The Changing Tide — Finding yourself when life shifts

Twenty-four+ years.

That's how long soccer has been in my life. Not my sport. Not my passion. But woven into the fabric of my relationship with Aaron in the way that a lot of things become woven in - quietly, consistently, just there.

For most of those years I was on the sideline. Literally. Watching. Cheering. Present but not really participating. And I was fine with that. There was always enough 'else' filling the space.

Then the space changed.

It happens gradually and then all at once, the way most significant things do. Kids who needed everything start needing less. The rhythms that structured your whole life - the pickups, schedules, and the constant low hum of being needed start to shift. And where there was noise, there is suddenly something quieter.

For a lot of women, that quiet is uncomfortable. It can feel like loss before it feels like anything else. For me, there was a period of almost mourning what was. Like the tide going out and leaving you standing on unfamiliar ground, wondering what you're supposed to do with all this exposed space.

This is what I've come to understand about changing tides over the past couple years.

They don't signal the end of something. They signal that the season has moved. Different rhythm. Different cadence. Different invitation.

The question is whether you're paying attention to what the new season is actually asking of you and what matters most to you.

For me, when I got honest about it, one of the things I discovered was my marriage was..... different. 

Not in trouble. And there was nothing wrong. But because long-term relationships have a quiet way of drifting when life gets full, there was just a lack of something. You're in the same house, the same life, the same team, often the same challenges! and yet somehow, distance was still be accumulated. I realised I'd been watching it happen gradually and I didn't want to keep watching.

So when the space opened, I made a deliberate choice about what to put in it.

Aaron started coaching at a new soccer club. And instead of taking my usual position (there but not really there, on the sideline in every sense) I became the manager of the senior Women's teams. In conjunction with being his number 1 supporter when he plays (which he also does!) Now, if you know me, this is either the most obvious thing I've ever done or the most surprising, depending on how well you know me.

But that's not really the point. The point is I chose to get involved. To be in it with him rather than adjacent to it. To turn something that had always been his thing into something we shared.

And it's been one of the better decisions I've made in recent years.

We don't just do soccer. We've started doing trivia. Dancing. Picnics. Art at home. Exploring things in our local area we'd never bothered with before. We've made actual time to participate in life together rather than just coexist inside it. We invite the kids. They mostly decline, because of course they do, they're teenagers and we are deeply uncool. But the invitation stays open.

What I notice, when I look at all of this, is that none of it happened by accident. It happened because I stopped and asked myself an honest question: what actually matters to me in this season? Not the last season. Not the one coming. This one.

And then I made decisions that aligned with the answer.

That sounds simple. It isn't always. Particularly when your nervous system has been in overdrive for so long that you've lost the ability to hear what you actually want underneath the noise. When you've been running on the fuel of everyone else's needs for so long that identifying your own feels almost selfish. Almost foreign.

But the tide changes whether you're ready or not.

You can stand on the shore and grieve what's receding. Or you can look at what it's leaving behind,  what space it's clearing and what it might be making room for.

Finding yourself in your 40s starts with finding your values. Not the ones you inherited. Not the ones you performed. The ones that are true right now, in this season, for this version of you.

This is the conversation I have with women all the time. Not about soccer or trivia or what to do on a Saturday. About the bigger version of that question - what actually matters to me now, in this season, and am I living in alignment with it? Because when the noise settles and the kids need less and the space opens up, that question doesn't answer itself. And a nervous system that has been running on everyone else's needs for years often can't hear the answer clearly even when the quiet arrives. That's where the work begins.

Even if that something is learning the offside rule at 43.