Ramshackle Glam is a website about parenting, divorce, aging, mental health, and other funny stuff. Free posts are published every week, but FYI if you want to upgrade you’ll automatically receive an eBook that I wrote just for paid subscribers.
In two weeks, I will be 45 years old. My son is about to enter high school and my daughter is moving into seventh grade, and they have more friends and activities and responsibilities and emotions than ever before, their lives growing bigger by the day. I’m trying to write the most exciting and difficult book of my career in the spaces between chauffering them to what seems like hundreds of end-of-year events, planning out their summers, and doing whatever I can to maintain some version of a semi-steady income. All of it very literally solo, as my ex-husband has hightailed it off to Europe for the time being and no longer keeps an apartment here, so there’s also that. It’s obviously logistically and financially challenging, in addition to being soul-crushingly disappointing — and while my kids are doing well, that doesn’t mean I don’t live in daily fear about if and how all of this will impact them both now and in the future. (I just finished reading Strangers, and let’s just say that it hit.)
This is not where I anticipated finding myself as I turned 45; when I think about where I was ten years ago, I feel an almost physical sense of whiplash.
