Low Tide

Finding Treasure

Photo by Jametlene Reskp on Unsplash

Sitting on the beach in what my children have started calling my granny-cottage-gear…cotton skirt, tank top, denim shirt…I am, like a sunray catching the bumper of the car ahead and bouncing back into your eyes, suddenly aware of a threshold I am traversing. Maybe you know this feeling. That moment when you look up from the life you’ve been living and realize you are standing at an edge you can actually see.

I can see it out there. The mentors I look up to, women in their mid-sixties, have crossed it or are crossing it now. They offer their experience like smooth stones placed in an open hand.

This season is unlike any other.

We celebrated our youngest’s birthday at the beach over Mother’s Day. One year from now, all of our children will be in their twenties…each one, like the small willow-channel rivulets the tide carves in the sand, finding their own particular path to the wide ocean. Perhaps you have watched someone you love do the same.

I didn’t know what empty nesting and menopause would feel like. Without my mother to guide me, my entire adult life has felt like uncharted territory. But even so, I did not expect it to feel like this. I wonder if you did either.

A returning. A returning to something almost child-like…presence, simple pleasures, the particular joy of doing nothing important beautifully.

I keep hearing this phrase move through me: menopause is a time of loss of ambition. For a lifelong perfectionist and striver, to feel those words stirring like a middle-aged tornado of independence is strange and disorienting and, somehow, also a relief. Can you feel that paradox? The way a loss can also feel like something being handed back?

I don’t mean a loss of desire to live fully or do things. Quite the contrary.

I mean I no longer have the energy, or the stamina, to chase the carrots that have been dangled in front of us for most of our lives. I watch my daughters doing it now. I did it too. I find myself wanting to reassure their edges, to say it’s all good, it will all work out — and I know that is exactly the thing no one in it ever wants to hear. The only way through is through. They will find out for themselves, if they are blessed to live long enough, and perhaps one day they’ll sit on their own beach in their own cottage-granny attire, saying the same unhelpful, entirely true things.

Have you been that person on the beach yet? Or are you still out there, caught in the current, too busy swimming to notice the shore? Either way, pull up a chair. There is room for all of us here.

For me, the loss of ambition feels like a returning to self. A shedding of expectations, the ones put upon me and the ones I signed up for willingly. I find myself more engaged and more enraged than ever. More protective of my time. More deliberate about what I will and will not carry.

Peace is my ambition now. Slow is my ambition. Ease. Presence. Service. Reading, writing, gardening, cooking, the people I love. What is yours, if you let yourself name it honestly?

Many of you supported me last year as I committed to writing every single day. I wasn’t sure where that year would want to take me next, but I believe the clarity has arrived. I’ll be spending the remainder of 2026 working on a book, one I’ll co-write with my sister, who you’ll soon come to know as my Sissy.

We keep laughing at the title that keeps surfacing: Batshit Crazy. Perhaps that becomes the tagline when the real title reveals itself. What we hope to bring into the world is a memoir woven from both our stories…the particular, painful, sometimes darkly funny inheritance of being motherless daughters learning to become women without a mother to show them how. Her story and mine are different, but they rhyme.

For the young women out there who have buried their mother. For the ones who were left, dropped at elementary school, paper-sack lunch in hand, no cell phone, locked doors on the other side. For those who understood at a tender age that they were essentially on their own. If any part of that is yours, we are writing this for you.

We see you.

And here is the plot twist: it turns out better than you could possibly expect. Pinky Promise.

I recently read that even though a wave appears to arrive at shore in a single crashing moment, it originated somewhere far out at sea…under open stars, with a random shift of wind at a time and place no one was watching. It travels a long, invisible distance before it finally reaches land.

Life feels like that right now. Many waves, set in motion long ago, are reaching shore all at once. And what comes next feels a lot like what’s left at low tide…sea glass, sand dollars, seashells, the quiet glitter of things worth keeping.

The fun now is in the sifting. I hope you’ll sift alongside me.

xx,Victoria