I began my freshman year of high school as a girl from a seemingly solid Midwestern family who regularly sang in church, and ended it as a girl whose parents were divorced, who no longer attended church, or believed in anything.  I was instantly re-imagined from protestant good girl to hapless promiscuous girl.  So it came as no surprise when I was barely out of teenagerhood, and I suddenly had to reinvent myself as a single mom.  Later on, I met the man who would become my husband and my daughter’s daddy, and then I had to learn to co-parent, and to be a step-mom.  Some years later, my husband wanted to open a restaurant, and I became a restaurateur, and too soon a solo-restaurateur, when he accepted a job offer in his field that took him on the road for much of most weeks.

Then a new reinvention came after we closed our restaurant and I became a somewhat (OK, maybe radically) possessed researcher of holistic healing which helped me to overcome my infertility and finally have the baby I’d longed six years for.  That success brought about another reinvention when I had to learn how to parent teenagers and a high needs infant at the same time.  All my thinking had to shift when I had to parent that infant in very different ways than I’d parented my girls.

Reinvention isn’t anything new in my life, though its process never occurred to me until recently with the ultimate reinvention:  Midlife Crisis.

Many of those previous reinventions occurred as reactions to the actions of others or to situations.  They didn’t happen from a place of self-discovery, and they weren’t in the least motivated by any sense of seeking, or of finding myself.

Looking inward began when we moved across the entire country from both of our daughters, and from any of the female support system I’d enjoyed and relied upon for much of my adult life.  Moving from Michigan to California wasn’t anything I ever imagined I’d do, and it wasn’t anything I wanted to do.  I pouted and I wallowed that first year away.  I was so desperately alone, and because transition of any kind isn’t easy for me, my brain got confused and I forgot how to function.  My son got sick, and I couldn’t remember what to do to make him well.  I couldn’t grasp the brands of my favorite supplements, foods, any semblance of an action plan wherein I could see myself ever feeling normal again. 

I was completely mired in this dull, marine layer version of my life.  

I had no confidence, I knew no one, and no one seemed to care to get to know me.  I couldn’t fathom what I might tell anyone about myself anyway, because I lacked any identity there, or frankly anywhere.

My marriage was at its most difficult point ever, I disliked myself and my husband, and I was barely worthwhile as a mother to my son, let alone as a human being in the world.  When I couldn’t stand myself any longer, I began to think about reinvention from within.

No one knew me in California.  This was my chance to become anything I wanted to become.  There were no labels, there was no family history to define me, and there certainly were no expectations, never mind the fact that absolutely no one cared or gave me a thought anyway—they were too mired in their own version of survival, too stuck in their own traffic.  

How did I want to be remembered, and how did I want to impact the future for my children beyond their day-to-day care and feeding?  I could no longer survive as that person who put herself down and put herself last and who disbelieved in herself, and my deepest fear was that my husband and I wouldn’t survive at all. 

I wanted to go back to Michigan, but I didn’t want to do it without him.  I didn’t have a choice.  I had to make a life for myself in California.  I didn’t have many friends, so I needed to be my friend, and I hoped that would allow me to once again be my husband’s.  

For me, the answer was and remains writing. 

When your soul is that of a writer who isn’t writing, the stories are swimming in your head, whether you write them down or not.  You feel like a crazy person.  You talk to yourself, you talk to your dogs; you can’t get your bearing.  Even if the lake or the ocean is always west, you get off on the wrong exit on the freeway because your mind is cluttered with all the stories--you forget to pick up your kid, or you forget to clean dog puke off the carpet.   

I seem to have lost my funny from when I first began blogging, in part because a dual midlife crisis while raising a young boy is hard, but also because I’m not as afflicted with self-diagnosed ADD anymore, so I simply don’t screw up as much.  I’m focused and I’m driven.  I have a purpose and I have goals.  The stories don’t fester in my head as much, because they’re alive and breathing on my computer screen.  I wish my sense of humor wasn’t the thing I had to give up…but perhaps when life gets a bit easier, I’ll find it again.  And even though life still isn't easy, I feel more fulfilled and more content within myself than ever before.

Tell me in the comments, where are you on your path to being your own best friend?

It’s back to work, and I find myself still reeling, hung over, really, but not in an alcohol-induced haze, more in a mind-still-blown haze from my weekend spent with almost 5000 other remarkable women, and a few men, at #BlogHer13 in Chicago.

I say other, because one of the most remarkable discoveries, reminders, I got this weekend was that I, too, am a remarkable woman.  This is something I tell myself sometimes, but don’t really believe.

I go through the laundry list:  You had a child alone at the age of twenty, whom you raised alone for the first 7 years of her life, you owned and operated a restaurant as a white woman whose husband was only home on the weekends, in a 98% black, severely socioeconomically depressed city for three years, you usually successfully managed a blended family and raised two beautiful, loving, remarkable women, you healed your own infertility and successfully added a beautiful baby boy to the then teen his&hers daughters you already had, recovered him from and prevented further vaccine damage, and you survived a two-year stint an entire country away from said daughters, and used (half of) that time to grow and discover yourself and you didn’t (quite) manage to kill your husband (not my story to tell, yet).   

And then there’s the professional stuff that’s happened in the last two years:  you were featured on BlogHer 3.5 times, you submitted an essay which was accepted for inclusion in a book that’ll be out later this year, and the theme for that essay earned you a Voices of the Year Honoree nod from BlogHer.  You wrote and taught Creative Writing for Fourth Graders to your son’s class over three sessions, and spoke before the local Depression and Bipolar Alliance about the connection between gluten intolerance and depression, anxiety, bipolar, and neurodegenerative disease.  You have so much more in you, just busting to get out, and all the while, you’re working again on your novel about a woman dealing with infertility.  Almost forgot, you taught yourself and built two complete websites all on your own.

It’s everything, it’s so much, and yet it’s nothing compared to some women.  This struck me over and over again, particularly as I listened to the other Voices of the Year Honorees who read their beautiful pieces to us on a stage, emceed by none other than The Queen, Latifah, herself.

As I commented on Feminista Jones’ post about Queen Latifah emceeing the #BlogHer13 Voices of the Year Reception: 

“I have adored Queen Latifah ever since ‘Bringing Down the House,’ and probably well before.  For her heart, strength, humor, obvious intelligence, talent on SO many levels, and her spectacular beauty that is the antithesis of petite, she is a role model who tells me to be myself even when a huge part of me wants to hide because I'm not the size zero I once was.  My family placed far too much importance on looks.  It's been a battle to find the midlife value in my own heart and my own intelligence and my own voice.  In a moment of false clarity, my weight can wash away all I’ve gained.  I'm five feet tall.  It isn't difficult to simply look over me; to not see me at all, [or to not see myself]. 

This is my brain shit, not yours, and you probably have enough of your own shit and don't even think to look past.  When I write, when I blog, I perceive that people recognize my intelligence and hear my voice first and, I pray, accept me for my heart before they see my size.  Writing, posting is bliss because for the moment *I* can forget.  I thought I was growing past it.  But even among all of [the women of all kinds, races, shapes and sizes], even attending as a #BlogHer13 Voices of the Year Honoree, at times it was insurmountable to introduce myself.” 

Why do we discount ourselves?  Why is it that I can sit in a room full to the brim of other midlife bloggers, recognize myself in them, yet feel too self-conscious to reach out to them as they have reached out to me after BlogHer?  Many of the Generation Fabulous women have since generously put out their arms and welcomed me into their fold.  How is it that I didn’t know before I attended that panel discussion that there are so many midlife women bloggers out there? 

How is it that we are still so underrepresented in every facet of life: corporate boards, politics, sponsorship, etc., etc.??  How is it that we so often don’t even recognize it?  We are 51% of the population (hence the book, 51%: Women and the Future of Politics), and yet we represent less than 19% of congress?  It seems we are largely complacent with being slotted into the role of teachers and school board members, raising the children, building the foundation of our future—all vitally important stuff that many of us probably don’t want to leave to the men.  But the fact that we are not nurtured to do otherwise isn’t good enough.  The fact that many of us don’t even think to seek otherwise isn’t good enough. 

And woe to those of us who didn’t attend college.   Whether or not it’s truth, the lack of a college education, time spent staying home with our children and the consequential holes in our resumes, can paralyze many of us with fear.  It halted me.  I allowed my lack of a college education to stop me from becoming something more, from finishing my book, from seeking and touching more of me.  

Until I left my hometown in Michigan, hit San Diego and was forced to take a hard look at myself, I existed, I loved, I enjoyed life to a degree…I wanted more, but I was holding my breath. 

I’m no slouch.  Two college level creative writing courses in San Diego, a modicum of encouragement from my professors, and I haven’t looked back…but what if…?

Well, as Kelly Wickham of Mocha Momma said in her Voices of the Year reading about being a single mom that resonated with me so deeply, “that is unacceptable.”  Kelly also wrote in “Untold Stories are Sometimes Secrets,” about,” feeling invisible as a person of color at times.”  I want her to know that I often felt invisible as a very short woman before I was heavy, and only more so now as a short heavy woman.  Perhaps we all put on our own invisibility cloaks for any number of reasons…acne, too large breasts, bad teeth…the list of things we can’t magically change about ourselves goes on.

Before #BlogHer14, here’s something I can change:  I will endeavor to stand proud, to embrace all that I am, inside and out, to *believe* myself to be your peer, just as Queen Latifah tells me. 

Before #BlogHer14, I will reach out to other women.  I will return the embrace of Generation Fabulous, and follow in their well-forged steps.  I.  Will.  Finish.  Bluebirds.  I will seek more speaking opportunities, I will query publications.  I will get paid for my writing.  And as of tonight, I am going to submit my book to a publisher! 

And come #BlogHer14, I will extend my hand to you no matter what I weigh, and I will help wake up the next generation of fabulous women to all they already are, even if they don’t get to witness people like Sheryl Sandberg and Rita Arens and Kelly Wickham and the almost 5000 strong of us amazing, powerful, diverse women for themselves.

What halts you in your tracks?  Or how have you managed to overcome your own personal invisibility cloak?
If you heard about the #JudyBlumeProject at #BlogHer13, SUBMISSIONS ARE STILL OPEN!!