‘I Wish I Had’ Isn’t My Ending

It wasn’t a midlife crisis. It was a calling.

My internal voice kept sending me a message: “Write the book.”

I kept it a secret because I wasn’t sure I could write it well, and I knew it would take years to pull off—years I wasn’t sure I had after my breast cancer diagnosis. But as my oldest son prepared to leave for college, my voice shifted from, “Should I try?” to “What happens if I don’t?”

I’d watched my mother grow increasingly unhappy with the direction her life had taken after spending much of it focused on my father’s dreams. When he died, the reality of missed opportunities and her unrealized potential began to rise to the surface. Now, at 92, more than 30 years after his death, it’s become part of both her demeanor and her dialogue. More often than not, she begins a story with, “I wish I had…”

Trying something new when the outcome isn’t certain requires a leap of faith, along with a fair amount of life restructuring. I also felt pressure to be grateful, which made it difficult to trust the urge to redesign my life. Yes, we encourage reinvention in theory, but in reality, we reward women for staying within the world they’ve already built. Stepping outside of it’s often considered unraveling. This can be destabilizing or clarifying—you don’t know which until you try. Before I tried, my question was whether this was really a midlife crisis, and if I was headed for a sudden, visible life change.

What I’ve come to understand is that this wasn’t a crisis to manage at all. It was a calling to follow.

Purpose Isn’t a Calling

I often hear the word purpose associated with a lightning-bolt moment—a mission, a life’s defining pursuit. Most women I know talk about finding their purpose. Almost none of them talk about a calling. There’s a difference and it matters. A purpose is a project. Something you can name, work toward, and complete. A calling is something else—quieter, more persistent, harder to put down. It hums beneath the daily noise and grows louder when you’re at rest. After 18 years of parenting, I was finally tuning in to mine.

Sometimes, I felt like I was in a game of Beat the Clock. No, we don’t all get to live to 92. And even if we do, that doesn’t mean all callings will be heard and acted upon. My mother said she ignored hers because, truth be told, “life had been challenging.”

I got it. I also got that I wanted more at a time in life when many of the women in my orbit were slowing down and doing less work. But I was, quite simply, creatively unfulfilled. And that was its own kind of challenge.

I wanted to write something for other women in the same stage of life looking for what comes next. That meant research, interviews, telling stories, pitching agents, writing a proposal, and accepting that if I went the traditional publishing route, the book-writing process could take three years or more. And that’s not counting the work I’d need to do once the book was published, all while continuing my day job.

Truthfully, it made me tired thinking about it, and I worried about failing in a public way. This wouldn’t be a simple knitting project gone bad that I could stuff in my closet.

On the other hand, if I shut out the noise and listened to the call, I’d have the chance to bring an idea to life and connect with other midlife women about a topic that we were living out in real time. It all came down to permission: to tune in, to make space, and to forgive myself if it didn’t work out.

Answering a call doesn’t always lead to dramatic change. Not every calling launches a business. Some are quieter but no less demanding. A calling might ask for clarity. It might ask you to finally face a decision you’ve rationalized away. Sometimes the call is vague. Sometimes the discomfort is the message. Eventually, you either answer it, or it becomes the story of what you didn’t do.

I’d heard that story my whole life. I didn’t want to inherit it.

My internal voice was staging an intervention. I could feel the emotional shift. I began slowly by inching my way through, breaking the process into manageable pieces. The more I dove into the book proposal, and then the book-writing process, the stronger my calling became.

When I signed with an agent and then a publisher, stress and anxiety coexisted with a sense that something had clicked into place. When the book finally came out, I received a wonderfully positive review from Publishers Weekly (the bible of the book business) that I hadn’t let myself imagine getting because I hadn’t let myself imagine writing the book at all.

I think about my mother, how she’s never known the satisfaction of following through on a calling of her own—apart from my father’s—nor has she made peace with the life she’s lived. Nearly everything she started that was just for her, ended up being “too much trouble” and she lost interest.

Today, she talks about writing a book, with me as her co-writer. Each time she asks, I tell her: “It’s not my calling, it’s yours.”

This answer doesn’t sit well with her.

I don’t know how long I’ll be alive, but I do know that when I tuned in to the message—stopped letting it be a secret, as if it were something I couldn’t accomplish—I didn’t unravel.

I began to realign.

My mother’s mother lived to 107.