The grief of growing older

The cost of wisdom

There is a heaviness in my chest that I feel more than ever as the days pass.

I entered my thirties a month after giving birth to my first child. I don’t remember much of it. I do remember that both my parents flew in the same weekend. A dream of a divorced child, realized in the blur of new motherhood.

Ask me what I did in June when I turned thirty, and I couldn’t tell you. Ask me about her milestones? I can recount every single one.

Although the weight in my chest isn’t about her, it’s about me becoming her mother while watching myself age in ways I wasn’t prepared for. It’s recognizing the grief that comes with growing older and realizing the cost of wisdom is heavier than expected.

I’ve learned to write my way through discomfort and honor the awareness of its presence.

That’s the beautifully complex part.

It’s hard to ignore all the junk vying for our attention that keeps us from being fully present. Anxiety. Depression. Isolation. Doubt.

The older I get, the more I see them coming. The more I understand their weight.

That’s Ecclesiastes 1:18 playing out in real time: The greater my wisdom, the greater my grief. To increase knowledge only increases sorrow.

When I moved closer to family, I told myself I had no expectations. Except deep down, when we tell ourselves this, we do. We carry unnamed hopes we don’t allow ourselves to articulate. And when we stop and feel, we realize how much of the previous season we actually miss. The parts we can remember.

I miss my friends.

I miss my pastors.

I miss the life I was building in Texas.

I have to watch life from that season continue without me.

With time and wisdom, you’re taught that some relationships are purely based on proximity. It’s a hard lesson. It hurts. All while seeing the beauty in the time spent together.

What a grief to realize it couldn’t translate across distance.

Postpartum adds another layer to the grief due to all the hormones. It makes me grieve friendships I attempted to cultivate, where reciprocity fell short.

Postpartum depression fought hard to take me under.

I needed the support of my family. And that’s where this hard decision to leave behind our life in Texas was born.

And this is the crossroads.

This is where I continue to admit getting older is hard.

Where I sit with and write through the grief.

We make hard decisions that are best overall, but don’t feel good.

Even when necessary.

Returning home puts you in front of people who are familiar with you and often don’t foster space for the growth that took place while away. It’s losing the same friendship twice because they couldn’t embrace the person you’ve become.

Motherhood is teaching me it’s okay to say no to overextending myself and fighting for relationships that don’t want to be kept.

That’s it. Understanding that not everyone can come with you. That growth sometimes means loss, and the wisdom to see that doesn’t make it hurt less.

The grief of growing older isn’t from wanting to be elsewhere. It’s from seeing clearly. From understanding the weight of decisions made.

The necessary decisions that still hurt.

The losses that come with growth.

The friendships that can’t survive distance or evolution.

We see the world around us differently now. We feel the cost of wisdom in our chest, in our silence, in the space between what was and what is.

I don’t have answers. Just the weight of the realization. I’m learning to hold love and grief at the same time—for my daughter, for the life I left, for the person I’m becoming. I’m learning to trust that a new normal can be forged even as time ticks, even as I sit in the unknown.

It’s finding contentment in where you are. Accepting what you cannot change. Fighting hard not to let the emotions of this world bring you under.

This is what growing older costs.

Wisdom that doesn’t make life easier, just clearer as you walk.

May you have the courage to sit with your own grief and write through it,
Janae Carlee