One and Done Empty Nesters

  Now that I am actually in midlife, I realize that " midlife crisis " is really not the right term. Whomever coined that probably wasn't in midlife yet. It was probably a 30-something who saw their 55-year-old mom decide to quit her job and go back to school to get a degree in an entirely different field. This may have looked like a crisis to the grown child, but Mom was probably happy as a lark.  I have gone through these changes of heart, too, but always found them to be positive adventures, never a "crisis" with its negative connotation. I did go back to school at age 52 to start my master's, which I will finish at age 56 (two classes to go!) It has been exciting and fun and fulfilling. No crisis here. So when I bought a two-seater convertible a year ago, I realized that this is what my younger self would have called a midlife crisis car. But now I know it is actually a midlife-just-for-me car. Shhhh, maybe we should still call it a midlife crisis car so...

My husband, Mark, and I took what may have been our first ever camping trip together without our daughter or other family members in 29 years of marriage. Honestly, it's been so long we really can't remember, the way life before kids is hard to remember. Before our one-and-only Mia was born almost 19 years ago, we did some amazing camping trips with Mark's family and other groups in places like Nova Scotia and the Grand Canyon. Later, with Mia and both our families, we camped in Yellowstone and Redwoods national parks. The three of us have camped on Cumberland Island and in the mountains of northern Georgia.  During the pandemic just Mark and I camped on our back deck a couple times, but Mia was home so those don't count. We mainly did that out of boredom because we had hardly left the house in two months, but it actually was really fun.  Mark spent a week of every month for a whole year camping by himself in national parks for a beautiful book he wrote called Lassoing ...