Reflections on my 40th year
New baby, career change, matrescence, & more! 🌀✨
My 40th birthday party was held at an old-school Brooklyn soda shop. My husband, 5-year-old kiddo and I met up with two of my oldest friends and their kids for extremely large and impressively inventive ice cream sundaes. After googling the menu beforehand and re-reading it multiple times at the table, I still sat undecided. I finally panicked and ordered the birthday cake sundae for on-the-nose-but-ironically-I-swear reasons. First bite in and immediate regret. Somehow, in all of my reading and re-reading of the menu, I missed that there was no chocolate in the sundae at all. Umm, what? No, thank you. That is NOT the vibe. A dessert without chocolate really bums me out. So here I am, newly 40 years old, and feeling petulant because I totally messed up this simple thing at my simple birthday party.
I was already a little hesitant going into this birthday. The party was at a local low-key ice cream shop and not some far flung exotic weekend away or fancy grown up dinner out because I found myself pregnant again, at work teaching full time, and very, very tired. I just didn’t have it in me to think or plan or organize, but honestly, the malaise went beyond that. At this point in my life, I felt very in limbo, not sure of what was to come next for me. Even though it was a traditionally big deal birthday— the start of a new decade, the unavoidable understanding that I was now *checks notes* middle-age—it felt smaller in its weight to me. Quieter. Unsure. Uneven. I needed a small, unassuming birthday to match my energy. And a small birthday I got, with an ice cream sundae I didn’t even like.
What a difference a year makes.
Fast forward to me today, hitting send on this essay, which is the start of this new project, which is just one of a few new projects. Today is my 41st birthday, and while I do not have anything planned in the way of a huge party or celebration, I feel so much stronger, solid, and surer of myself. Something shifted in me this year and that is celebration enough.
But what shifted? And how?
As I reflect, it was actually getting pregnant and having my second son that spurred this change. I must admit the whole thing was somewhat of a surprise. I had been so ambivalent about having a second for years. When my first was younger, I would lurk one-and-done message boards, trying to uncover the one holy grail comment or post that would speak to me directly and finally, mercifully answer the question: should we have another?? When friends or family would ask about our plans, I would often joke, “When you win the lotto, you stop playing.” I said it with a wry wink but I also meant it! I fully and completely adored my son. He was cute and healthy and strong and sweet. I had a (mostly) easy pregnancy and a (mostly) easy birth. Who was I to ask for more? I could absolutely see the three of us rockin together as a small but nimble trio, living in this incredible (see also: expensive) city and traveling as much as we could. But also, the postpartum anxiety was real, the loss of control of my time and energy and body and life took some serious adjusting to, and the changes to my identity took years to settle in my bones. I was a raw nerve those early years (and COVID hitting when my son was two didn’t help!)
But of course there was the other side of the fence. The what-if, take-a-chance, throw-a-little-more-love-in-your-life excitement of having a second, of giving my kid a sibling, of expanding our little adventure crew. It was admittedly intimidating to me for a variety of reasons, but also so, so sweet. I couldn’t let it go. It was always there, always a maybe. I could never fully shut the door one way or the other.
To make a very twisty and long story short, the choice was made for us when I surprisingly found myself pregnant at age 39. I had always joked to my husband that whatever the choice would ultimately be, it would have to be before I turned 40; the factory was to be shut and condemned, the oven unplugged, insert any other weird metaphor here. The image I had of this baby was a wild Hail Mary half-court buzzer beater shot for the championship game. He made it - swoosh - just on time.
As I sat in that ice cream shop, I had no idea the choices I would soon make and the shifts I would undergo as we welcomed the new baby. Here are the doozies:
1. I decided to quit teaching full time to stay at home with the baby
This was a decision that came in waves over months, but once it was made it hit like a lightening bolt. Our life with one kid already felt packed to the brim. My husband and I are both New York City teachers with really early mornings and long, hectic days. During the school year, our mornings are a tornado of hurry-ups and we-gotta-gos. Our evenings are not much better. Even though teachers have decent breaks and time off, we have no flexibility during the school year. We each had to be physically in our classrooms by 8am. Sometimes, after the morning rush of getting myself and my son out the door, I would sit in my car, take a few deep, trembling breaths, and feel the stress buzz around my body. I would think “Okay, that was the hardest part of my day.” Just leaving the house! at 7am! How on earth could we do this AND have a new baby?!
Then came the financials. With my education level and my years of experience, I earned the high end of a preschool teacher’s salary, but let’s be real—it was still barely anything for living in NYC. Daycares near us would basically wipe out my take home pay. I’d be working, and rushing, and stressing for around $300/week.
Of course I know it is never as simple as a one-to-one equation. I got a lot more out of my work than just a paycheck: colleagues I loved working alongside and learning from and laughing with, families I truly enjoyed partnering with and getting to know, and young children I absolutely adored being with every day and watching grow. My work also gave me self-confidence. I was good at my job—I knew what I was doing and I did it well! It’s a great feeling to be competent and sure of yourself in this weird and wacky, intense and stressful world. Who would I be if I was not working, if I was not a teacher?
But yet, I just couldn’t circle the square and see a path where I continued working full time during this next season of our lives. I wanted to be home to care for my baby, to walk my older son to school, to throw a load of laundry in on a random Tuesday afternoon, or to food prep lunches before the mad dinner rush even began. I wanted to lighten our family’s load and give us some more breathing room, but I also knew I needed to feel useful and purposeful outside the home, too, and I did not want to subsume myself to the grinding gears of family life. Was there a way I could thread this needle? And how?
If this choice was first one of rational logic, it eventually turned emotional and expansive. I thankfully heard Neha Ruch, founder of Mother Untitled, on a podcast one day and gobbled up her message: leaning into family life and taking a career pause or shift to do so can be “infused with ambition, dignity, growth, and potential.” This language made sense to me and I desperately needed to hear it. I needed to wholeheartedly own this choice and see it for the amazing opportunity it was—both for my family and for myself alone. As a forever Artist’s Way enthusiast, I began writing morning pages and was shook at just how quickly the fire of my creativity took off on the page. I began to envision so many paths this ‘pause’ could take and I felt empowered to begin laying the groundwork to make them happen. This newsletter is one of those outlets for me, as well as partnering with my school to design and run caregiver-and-me classes two mornings a week. I still get to be engaged in the work I love and have passion for, while making room for myself and my growing family. It’s an incredibly privileged decision (that of course comes with financial sacrifice), and I have big, exciting dreams for these next few years that I literally couldn’t have even imagined a year ago in that ice cream shop.
2. My second postpartum period was so healing to me
I gave birth last December to my second baby boy. I reflect again with thankfulness that this pregnancy, like my first, was (mostly) easy and the birth was actually quite special, even magical at points. We brought the baby home the sparkling week of Christmas. I felt calm and confident with him in a way that honestly shocked me. Not because I am not good with babies or that my first time around with my older son was so bad (it wasn’t!), but there was a new wisdom in me. This time around, with my second, I did not have to go through matrescence in the same way as I did with my first. I did not have to go through the massive multi-domain transition of becoming a mother; I was already a mother. For me, this made all the difference.
Matrescence is the process of becoming a mother. It is a "developmental passage where a woman transitions through pre-conception, pregnancy and birth, surrogacy or adoption, to the postnatal period and beyond.. The scope of the changes encompass multiple domains - biological, psychological, social, political, spiritual – and can be likened to the developmental push of adolescence”.While, duh, yes, of course I know that may sound obvious or trite, but my lived experience of matrescence was truly radical. It disorientated me and then reorientated me. I remember sitting on my therapist’s couch, two years after giving birth, and saying it felt like my house burnt down and I had to rebuild from the ground up. I had to sort through the boxes of my identity and figure out what stays, what goes, what evolves? Who am I now? What kind of mother am I? What kind of woman? What are my interests now, my priorities? What books do I read and how often, what style of clothes do I wear, what time do I go to bed, will I bedshare forever, how long will I nurse for, what is my relationship to tech like, what are my boundaries and hard lines, how much do I care about how much my body is changing, how will we handle screen time and potty training and play-dates and birthday parties and sugar and babysitters and grandparents and school and the tooth fairy and YouTube, will we still travel, will we camp and hike, what do I really believe? And so on forever and ever into the void. I felt my cells shifting, similar to the Saturn return years of my late 20s. I was changing, I was fine-tuning; I didn’t know what of me would stay and what would go, what was fad and what was true. To put it simply, I did not know what I did not know and only time would tell me.
At the time of my second child’s birth, I had been dancing to that matrescence song for six glorious and hard won years. Getting the opportunity to be a mom to a newborn again made me realize that the rollercoaster ride was, if not fully done, at least at a very good resting point. I was comfortable in my own skin as a mother and I luxuriated in it. We had been through the first six years of raising a kiddo (during the pandemic! in NYC! as teachers!) We made the hard choices. We went on the infant-toddler-preschooler-kindergartener adventure together and came out on another side. We had all of the highs and all of the lows and all of the little quotidian struggles and all of the transcendent sparkle that made me me, and made my family us. And now we get to do it again with the waves settled a bit, with experience and clarity and our hard earned wisdom. It's been so fun, and sweet, and special. It’s been revealing, exciting, and beautifully healing. I feel solid and strong and ready for whatever is to come.
To be clear, I am not at all saying that all is done here, that I am cooked, or that this parenting-two-boys-thing is going be as rose-colored as the postpartum period was, but I was so beyond pleasantly surprised by the experience and it felt so good to be able to see all the work and progress I’ve made over the years, becoming the mom and person I am now. As I sit here at 41, I am able to send love to my young, precious, nervous, first-time mom self and look forward to meeting my next version(s) on the other side.
So that is my reflection of my 40th year—and my first newsletter ever!—Pretty juicy, huh?
I can’t imagine every newsletter will be as deep and searching as this one but I did envision this first essay as a sort of beginning mission statement for this newsletter as a whole. It touches upon so many of the ideas that I want to explore here: motherhood, parenting, my work with families, babies and young children, and the choices we all make in this wild, modern world. Please share and subscribe to come along!
Now off I go to find some chocolate to celebrate with.
Thanks for reading xx
Danielle
What a beautiful place to start. Beautiful words, I Will be turning 41 this year too!
So beautiful!!! I felt completely with you the whole article through ❤️