The Space Between: Midlife, Menopause & Becoming the Elder

Lately I have been sitting in the space between what was and what is becoming. As women, we move through so many thresholds: birth, loss, menopause, reinvention. Each one asks something different of us. After a long week of holding others, holding myself, and wondering how to integrate it all. It is about midlife, menopause, medicine, and the slow, sacred unravelling that comes with change.

Sometimes I sit and contemplate where I am in my life, what I am doing, what I have lived through, what I have learned, and what I now carry. The skills, the wisdom, the wounds, the ways I share them and the ways I still hold back. The world outside feels loud, full of ego, inspiration and noise. Social media amplifies it all until you forget how to simply be in your own truth, how to find your place in it. And here I am, moving through the menopause, which feels enormous, like crossing a threshold that nobody quite prepared me for.

There is so much wisdom in the women I speak to, in the quiet spaces we create. This week I found myself opening up with different friends, different colleagues in a new way, in a vulnerable way, a place that felt both raw and on reflection necessary. Being a midwife has always been entwined with my own body, my own womanhood. It is impossible to separate the two. And after my hysterectomy, as I recover and reckon with what that means in a society that rarely makes space for women to pause, to heal, to grieve, I find myself questioning, integrating, searching for the next version of myself.

This past year has been full of deep work: shamanic circles, breathwork, retreats, grief and womb workshops. Each one peeling back a layer, inviting me to meet myself again. The challenge is always how to carry that wisdom back into the world. How to integrate it into my work, into the trauma healing and energy work I hold for others, without losing myself in the process. Still, self-doubt creeps in. Do I have enough? Enough knowledge, enough uniqueness, enough something different to offer? Sometimes I sit between worlds, medicine and mystery, evidence and energy, intellect and instinct, and I wonder how to weave them together with grace. I have always had a yearning for truth, for what is real, factual, embodied. But I also feel the ancestral pull, the echo of women’s wisdom that lives beyond the measurable. Perhaps this is what it means to step into elderhood: to become both scientist and sage. To let experience, grief, and change forge something deeper in me. To stop reaching for who I used to be and begin to honour who I am now. There are days I still ask: When will I recover? When will I be better? Will I ever feel that surge of energy again, that fire that drives me forward? But maybe being better is not the goal. Maybe it is not about rising up in the old way, but burning differently, slower, steadier, truer. Maybe this is the work of midlife: to strip back the roles, the noise, the proving, until all that is left is the truth of who we are. To finally not care about the opinions of others, and to stand fully in our value, our integrity, our power.

I am learning to see this not as falling apart, but as a sacred unravelling, a shedding of all that is no longer mine to carry. What remains, beneath it all, is a woman still rising.