instant to a purpose-driven life. Caretaking, modeling, providing, guiding, and loving.

This is the passing of the torch. My first son holding his first son. The universe is shrinking around us, pushing away worry and doubt, keeping expectations at bay, a narrowing in, closer and closer, until there is nothing but an unnameable connection. There’s a bond that needs no bridge, a knowing that pounds inside, a beginning, a middle, and an end. A parent and child entering into a pact without rules, without instruction, just intuitive movement towards one another, the sealing of a generational imperative.

I watch the fingers of the child I bore clasping the fingers of the child he fathered and consider the possibility that my work is done.

My heart bursts with love for what possibilities now exist, for our family, for the world, for the future.

You have a place here because others have departed. The truth of that still raw. Those who loved first, who sacrificed much, and who broke my heart when they said adieu.

It’s easy to say it’s the circle of life, and it is, but knowing that doesn’t alleviate the pain, the sorrow, the missing. Grief dissolves into love and the love is elevated, prescient, remembered, revealed. My grandparents, my brothers, my parents.

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I imagine us all, siblings, parents, grandparents, great-grandparents, cousins, aunts and uncles, babies and children, all siting on the screened porch in my parents’ house in Larchmont, NY. I can hear laughter, intense conversation, a baby’s cry, a toddler’s whine, teenage giggling. My mother is serving cheese and crackers on floral plates, surrounded by figs and grapes and newly shelled walnuts. My father is pouring glasses of Beaujolais Nouveau and everyone is toasting you, the latest addition to the clan.

The old are fading while the young are just getting started. Traits are passed on, strong genes are on display, while traditions are cherished and stereotypes shatter. Time passing on. Lives well lived.

You are a part of it all, my love, this tapestry of humans who have endured and dreamed, survived and succumbed.

I hear my father as he stands and raises his glass.

“You have a strong name, son. You will grow into it.”

I see my mother gently kiss the top of your head.

“Root for the Yankees”, a chorus of voices shout.

“Love theatre!”

“Love fishing,” my brothers chime in.

The chair where my mother used to sit when she held your father, my son, her first grandson, is visible both in the now and the then. The light is peering in through the screen, and she is cast in a rosy glow, her fingers, long like yours, but bony and a little stiff, her sharp blue eyes demanding the truth.

I am in that chair now, older than she was then. Time is collapsing. Decades are circling. There is a collective heart beating, bursting with joy, all of us at the party of life. Applause can be heard. You are welcomed to the world and I to the older generation where I step into the unknown, bringing with me tools I was given by those I honor, which I will share with you, my beautiful boy.

Let’s begin with this. Love well, love loud, love hard, and love in the face of it all.

Love,

Nana

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This essay is part of the Between Chapters project, inspired by the book. What chapters are you between? How did you get from one chapter to another? Share your story here.

What Chapter Are You…

Leaving:

Four years of structured university life.

In:

The post-graduation "in-between."

Entering:

Early adulthood and professional independence in a new city.

For twenty-plus years, life had a built-in trajectory. Fifth grade led to sixth. Sophomore year led to junior year Finals led to summer. The school handled the timeline for you. You might have been overwhelmed, but at least everyone agreed on what week it was.

Then, you graduate and the timeline stops. Suddenly, there is no syllabus, registrar, or automated email from an advisor titled, “Important Next Steps.” (You begin to crave that correspondence with humiliating intensity.) The day belongs to you. This is presented as “freedom,” but often feels like being thrown into the water, not knowing how to swim.

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Postgrad life is strange because nothing has technically gone wrong. You graduated! People are proud of you. There were photos and flowers and cards. And yet, immediately after, the ceremony curdles into logistics. Where are you living? What are you doing? Are you moving? Are you saving money?

You apply to entry-level jobs and tweak your résumé because you are unsure whether past responsibilities like “assisted with project management” sound too vague. You write cover letters in a tone of forced enthusiasm: “I am thrilled to apply” and “I have long admired your work.” It feels pathetic, this stream of polite petitions sent into hiring portals that may not even be monitored by real people.

The design flaw of postgrad life is that it begins with a ceremony which suggests completion. We dress up the end of college as a coronation, but the experience is closer to being pushed off a dock while everyone waves from the shore. A diploma has a cruel joke built into it: the document says you are finished, while every practical detail suggests you have barely begun.

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The worst part is having to explain yourself when you don’t have the answers. At family dinners, in the grocery store, or on your mother’s Facebook page, someone always asks: “So, what’s next?”

Before you can think, your anxiety answers for you. Your shoulders tighten, you smile in a way that is highly overqualified and deeply underpaid, and you offer a cheerful response about looking for roles in New York, grad school, or “taking the summer to figure things out.” The question is affectionate, but it lands like a small civic interrogation.

What people want is a clean answer: a job title, a city, a start date, and a salary that does not require parental euphemism. A happy before-and-after story. Student to employee. Dorm room to apartment. Small errands become tests of competence. Returning an online order, refilling a prescription, depositing a check, calling the dentist back. Somehow, they become existential. You wonder: Can I be trusted to manage a life?

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Sometimes the answer appears to be no. It is easy to have a minor breakdown over something ordinary, like choosing an email subject line that sounds professional without sounding embalmed. In postgrad life, the scale gets warped. One ghosted email feels like ruin, one decent networking call can feel like salvation. You start to feel everything more intensely when no one is watching.

After graduation, wanting becomes unsupervised. No one tells you which opportunities are worth your time, which ambitions are real, or which ones you inherited from prestige, panic, or Instagram.

You learn that some jobs look better on paper than they do in real life. You learn that prestige is a drug with a miserable comedown. You learn that a city can feel like destiny in the abstract and a utility bill in the concrete. You learn that comparison turns affection into acid.

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Part of the problem is that postgrad life is unusually public. Everyone is announcing something: a job, a move, a fellowship, a lease, a new city. The language is almost always the same. People are “excited to share,” “thrilled to announce,” and “grateful for the opportunity.” Meanwhile, the actual process is much less photogenic. There are unanswered emails, awkward informational calls, half-written cover letters, and long afternoons spent wondering whether “just following up” sounds normal or desperate.

But the effort accumulates. The cover letters and conversations add up. The humiliations compound too, but so do the recoveries. You send the follow-up. You ask for advice. You survive the silence, fix the sentences, show up anyway, and try again.

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This essay is part of the Between Chapters project, inspired by the book. What chapters are you between? How did you get from one chapter to another? Share your story here.

What Chapter Are You…

Leaving:

My post-maternity leave chapter.

In:

The querying trenches as an Indie author

Entering:

About to sign with my very first literary agent! YAY!!

This world is not meant to be easy on a childbearing woman.

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Three weeks ago, as I stood making a cup of coffee, cradling my fourth baby, who had been nestled at my breast for the previous twenty minutes, I thought to myself: I can’t wait to go back to work.

The laundry had piled up. The dishes sat unwashed in the kitchen sink. My work as a writer had been placed on hold for months. My still-recovering body was worn down. Bags under my eyes held more fluid than usual. My normal bandwidth — being able to balance it all well — was missing. Instead, I was in a soul-crushing sea of chores, never-ending tasks, and mundane responsibilities of motherhood.

But now, back at my desk as a psychiatric office supervisor, a position I’ve held for almost twelve years, I find myself thinking: I wish I could go back on maternity leave.

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Why is it that women have to choose between quality time with their children or a job we enjoy? What about our ever-fragile sanity?

In my last week of maternity leave, I took time to reflect. I was thankful I had a job to go back to with colleagues who were counting on my return. I was grateful to have another healthy baby. I was fortunate to be married to a supportive husband. Yet inside, I was screaming to be anywhere but home, even though it was a home filled with love, laughter, and good health.

Between the weeks of sleepless nights, the smell of spoiled milk capping each of my shoulders, the extra skin that hung over my pajama pants, and my unwashed hair tossed up into a bun each morning, I longed to be myself again. I was having irrational thoughts, like: if I could just squeeze back into those jeans that once fit, or if I could travel the roads in my own car, then I could get some happiness back.

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Turns out, what I was missing was a routine separate from that of being a wife and mother. One that didn’t involve me holding my beautiful new daughter 24/7 or cleaning up an endlessly dirty house.

The thing is, now that I’ve gotten my routine back, I still feel like something is missing. Sadly and alarmingly, I find myself longing to go back in time. I find with a little more rest, I can now appreciate the moments I can’t get back, no matter how hard I try. Like little toes that curl at the touch of my hand. A coo and a smile when she sees my face in the morning. A cry that is comforted by the crook of my arm, placed just right. A crook no one else seems to be able to offer.

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Why did I rush it? Why did I rush that uninterrupted time with her? She’s my last baby. Everyone else is grown. My oldest hardly seems to need me anymore. It’s all carpooling, and sports, and endless snacks at the ready. I wish I could go back to making those cups of coffee with her feeding at my breast and falling asleep for hours in the crook of my arm.

I pick her up from daycare, a solid ten hours with someone else to rock her to sleep, desperate to see her at the end of my workday. Many women like me have to take those ten hours away from their children to be able to provide for them. Yes, that required time away is spent doing work that I enjoy, but still. It’s a vicious cycle of hoping and praying I am doing the right thing. For me. For them.

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The guilt I felt in my last week of maternity leave was unbearable. How could I wish for time away from the child I prayed for? I reminded myself of the miscarriage I had last summer, thinking, you lucky woman. You got pregnant again so quickly after such a horrible loss, and now you have everything you could ever want. You have things some women will never get to experience. Why aren’t you soaking it up and enjoying this time?

It isn’t that simple.

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This essay is part of the Between Chapters project, inspired by the book. What chapters are you between? How did you get from one chapter to another? Share your story here.

What Chapter Are You…

Leaving:

Seeing my mother through the lens of her death.

In:

Reaching my mother's age.

Entering:

Deepening my relationship with the woman she became.

I always understood that my mother died too young, which didn’t stop me from thinking of her as old. She made it to sixty-four. As my birthdays came and went, I knew — or, at least, believed — that one day I would reach an age she never did. I wondered what that birthday would feel like. If there would be sadness. If I would resent friends my age who still had their mothers. If crossing into the years she never lived would somehow change our relationship.

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Last year, I turned sixty-five. And suddenly that woman, my mother, seemed incredibly young. For the first time, I stopped thinking about the loss, or even the age at which she died, and started thinking about all that life she was able to live.

When people ask about my mother, I usually begin with her diagnosis. Stage IV ovarian cancer. She was fifty years old. The doctors could have caught it sooner, but for months they told her whatever she was feeling was because of her weight. By the time they finally took her seriously, they gave her two years.

In a rare moment of agency, she looked at them and said, “You don’t know that. You don’t get to tell me how long I get to live. I’ll decide.” And so she did. For fourteen more years.

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Recently, I came at the math differently. (That’s my father’s side of me at work.) Fourteen years is nearly a quarter of her life. My mother spent almost twenty-two percent of her life living with a terminal diagnosis. I had never thought about her life that way before.

I always loved my mother’s story, not simply because she beat the odds, but because she did cancer well. She gave herself permission to do things she had only dreamed about, or things that scared her. She took up acting classes and wrote poetry. She discovered facials, became a grandmother, and started to remove a port-wine stain birthmark from her face. She joined a woman’s support group where newly diagnosed women looked to her for hope. The woman who had spent much of her life doubting herself became someone other women believed in.

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For most of those fourteen years, we lived on opposite coasts. My parents were in Los Angeles. I had moved to New York. There were phone calls and visits. I flew west to watch her perform a scene from the play “‘Night, Mother” at Roxbury Park in Beverly Hills. But there was so much of her life I never knew. I didn’t even know she had cancer until after her first surgery. She didn’t tell anyone except for my father. Not my brothers or her friends. Not even her own sister or mother. She needed to know she was a survivor before letting anyone in.

At first I was angry. She didn’t tell us? Not even me?

Then I realized my feelings weren’t about my mother, they were about myself. My fears, not hers.

Several surgeries followed as the cancer spread to her spleen and other areas. Through it all, she slowly stopped auditioning for her own life and simply started living it. When the cancer found its way into her liver, a three-year-window became three days. And when she left, I thought the lesson was simple: Life is short. Just a few months later my understanding started to change.

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Independent of my mother’s death, I had decided to do something completely out of character. I had never liked massages, spas, or meditation. My workaholic ways were worn like a badge of honor. But I had begun to understand they weren’t sustainable. So I booked a week at Canyon Ranch in Tucson and attended their Life Enhancement Program. Without realizing it, I had arrived during Mother-Daughter weekend, an experience my mother and I never got to share in any form.

At my first-ever hypnotherapy session, the therapist said, “I don’t usually say things like this, but I do feel your mother is with us.” She put me into a relaxed state, eyes closed, body reclined, and guided me down a staircase.

“On the bookcase there’s a black book,” she said. “I want you to reach for it and pick it up. It’s heavy.” She told me it held all the sadness and tears I had been carrying for my mother since I was little. “She wants it all back now. She’s strong enough to hold it herself.”

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From there, I wandered into the gift shop. I don’t like jewelry, but I do like to look at it, which is what I was doing when I heard the two voices.

“Can I help you?”

My eyes were focused downward, studying the jewelry.

“Yes, please let us know if we can help you,” said the other.

I looked up at the two saleswomen standing side by side. One wore a name-tag that read Ellen. The other was Ruth. My mother’s name. In that order. Ellen Ruth.

It was our first mother-daughter weekend after all. Over the years, my mother has kept finding me. On a trip to Merída, Mexico, I found myself writing about her in Spanish. A shift in language helped me understand her with generosity English never had. Each encounter has felt less like remembering her and more like meeting another part of the woman she became.

One year ago, she found me on stage, the night before summer solstice. June 21st was her birthday. I had been invited to perform spoken word at Grand Performances in downtown Los Angeles. The theme was “What is a Woman?”

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“Ellen Ruth. Maiden name Groer. Tonight, I want each of you to know her. So join me in this moment. A word that begins with mom.”

Standing at the microphone, less than three months from the birthday my mother never got to have, I shared her story. Or perhaps I should say, we shared the stage.

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This essay is part of the Between Chapters project, inspired by the book. What chapters are you between? How did you get from one chapter to another? Share your story here.

For more than a decade, I have operated under an unspoken, psychological survival mechanism: fake it till you make it. It is a protective armor familiar to anyone who has survived the grueling, high-stakes crucible of medical training. Look in the mirror, pull on a white coat, and repeat the mantra until the boundaries between performing competence and embodying it begin to blur.

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But recently, I have been waking up to a strange realization: I am no longer a student. I am over a decade into my career as a surgeon. The external markers of success are indisputably present; I am trusted with intricate, complex procedures, and, financially, I am comfortably in a higher tax bracket. But internally, my habits, my spending patterns, and my self-image have remained stubbornly anchored to the survival mindsets of my immigrant family upbringing and my exhausting residency years.

My current “in-between” chapter is not defined by a conventional transition like a divorce, a move, or an empty nest. Instead, it is defined by an internal mandate: the desire to elevate. I am intentionally closing the book on the provisional, faking-it phase of my life and learning how to fully inhabit the reality I worked so hard to build. It is an evolution from scarcity to abundance, from holding back to stepping forward.

This friction showed up in the small, quiet corners of daily life, where old habits refused to die. Why, as an established surgeon, was I still instinctively recycling old gift bags or settling for flimsy plastic storage containers? Why was I still, again and again, leaning toward imitation jewelry when I desired precious gems? Why was I telling myself I didn’t need a matching pair of shoes for a formal event, or continuing to use worn-out ladles? More tellingly, why was I still tempted to refer out complex surgical cases instead of fully owning the mastery I have spent thousands of hours perfecting?

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Elevation means moving past the compromises of my twenties. It means trading temporary substitutes for quality that lasts, intentionally supporting small and local businesses, and embracing a visual aesthetic that feeds my soul — neutral tones, better fabrics, organic food, and the deliberate creation of a beautiful home, right down to the gold sink and the intricate Indian-style wallpaper in the powder room.

I often find myself overthinking this shift, wrestling with the guilt that women and daughters of modest upbringings in particular so frequently carry. Is this vanity? Am I just swept up in the polished curation of social media grids and glossy magazines? I struggle with these questions constantly. But I am beginning to realize that true elevation is not about superficial flash or keeping up with external expectations.

In fact, the most vital part of this transition is elevating my boundaries. To elevate is to claim a life well-lived. It means outgrowing the fear of what others will say. It means no longer being passive or allowing myself to be taken advantage of, whether at group outings or when requests for donations arise. It is about moving from a place of chronic overcompensation to one of quiet, solid confidence, and trusting myself with the surgical cases I once would have handed off.

It is the challenging, beautiful process of ensuring that my internal architecture matches my external achievements — and that phase of authentic ownership has begun.

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This essay is part of the Between Chapters project, inspired by the book. What chapters are you between? How did you get from one chapter to another? Share your story here.

I’d heard the ancient Yiddish proverb, “We plan, God laughs,” but I’d never fully understood the depth of its meaning until the summer of 2023.

Until then, my life had unfolded almost exactly according to plan. I had an amazing husband, two children, a dog, a house in the suburbs, and a fulfilling career in health care. I was Type A, organized, routinized, and always in control, functioning mostly on autopilot.

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On June 11, 2023, Eric, my husband of thirty years, died from a brain tumor. In an instant, every plan came to a halt. I was thrust into a chapter of life I never imagined and certainly never wanted: widowhood.

The thing about widowhood is that there is no routine, no rulebook and no sense of control. I felt completely untethered and desperately searched for a way to make it through. Grief was unpredictable, refusing to follow a schedule. True to my nature, I approached grief like a college course I was determined to ace. I went to therapy, attended multiple support groups, read countless books, and listened to podcasts. It was my therapist who gently reminded me of a truth I desperately needed to hear: you can’t earn an A in grief.

Instead, this chapter became one of deep introspection. I learned that healing wasn’t about mastering grief or finding a shortcut through it. It was about allowing myself to feel every emotion, surrendering the need to control the process, and, as uncomfortable as it was, embracing the suck.

I had always believed strength meant independence and perseverance. Widowhood taught me that strength sometimes looks like accepting help, saying I’m not okay, and allowing people to sit beside you instead of trying to fix you. I recognized that, for perhaps the first time in my life, I would have to allow myself to be vulnerable and accept that I couldn’t navigate this journey alone.

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Although at times the pain seemed unbearable, I decided I needed to turn my pain into purpose. My sons and I became actively involved in raising awareness and funds for brain tumor research, honoring Eric’s memory while helping other families facing the same devastating diagnosis.

I also made intentional changes to help move forward. I sold my house and moved into an apartment. I went zip-lining. Eventually, I also started dating. Each of these choices was a meaningful step toward rebuilding a life I never expected to have to create. None of these decisions erased my grief. They weren’t attempts to replace the life I had lost. They were quiet declarations that I was still alive, still capable of curiosity, courage, and joy. Each new experience reminded me that moving forward did not mean leaving Eric behind.

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I no longer plan as much as I once did. Instead, I try to live more fully in the present. I stop and smell the flowers. I practice gratitude for what I had, for what I have, and for the life I continue to build.

The widowhood “chapter” never truly ends because love and grief are forever intertwined. But it is not the final chapter in my story.

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This essay is part of the Between Chapters project, inspired by the book. What chapters are you between? How did you get from one chapter to another? Share your story here.

At age twenty-five, I was finally able to rent a car on vacation. I remember thinking, this is it—the last real milestone. Our whole lives are organized around them: graduating from one grade and moving on to the next, getting our license, becoming a legal voter, then a legal bar-goer. Then it’s graduating from school, getting a job, maybe meeting a partner, and having kids for some. And then abruptly, the map ends. What happens after the final milestone on this pre-laid cultural path, but before retirement?

There is no navigation system for the decades in between.

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I celebrated my forty-eighth birthday this year, inching ever-closer to half a century. On the same day, a social media post popped up in my feed letting me know that the most common age for a woman to end her life is between the ages of forty-five and sixty-four. Happy birthday to me.

The data, while often flattened into headlines, points to the truth, which is that midlife can be an especially psychologically vulnerable period for women. According to the CDC, females between ages forty and fifty-nine have the highest rate of depression of any age group in the United States.

Not every season of life feels the same—some years feel expansive, and others fall into the well-that-was-a-doozy category. Midlife, for many women, holds what my husband and I call “aging years” – not because they necessarily correspond with getting older chronologically, but because of the way they seem to speed up the aging process. “Aging years” are periods marked by stress, loss, and mounting responsibilities.

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Sometimes, my friends and I are nostalgic for what we call our “wedding years,” that time in our twenties when life felt simpler: weekends filled with friends, our lives punctuated by celebrations and bursts of spontaneity.

So, I asked myself: What makes a wedding year (even sans the wedding)? When I think about those decades, I remember the joys of social connection, new experiences, goals to work towards, and a general sense of “aliveness.”

In an era filled with arranging family schedules, cooking, taking care of a home, and work responsibilities, it’s easy to move through the day on autopilot. There’s also fear sitting beside it all. The more I stay in my safe cocoon, the less empowered I feel to leave. Apprehension and exhaustion often win out over action. I wonder: In the midst of the responsibility and monotony, when does the actual living happen?

During midlife, joy rarely shows up on our doorstep as it did in our twenties and thirties when novelty and opportunity felt exponentially more accessible. The novelty that used to find us—a friend’s engagement to celebrate, a new city for someone’s bachelorette, a reason to dress up—is no longer knocking at our doors. Or at least, not in the same way.

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Recently, my son expressed an interest in visiting Copenhagen after discovering it was one of the most skateboard-friendly cities in the world. As I often do, I said, “Sure, maybe one day.” But then something unexpected happened. I found myself researching skate parks in Copenhagen and fold-up scooters for adults. Within a week, I had booked it. Sure, it wasn’t the most practical or money-conscious move, but instead of “maybe someday,” I just wanted to say yes. It felt hopeful to reclaim some of that spontaneity, and it immediately empowered me to become more active in my joy-seeking.

If adventure and novelty are to be part of midlife, we have to make it happen. For me, that looks like a middle-aged woman scooting around Scandinavia with a slightly embarrassed teenager in tow. For another friend, it’s returning to grad school at age fifty-two. But reclaiming your wedding years can also look like saying yes to more social plans, embracing more time in nature, or taking a photography class at your local library. It’s not the size of the gesture, but the intentional shift from staying on autopilot to driving the car, the decision to go after your joy with the optimism of a twenty-two-year-old.

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Sure, our surges of vitality may be in between loads of laundry or sending emails; they might even be in the midst of an aging year. But the wedding years weren’t exciting every day either. It’s not about constant thrill-seeking, but more about an orientation and openness that often shuts down as responsibilities mount. When the aging years press in and the map forward runs out, restlessness can be an invitation for change. It’s easy to get caught in “if only” thinking: if only we’d made different choices, if only circumstances had been different. But that mindset keeps us focused on what could have been rather than what is still possible. Sometimes, we can choose to say yes.

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This essay is part of the Between Chapters project, inspired by the book. What chapters are you between? How did you get from one chapter to another? Share your story here.

What Chapter Are You…

Leaving:

Chaotic last year of my forties where it felt like everything was falling apart.

In:

The bold, unapologetic world of my fifties that I didn’t realize was novel worthy.

Entering:

Taking a leap into a new genre of publishing not knowing where I’ll land.

My forty-ninth year took me from feeling like the belle of the ball to the bottom of the barrel. Even the best of intentions couldn’t tame the chaos of those twelve months. There were manuscript rejections, old heartbreaks, professional disappointment, and a diagnosis I still struggle to say out loud. The only thing that made that year bearable was Rockaway Boy.

At first, he was just an FDNY firefighter I passed on my daily walking route. I could never bring myself to have a conversation with him. I’d wave, say hello, and then walk a block or two down the street before thinking of the perfect opening line. He wasn’t always there when I passed, but somehow he was there when it counted. His smile made me feel seen, as if I were worth a million dollars.

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At the time, my writing career had seemed to hold such promise. But after pitching my latest YA manuscript, all nine agents who had expressed interest passed. As if staying on theme, I revisited three men from previous relationships. One admitted he went out with me out of pity. Another forgot to mention his current girlfriend. The last one ended up becoming a friend.

I was desperate for something to go right, so I applied for a temporary assignment at work I’d had my eye on for more than a decade. Armed with experience and education, I thought I was a shoo-in. I didn’t get it. As disappointing as that was, little did I know the worst was yet to come. During my annual echocardiogram, I was diagnosed with pulmonary hypertension. Two words nobody wants to hear. Two words I suddenly had to learn how to live with.

Test after test, needle after needle, dealing with my heart condition didn’t get any easier. Then winter came. The firehouse doors were shut more often, and I hadn’t seen Rockaway Boy in months. In spring, while waiting at the hospital for my heart catheterization, I scrolled through Instagram and saw a picture of him. He’d been promoted, which meant he’d be transferred. If I was ever going to say something, time was running out. So I returned to the firehouse, only to find out I’d missed him by a week. The best I could do was drop off a card, leaving my fate in the hands of his co-workers.

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As my fiftieth birthday neared, I decided to take myself back to the Rockaways. It began, in part, because of him, but it quickly became something else. Water has always calmed me. Born along the Erie Canal, educated at the University of Miami beside the Atlantic Ocean, and now living in New York City, blocks from the East River, water has followed me everywhere I go. Or perhaps I have followed it.

Dark clouds blanketed the sky as I arrived. I checked into the Rockaway Hotel, bundled up, and took a stroll along the boardwalk, where the howling wind tangled my curls and grains of sand stung my cheeks. After an hours-long battle against the elements, I returned to the hotel and found Rockaway Boy standing out front.

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I approached him, smiled, and shook his hand.

“Hi, I’m Kimberly,” I said.

We chatted briefly while the wind and rain continued swirling around us. When he said, “Happy birthday,” he leaned in for a hug. My chin fit perfectly on his shoulder, and I closed my eyes, refusing to step back. Knowing I might never have that opportunity again, I savored every second. When he eventually pulled away, I could see it in his eyes — or maybe I only imagined I could: I’d waited too long.

Still, the moment stayed with me. Later that year, I’d attended a live podcast where her guest, , spoke about how she’d flipped the script when plan A failed. She’d pivoted to plan B instead. That got me thinking. My plan A was Rockaway Boy, but I struggled with plan B. I had spent so much time hoping he might rescue some part of the year for me that I hadn’t considered what it would mean to rescue myself.

Our brief moment reminded me of something a classmate once wrote in my high school yearbook: “Hey, locker neighbor. I don’t know what I’d do without your smiling face in the morning when I’ve had no sleep. Thank you for not cutting me down on those lousy days.” Little did I know that one day Rockaway Boy would do the same for me. Passing by his old firehouse won’t be the same without that smile I always took for granted. Now I’ll have to carry myself through the tough days ahead.

Maybe someday we’ll have a drink on the beach, and I’ll tell him about all the times our paths nearly crossed, and how one brief moment led me to write my first adult novel. Until then, here’s to you, Rockaway Boy. Your sweet smile and kind heart gave me my voice back.

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This essay is part of the Between Chapters project, inspired by the book. What chapters are you between? How did you get from one chapter to another? Share your story here.

What Chapter Are You…

Leaving:

A life in America that was predictable.

In:

Building a new life in Israel with career change and young kids.

Entering:

The settled stage, but still filled with questions.

Ideally, on my last day of work, I would have stopped at every nurse’s station to say goodbye. I would have taken an absurd number of selfies with all of my favorite people. I would have paused on the pedestrian bridge and taken the perfect picture of the hospital. I would have sat in my car, written a heartfelt post on social media, and driven away with that satisfying, albeit rare, feeling of complete closure. I would have had a moment to say goodbye to my career as a physician assistant.

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Instead, on that last day, I got the reality of hospital life on a Friday. I’d spent most of the day trying to transfer one of my female patients to the ICU. There were endless phone calls and several trips to find an attending physician willing to accept the transfer. Her tests had to be completed. Complications kept piling up. More consultants needed to be added to her case, and I had to contact each one and impress upon them the importance of seeing her before the weekend. I still had notes to finish and other patients to care for. I still had to say goodbye to everyone in the hospital. And I still had to get home in time for Shabbat.

Two of my closest work friends dragged me into the doctors’ lounge for a quick goodbye. They had found kosher cupcakes to share with me. We took one rushed picture, hugged quickly, and went right back to work. At the very last minute, I grabbed my things and raced across the pedestrian bridge. The next time I stopped moving, I was standing in front of my Shabbat candles. And that was it. My hospital life was over.

It is hard to explain to people who have never worked in a hospital how a building that holds so much fear and uncertainty, a place that contains the worst days of so many people’s lives, can also feel like a second home. How you can feel connected to hundreds of coworkers, some deeply and some only in passing, but all of them part of the same strange ecosystem. How certain smells and sounds can take you right back: cardiac monitors beeping, a ventilator cycling, the snap of a pair of gloves.

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Now in Israel, halfway across the world, I’ve visited hospitals a few times and they still feel familiar. The hallways are always impossible to navigate. The lobbies look like shopping malls. I walk past patient transporters and think of all the hospital employees I have known. A group of providers hurries by, and I think of my old self and the ease with which I moved through my hospital. On Friday mornings, my boss and I did rounds together. As we raced through the halls, someone would almost always call out, “Dream team in the house!”

I miss the feeling of caring for patients. I miss the early mornings, sitting down in front of the computer to see what had happened overnight. New patients. New complications. Old problems. Good news and bad, all mixed together.

I won’t pretend to look back with rose-colored glasses; there is plenty of pain in the hospital. Plenty of times I called family members with shaking hands and a pounding heart to share terrible news. Plenty of times I felt frustrated, helpless, and upset. Plenty of times I daydreamed about a boring office job where no one died. But on that last day, I knew how special it all had been. I wanted to look back up at the windows, see the lights, and thank that building for being my home for so many years. I wanted to whisper a farewell to the hospitals I had worked in before that one, because those had been homes too.

I can’t say for sure that if I had paused and taken that time I would feel any differently now. I don’t know that a few quiet seconds of gratitude would have made it easier to move on or magically put it to rest.

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But now, the last day firmly in the past, I sit and scroll through videos and pictures. The best one is a video of a fellow PA dressed in an inflatable dinosaur costume, wearing flashing neon shoes, riding a knee scooter down a closed-off hallway. There are pictures from March and April 2020. So many selfies in gowns, masks, and gloves. And there is my favorite picture, taken nearly a year before I left, on a day when I actually did stop to look back at the building as I walked toward my car. The sun is setting, and the sky behind the hospital is beautiful.

I had a wonderful career. I helped a lot of people. I held patients’ hands as they died. I held phones and iPads so loved ones could say goodbye. I spent hours listening to people, and even more hours explaining diagnoses, treatment plans, and why you cannot stay in the hospital forever. I met extraordinary people. I had the privilege of learning from incredibly knowledgeable and talented providers. I was part of the living, breathing ecosystem of a hospital.

I don’t know whether I will find my way back there. I don’t know whether that is where I am meant to be. But I am grateful the memories exist. I am grateful to have those years. And wherever I end up, I hope it grants half the sense of home that a hospital once gave me.

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This essay is part of the Between Chapters project, inspired by the book. What chapters are you between? How did you get from one chapter to another? Share your story here.

Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about the new stage of life I’m in: a season of reinvention, gratitude, challenge, and possibility, all arriving at once.

Every day, I wake up building something. My jewelry business, which started as a creative passion, has become a larger platform for storytelling, connection, and purpose. Each collaboration, each bracelet, each conversation, reminds me that it’s never too late to dream bigger and create something meaningful.

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At the same time, my podcast has opened an entirely new chapter. In every interview, I’m reminded that other people are constantly reinventing themselves. These conversations inspire me, challenge me, and often mirror my own journey. They are proof that growth does not stop at a certain age. In many ways, it seems some of our most exciting chapters might still be ahead.

My marriage is also entering a new seasons. After years together, my husband and I have found that there are many ways to rediscover each another, create new traditions, and embrace beginnings. There is something powerful about choosing each other again and again through every stage of life.

Then there is the role I cherish most—being a grandmother. Nothing quite prepared me for the joy of watching the next generation grow. It grants a different perspective on time, family, and what truly matters. There is a tenderness in being a grandmother that feels different from motherhood. It is less about control and more about presence. Less about guiding every step and more about celebrating the magic of watching life unfold.

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Meanwhile, I’m supporting my daughters as they build their own lives. Whether they’re navigating pregnancy, relationships, careers, motherhood, or simply finding their way, I’m learning that parenting adult children requires a different kind of strength. Sometimes they need advice. Sometimes they need support. And sometimes they simply need someone to listen. The greatest gift I can give them isn’t having all the answers; it’s reminding them that they are capable of finding their own.

Finally, friendships. As life gets busier, friendships require even more intention, and yet, they’ve never felt more important. I find myself celebrating milestones with old friends, cheering them on through exciting new chapters, and standing beside them during some of their hardest moments. Life has taught me that friendship isn’t just about sharing the good times. It’s about showing up. It’s about answering the phone, sending the text, and making the visit.

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The older I get, the more I realize that we are all carrying something. Some of us are navigating loss. Some are rebuilding after divorce. Some are finding love again. Some are facing health challenges. Some are stepping into dreams they’ve delayed for decades. And all of us, in one way or another, are reinventing ourselves.

Perhaps that’s what this chapter is really about. It’s about understanding that life does not arrive in neat, separate compartments. Career, family, marriage, friendship, purpose, and personal growth all happen simultaneously. Some days it feels overwhelming. Other days, it can feel extraordinary. Most days are a little bit of both.

I’ve stopped waiting for life to settle down before embracing what’s next. Instead, I’m learning to appreciate the beautiful complexity of it all. The entrepreneur in me is building. The storyteller in me is learning. The wife in me is growing. The mother in me is supporting. The grandmother in me is celebrating. The friend in me is showing up. And the woman in me is still evolving. Always.

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This essay is part of the Between Chapters project, inspired by the book. What chapters are you between? How did you get from one chapter to another? Share your story here.

What Chapter Are You…

Leaving:

Stay-at-home mom.

In:

Empty-ish nest.

Entering:

Trying to figure that out!

The longing is real. The missing is real. But this is my time, and that is exciting. Right? Time to reinvent myself, to fuel my passions, to reignite my career. I could travel, get myself in tip-top shape, create photo books, organize the attic, have more date nights with my husband, snuggle up with book after book after book, and, oh yeah, finish writing that novel.

And yet… I am still needed. In fact, I think others have done a better job of figuring out how to make use of my “free” time than I have. I am still struggling to find structure in this new space, and to say, “I am so sorry, I can’t,” when technically I could.

No one is making me say yes, but I keep shuffling my dreams to the back burner. And wait, what are my dreams again? Just writing these words makes me feel guilty because I love helping friends and family, and more than anything, I love being my kids’ mom. I realize that these two versions of myself do not need to be mutually exclusive. Of course I can nurture myself and the people I love in the same season. So, why am I faltering?

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The novel I imagine writing keeps drifting further and further away. I mean, I guess it would be cool to have a debut novel at age seventy, but fifty-five already feels too old. And, just as in my life, I am having trouble envisioning what comes next for my heroine, Katie Valentine. I need time to sit with her. Just us.

“So take the time,” my family will say. But it’s not that simple.

I used to be spunky and ambitious, but now I feel a bit disoriented. I am happy, but I miss the routine of school days and activities. I am so proud of my kids and who they are becoming, but I also want them to be proud of me. I want to do something meaningful and measurable so they can say, “That’s my mom.”

The thought of finding my thing is exciting. But what is it? I would like a roadmap with step-by-step instructions, but since I am unsure of my destination, I don’t know how to program my GPS. Still, I feel something brewing, something bubbling inside me. And as much as I wish I could reread the previous chapter, I am hopeful that good stories await me as I turn the page.

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This essay is part of the Between Chapters project, inspired by the book. What chapters are you between? How did you get from one chapter to another? Share your story here.

What Chapter Are You…

Leaving:

A familiar and comfortable home.

In:

Figuring out life in a new city.

Entering:

Parenting teens, caregiving for parents and midlife.

The phone call came on the last night of spring break, an unusually quiet Sunday in our normally bustling household of five.

We all seemed to be coasting on the relaxed energy of having just returned from time away. My husband and I were puttering around the kitchen while the kids sat at the counter, finishing crunchy bites of toast. I was wiping the last breadcrumbs from the countertops, about to start ushering everyone upstairs to bed, when my husband’s work phone gave a sharp ring, pulling us out of our respective reveries. When we saw the caller’s name, my husband and I looked at each other. We both knew it meant something significant.

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Our world came to a standstill as we processed the news: my husband had been asked to accept a new role at work, one that required us to move to the other side of the country, to Toronto, a city more than 2,000 miles from our hometown.

My thoughts immediately turned to how our lives were about to be upended. Where we lived. Where my kids went to school. Finding new doctors, dentists, optometrists, hairdressers, pet sitters. Everything familiar was about to change.

In the days that followed, a master to-do list formed in my mind. It grew so long that it felt like the endless, old-timey scroll of names Santa maintains, the one that keeps spiraling in perpetuity. My list was, unfortunately, not of the magical variety, and I would have no superhuman elves assisting me. Instead, it was filled with tasks I was manically triaging in order to get us ready in five months.

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After a brief, hyper-intense stint of trying to sort and control everything, I became overwhelmed and exhausted. I wanted an escape. I felt like crawling under a blanket and forgetting about all of it. My frantic preparations had left little time to process the emotional upheaval of our move. We would be leaving the only city my kids had ever called home and moving to a city where we hardly knew anyone. There were no action items on my list that would help us cope with our feelings.

Moves like this were not new to me. I had made similar cross-country journeys, but they’d happened when I was young and unencumbered. I had moved with little more than one suitcase in tow. Plus, I had always been moving toward something: an exciting opportunity or a promising job. This time, my husband was the one about to embark on a wonderful new opportunity. Not me.

The kids and I were thrilled for him, but we didn’t feel the same pull toward our new city. All they could see was what they were leaving behind: cousins, best friends, sports teams, a beloved school. This was a world in which we were not only full entrenched, but thrived.

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In my new phase of denial and resistance, I started to hope for some insurmountable obstacle to derail our move. Perhaps we wouldn’t find schools we liked. Maybe the real estate market would be too crazy. I had grown weary from making phone calls to realtors, emailing schools, and figuring out how to transport two dogs and a temperature-sensitive lizard to a new city. I wanted someone else to make the decisions on my behalf. Really, I think I just wanted someone to tell me I could stay where I was comfortable.

Of course, life doesn’t work that way, so I kept chipping away at the to-do list, albeit with a kind of numb detachment. When it came time to take an exploratory trip to Toronto, I felt sick to my stomach as I boarded the plane.

I put on a brave face as we explored the city, its neighborhoods, and schools. We took the kids to a baseball game to get them excited for their new chapter. Tulips were blooming, and the city felt more lively and upbeat than our own. It felt almost promising.

Then we got another extraordinary phone call. This time, the news pulled us back toward home; my mom had received a cancer diagnosis. If I had still been looking for an escape, this could have been it, although not in the way I had imagined. By then, however, we were already mid-move. We had found great schools for our kids. We had found a home. We had bought tickets to upcoming basketball games and shows, leaning into a sense of possibility and adventure.

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Meanwhile back home, my mother’s cancer became acute. She was hospitalized for what became a month-long stay. As the kids finished out their school year, I spent my time juggling caregiving with moving preparations from the hard vinyl guest chair in her hospital room. As I watched machines and doctors monitor my mom, the impossibility of what was on the horizon became painfully clear. How could I leave when I was needed here the most? But how could we not move when our livelihood depended on it, and when it was such an incredible opportunity? My kids were starting to dig in their heels as their final day of school approached. They were facing a big goodbye.

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My eldest, a teenager about to enter high school, was the most upset. One night, I finally sat him down, one-on-one, to talk through it. He shared his concerns, and I unexpectedly found myself encouraging him to make the move, to take the leap. I told him that if we didn’t do this, we would always wonder where it might have led us, what we might have learned about ourselves, and what experiences we might have had. In that moment, I realized I was not simply telling him what I thought he needed to hear. I believed it myself.

There was still plenty of unpredictability, but I felt more at ease with it. We still had little clarity about my mom’s health or about many aspects of our new lives, but I did have clarity on what mattered most: we were making the right decision, together.

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This essay is part of the Between Chapters project, inspired by the book. What chapters are you between? How did you get from one chapter to another? Share your story here.

What Chapter Are You…

Leaving:

The work world.

In:

The over-sixty crowd.

Entering:

The “senior citizen/retired” chapter.

My husband kisses me goodbye as he heads to the office. These days, it often lands on my cheek.

We met when I was a junior in high school, outside the United States, on the eve of his mandatory military service. We quickly realized we were soulmates. But our romance came to an abrupt and unnatural end when, just five months after we met, my parents moved our family home to New Jersey.

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We only saw each other twice over the next five years. While we tried to maintain our connection through written letters, even those eventually dwindled. In the interim, I graduated from high school, finished college, and had another serious romantic relationship. He completed his four-year army service, worked, prepared for college, and dated with abandon.

That should have been the end of it, but I was drawn back in. After college graduation, I returned to the city where we had first met to try my hand at international living. He and I reconnected and committed to giving our relationship a try, part two.

Three years later, we got married. Two years after that, we had twins. We moved back to New Jersey. My seven-year experiment with living abroad ended, while his life in the United States had just begun.

My husband and I have now been married nearly thirty-eight years. We’ve raised three children in a small, northern New Jersey community just miles from New York City. We’ve put all three kids through the public school system, college, and graduate schools in medicine, public health, and business. They have found their professional passions and married. Collectively, they have blessed us with three grandchildren.

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We both have had long-tenured careers, been active members of our community, built close friendships and busy social calendars, and traveled to destinations near and far.

But like anyone, we have had our challenges. We have grown unevenly, wanted things differently, and often communicated awkwardly, or not at all. At times, it felt like we had moved away from that common space between our two different cultural backgrounds. Yet we are lucky enough to still have what it takes to weather these challenges together.

And here we are on the precipice of a new chapter. My husband still works full-time, and the stress from his corporate job follows him home at night, while I am, somewhat reluctantly, transitioning away from a career that peaked with my own consulting business. As a couple, we have one foot in this chapter and one foot in the next.

Naturally, we talk frequently about the future: the obvious joys of grandparenthood, the worry about our children and grandchildren and aging parents, and, of course, the inevitability of our own aging. Like so many of our peers, the aches and pains have started to creep in, and the doctor’s visits are more frequent. Memory and hearing are not what they used to be, and the kids are checking in on us more often.

We face a future that has no script, no guardrails, and few guidelines, but a finiteness that scares us. In this chapter, we face our own mortality.

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While I have a tendency to allow worry and irrational fear to sideline me, I know I can pull myself back to that morning kiss, which bears witness to years of collective memories and still offers the promise of a wondrous future. A future with beautiful grandchildren growing before our eyes. A future with plans to travel to Nepal, Japan, and other faraway destinations. A future with RV trips through the American landscape, with hobbies and passions pursued both together and separately, with friendships we treasure and new ones we cultivate. A future with new memories, with love we continue to nourish and share, and with a legacy we are still building.

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This essay is part of the Between Chapters project, inspired by the book. What chapters are you between? How did you get from one chapter to another? Share your story here.

What Chapter Are You…

Leaving:

Private school business owner.

In:

Retirement (sort of!)

Entering:

I honestly do not know.

I officially retired in November 2018 and set out on a journey that felt exciting, almost decadent. We had sold our family business for more than we could have ever imagined, and we were determined to enjoy doing all the things we had fantasized about as “working people.”

To some degree, we did. We traveled a bit. I had time to write a book and become a guest speaker for mothers’ groups, parenting groups, and women’s business organizations. I promoted my book in a niche that I had not realized would have a following outside of the schools we owned for twenty-five years.

Retirement was looking easy, enjoyable, and meaningful in all the indulgent ways I could only have imagined. However, I soon found out that my time became fair game for everyone else to claim. When I was working, I always had a built-in excuse when family or friends asked me to do something. After all, I had a business to run. But now, apparently, I had no excuse. My book and speaking engagements didn’t seem to count.

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For my entire working career, I could make my own schedule around, or in spite of, my work life. I could book once-a-month hair appointments for six months out and tailor my business schedule to be there. No more. I have had to cancel so many appointments, not only with the salon, but also with friends for lunch, even trips with my husband. Family obligations keep coming up and the assumption seems to be that Kay can take care of that.

So as not to appear selfish, I did, and still do, take care of those things, no matter what they sometimes cost me. Many obligations have involved aging relatives. There comes a time for so many of us, if we are lucky enough to still have parents as we become senior citizens ourselves, when we face both the obligation and the joy of caring for them. In fact, six years into retirement, some of those family obligations have diminished because of inevitable, sad endings. And with time, the rescheduled hair appointments and missed lunches have lost the luster they once held.

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But how do you tell yourself, in the middle of what feels like such a heavy lift, that you may one day miss the very reason for the unwanted obligations? I still think a balance can and should be struck, even when it seems impossible.

Retirement does not always mean travel and extravagance. It does not always mean searching for a new purpose. Sometimes it just means standing between two realities: being young and healthy enough to enjoy the retirement years while also becoming the person others rely on for help, care, health decisions, and even convenience. To be at everyone’s beck and call? Well, I suppose to some extent that is what having family means: obligations and joys alike. Ongoing.

It’s up to us, in our own senior-years-chapter, to find the wisdom necessary to enjoy the demands and delights. Like previous chapters of my life, I’m meeting the challenge head on, or at least, I’m trying to.

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This essay is part of the Between Chapters project, inspired by the book. What chapters are you between? How did you get from one chapter to another? Share your story here.

What Chapter Are You…

Leaving:

Fourth (and last!) child about to cross the high school graduation stage.

In:

A house full of young adults who are in the process of becoming.

Entering:

The one where I finally get to be the guest.

I was not ready in September. Not for the senior portraits, not for the college applications, not for the particular way she walked out the door that first morning of twelfth grade like she already knew it was the last time. I told myself I still had time. Months of it. A whole senior year still ahead. I was wrong about what that would feel like by spring.

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Last May, while my youngest was counting down to prom and yearbook signings and a senior boat cruise, my oldest daughter walked across her college graduation stage. And then something unexpected happened: she and her friends had planned the entire weekend themselves. The brunch for the graduates and families. The celebration at one of their apartments before heading out into the night. The itinerary, the reservations, every last detail, handled. All I had to do was arrive.

I did not realize until I was standing there, someone’s guest in a life my daughter had built largely without me, how much I needed someone to take the clipboard out of my hands. It was freeing in a way I did not see coming.

What followed was a night none of us will forget. Hand stamps. Moms and dads at the karaoke mic. Grandmothers, aged eighty and seventy-four, singing along from the crowd almost all night, because why not? The sheer, uncomplicated joy of being alive and together and proud.

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At some point near midnight, surrounded by people I had only just met and already loved, I could finally feel it: this chapter of motherhood was actually closing. And to my sentimental surprise, I could finally bear it.

I have four children, spaced every two years like clockwork. My oldest turns twenty-four next month. The youngest, my baby, who carried a Peppa Pig backpack with her best friend through senior year as an homage to their preschool days, will receive her high school diploma in a few weeks. Twenty years of school mornings coming to an end.

Mothering children through these stages was hard in ways I could not have anticipated and would not trade for anything. There was the child who had to be gently peeled from the car by school staff some mornings. There was my son’s senior spring, when the world shut down and swallowed the year whole. There was my dad, who lifted that same son onto his shoulders on the first day of kindergarten and carried him all the way to school, but who passed away four years ago and won’t be here for the last high school diploma.

And there was Tim, my husband, who coached pee-wee soccer and lacrosse for years after school and on early weekend mornings while our oldest daughter trailed along the sideline with him, dead serious about a job no one had officially given her. She wasn't even distracted by her newborn sister wailing to be fed in the shade next to the bleachers.

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Those were the moments I held onto. I knew, even then, that they were the ones that mattered.

The chapter I am leaving is the one on which I built my whole adult life: the school calendar, the permission slips, the particular exhaustion and fullness of being needed in the way children need you when they are small, and then young, and then, almost gone.

The chapter I am entering is quieter. The sounds from the sidewalk outside our house are from other people’s children now. And I am happy to wave as they pass.

But if that graduation weekend taught me anything, it’s that the next chapter doesn’t announce itself. It just shows up in a karaoke bar at midnight, singing along with three generations of families and friends, until you slowly realize that you are not approaching the end of something. You are starting all over again.

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This essay is part of the Between Chapters project, inspired by the book. What chapters are you between? How did you get from one chapter to another? Share your story here.

My 15-year-old son had a growth spurt recently. Suddenly, he’s the tallest person in our family, much to his delight — and to my older son’s and husband’s chagrin. His clothes and shoes are now enormous, requiring more space in his closet. The metal bars must be raised, shelves need to be reconfigured, and new hangers are on the way.

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This isn’t a small job, physically or emotionally. Hand-me-downs are a thing of the past. Little League uniforms and Halloween costumes will make way for size 12 Jordans, a budding watch collection, and cologne. A lot of cologne.

It’s time to accept what I’ve been loath to even acknowledge for a while now. The littlest one has gotten big, and there are no more littles in the pipeline. It’s like I was abducted and tossed into an alternate reality, one in which my old mom job has become obsolete. I’ve been offered a new position, but it’s in something impossibly obtuse, like finance. And I don’t know how to read a spreadsheet.

I don’t know exactly where I fit in anymore. I’ve spent two decades as the backbone of my family, and now that so much of the weight is dispersed — to friends, schools, interests, and lives increasingly separate from mine — I’m feeling a bit wobbly.

Last year, when I was mentally preparing for my oldest to leave for college, a friend whose kids are older than mine put it like this: “You’re transitioning from parenting to being a parent.” It’s a simple concept, although not entirely intuitive. I took it to mean I’d no longer be steering the ship but, instead, serving as an occasional fueling station and port in a storm. Vital functions, yes, but not nearly as instinctual or gratifying as being at the helm.

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My older son is now home from college for the summer. During the first few weeks he was back in the house, we were engaged in an awkward dance, each of us trying to lead and sometimes stepping on the other’s toes. He told me that he’s an adult. I silently begged to differ, because of the financial dependence, the not fully developed prefrontal cortex, and all. I think the proclamation was code. From now on, our relationship will be different than it once was. Apparently only one of us needed reminding.

In hindsight, I can track some of my older son’s incremental detachment over the last five years, as he spent more time acting like a tenant in our home, living among us but not always with us. Whereas I was once his closest confidante, he began keeping things private or sharing them only with his dad. The less he played with Lego and Nerf guns, the faster he pulled away from me and leaned toward the guy who plays guitar and knows a lot about tech. There was a new ease to the relationship between father and son, untainted by the kind of worry and vigilance I brought to the table.

With my younger son, I can see him cutting the apron strings in real time. He’s in deep adolescence, with all of its pushing and pulling. I recognize the familiar draw of his dad, who’s fun and patient and into cool things. My husband has taken to “being a parent” like a champ. I’m holding onto “parenting” for dear life.

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I feel such a sense of loss for that moment in time I was warned would be fleeting. When I was in the throes of parenting — the days when my kids left their wrappers on the counter or walked on a clean floor with dirty cleats — I used to tell myself: “One day, there won’t be any stray wrappers lying around for you to pick up, and you’ll miss it.” At the time, I didn’t know how I’d actually feel when “one day” came around. Turns out I’d be happy to collect the empty juice boxes from wherever they landed.

On occasion, however, my rose-colored parenting glasses slip down my nose, and I glimpse the day-to-day reality of having young kids as I observe other families. Like this morning at the farmers’ market. The coughing and sneezing and runny noses, oh my. The crying and tantrums. The nails-on-a-chalkboard whining. Demanding food and drink. Double dipping their taster toothpicks. Spilling their freshly squeezed orange juice. Wanting to be carried. Wanting to walk independently. Did I mention the whining?

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I saw a mom pushing a baby and a toddler in a double stroller while holding the hand of another, who appeared to be five years old, and who was crying and stomping his feet because he wanted to go to the playground RIGHT NOW. The boy let go of his mom’s hand and ran into the crowd, headed for the play structure. She started yelling, “AIDAN! AIDAN! AAAI-DAAAAAN, COME BAAACK! MOMMY STILL NEEDS TO GET THE BONE BROTH!”

Poor, frazzled woman. I had the urge to tell her she’d miss all of this someday. But then I thought better of it. Too soon.

Meanwhile, my own boys were ambling a few steps ahead, laughing at something I must have missed. One of them was holding a heavy bag of fruit for me. They got in line and paid with their own phones. I have to say, I felt relaxed. “Being a parent” instead of “parenting” isn’t all bad.

I just don’t have the physical stamina and infinite patience parenting takes anymore. On those bittersweet days, when I’m searching my boys’ stubbly faces for the babies they once were, or when the house is eerily quiet, I’ll be sure to take a trip to the farmers’ market to enjoy “being a parent.”

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This essay is part of the Between Chapters project, inspired by the book. What chapters are you between? How did you get from one chapter to another? Share your story here.

What Chapter Are You…

Leaving:

Mother birding.

In:

An empty nest.

Entering:

Stabilizing the twigs of our nest as the weight distribution shifts.

Over a recent holiday break, one of my college-age daughters showed me a new TikTok trend in which young women, often in their twenties and not yet mothers, post videos of themselves immersed in an adventure or significant life experience. The videos begin with an enthusiastic, “Hey kids, it’s your mom.”

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To my daughter’s dismay, I first had to find my reading glasses to watch them. Then I proceeded to play the videos over and over. Each one struck me: I felt a sense of wonder, and maybe a small pang of envy, at what these vibrant young women were doing in their highlight reels before motherhood.

Was this declaration a way to manifest a future identity as a mother, or was it a rebellion against motherhood’s anticipated constraints, a way to relish the adventure even more?

I was moved by their ability to mark the moment, knowing age and the passage of time were beyond their control. They were preserving proof of the present, even as their future was unfolding.

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Sitting at my computer in January 2026, after my nest had just emptied again after winter break, I easily recognized the distance between me, a midlife mom with four grown children, and those young, adventurous women who didn’t know what their future as mothers might look like. Back then I would’ve said, “Hey kids, it’s your mom. I did exist before you came into my life. I did adventure.”

Now, like many of my friends, my emotions are constantly teetering on the rim of my cup, often spilling over with an overwhelming feeling of fulfillment or loss. It is a cycle that seems to be, not surprisingly, in sync with the home-from-college calendar. The revolving door often feels like an acceleration of time toward an inevitable ending, creating an urge within me to document and mark moments, too. Not necessarily with TikTok highlight reels, but with old-fashioned words on the blank page, words that won’t disappear with a tap or a scroll.

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So, “Hey kids, it’s your mom.” Not only to my own kids, but also to all of the young women hoping to be mothers one day: please know that I, too, once paraglided off mountains in Switzerland before there was any way to have video proof. You will just have to believe me. And although I am old enough to remember when tick-tock referred to the two literal hands moving between the minutes on a clock, I can confidently confirm in writing that being a mom is my greatest, most fulfilling adventure yet.

To be continued. TikTok, tick-tock.

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