Midlife Woman: A Sacred Love Letter To Yourself

Sometimes, a poem knocks gently at the door of your mind. Sometimes it kicks the door in, walks right up to you, and says, “You. Yes, you. I see you, and I’m talkin’ to YOU.”

David Whyte’s “Midlife Woman” did just that to me: kicked in the door, walked right in, grabbed me by the throat, and refused to let go until I was down on my knees—all in the best way possible.

It’s a stunning piece—a love letter, or as he’s called it, a Valentine—to the midlife woman. And when I say “love letter,” I mean that in the most layered and sacred sense: yes, it’s a poem of witness from a man to the woman in his life, but it’s also an invitation for each of us to turn it inward, to write our own name at the top and receive it as a Valentine from ourselves, to ourselves.

Wait, can we do that? Is that allowed? This may feel like taking a few too many liberties….

From Language To Coaching: A New Way to Speak Wellness

Let’s take a detour: once upon a time, I taught Mandarin Chinese. That’s right, Mandarin Chinese. I grew up in a Russian-speaking household, picked up English in school, and went on to study Spanish, French, Latin, and Mandarin. 

After all that, one thing I can tell you is that if you’re looking to really exercise your mind, try Scots Gaelic—which I took up on a whim to exercise my 60-year-old brain. 

The really cool thing about foreign languages is that if you keep at them, you’ll reach a point where things click: it suddenly isn’t odd to call bluebells “shoes of the cuckoo” AND the grammar that makes that phrase possible becomes second nature.

Something else I love about learning new languages is that you can’t help but learn to see your own language/culture/country in a different light. Your brain actually rewires itself, creates new neural pathways so that you can survive in a new culture while observing your own with a more objective eye.

And that’s where health coaching comes in: as a health coach with a background in language studies, I invite women learn a new language around wellness. 

We leave behind the one that’s rooted in performance and expectations of perfection and step into one that is all about  permission and presence. We leave behind the world of goal setting, pushing through, and “just do it” for one of intuition, alignment, and sustainable transformation. We move away from performing wellness to embodying it.

Maybe that’s why this poem feels so urgent. So intimate. So personal. It turns the accepted perception of a midlife woman upside down and inside out. 

It gives voice to something I’d felt for years but hadn’t yet fully articulated: as a client once said, we are not fixing our broken; instead, we are unfurling our perfect.

Midlife Woman, You Are Not Broken:

Like adolescence, perimenopause is a natural, biological, chemical, physiological transition. One that can be messy, confusing, uncomfortable—and also radiant, rebellious, and ripe with potential.

We support our tweens and teens through their hormonal rollercoasters with grace (mostly). And we tell them how great life will be once the acne abates and things settle a bit. So why don’t we extend ourselves the same compassion in midlife?

Midlife women need to hear this truth: your body is doing exactly what she’s meant to do. You are not defective. You are not in decline. You are entering your next great incarnation.

When I first read The Wisdom of Menopause by Dr. Christiane Northrup, it was like someone had handed me a new pair of glasses—one that let me see midlife as a sacred threshold, not a downward spiral; as the final act of fertility—giving birth to ourselves the way we were meant to be (Where my LOTR fans at? Anyone?) rather than a withering away into irrelevance and invisibility.

And while Northrup’s tome speaks learnedly about the science behind menopause and the many approaches one can take to ease the transition, it took a poem to really give me an aha moment. Reading Midlife Woman—especially during a particularly dark phase of my personal life—felt like updating the lenses in that frame Northrup had given me, bringing both clarity and poetry to this wild, wonderful stage of life.

I’ll be honest: I’m not generally a reader of poetry, particularly not contemporary poetry. And as I said, this one literally had me sobbing on my knees. Why? Perhaps Whyte says it best in an interview with Krista Tippett for the On Being Podcast: “[P]oetry is that moment in a conversation where you have to have the other person understand what you’re saying…. And you have to say it in such a way that it’s heard fully.” 

Whyte also refers to poetry a “language against which you have no defenses.” That bowled me over—again, in the best way.

The Language Of Poetry And Defenses We Drop:

As women, midlife is when a lot of our defenses start to crumble—or get too exhausting to maintain. The masks, the pleasing, the pretending … it all starts to feel like too much. 

We human beings have lost our true selves in the role play, continues Whyte: “[W]e can temporarily put a mask over our face and pretend to be somebody else or something else. And … then we can take … another step … and forget that we were pretending to be someone else and become the person we were … just pretending to be in the first place.” I would suggest that by midlife, women in particular excel at this.

And this means when you let down those defenses and take off that mask, you’re ready to tell the truth—to others and to yourself. You’re ready to be fully visible—to others and to yourself.

Whyte goes on to name a “reluctance to be here”—a resistance the fullness of our lives, our bodies, our roles, our relationships. Again, I’d say midlife women have mastered this.

And Whyte also offers this reassurance: “As soon as [our reluctance is] embodied, it actually starts to take on a kind of seasonality … to change into something else.”

In other words, the second we stop pushing midlife away and start living it—naming it, feeling it, and yes, even laughing at it—it begins to shift. Slowly. Tenderly. And often surprisingly.

This is the work I invite women into: to start seeing midlife as an opportunity to stop performing wellness and start embodying it. To stop fixing “what’s wrong” and start unfurling what’s already perfect, all guided by what’s already deeply wise within.

Visibility In Midlife As A Sacred Act:

To be visible in midlife—truly visible—is a sacred act. And a deeply vulnerable one.

It’s easy to disappear here. Goddess knows, the culture sure makes it easy, erasing midlife women as if we never existed. And I believe that midlife is precisely when we are meant to take up space—not to fight for relevance, but to redefine it. 

To be the elders, the mentors, the trail-clearers for those behind us.

To say from our current perspective as the Cailleach, the wise-woman: “You are not alone. This, too, can be beautiful.” 

If you’ve ever read The Mists of Avalon (or reread it as much as I have), you may have finally, in midlife, picked up on the sacred truth of the novel: the Goddess, the Divine Feminine, comes in at least three distinct forms—maiden, mother, crone—and she is lovely and terrible and powerful in each incarnation, perhaps never so much as in midlife.

Midlife Woman–A Love Letter To The Self:

So let’s get back to turning “Midlife Woman” around a bit. 

In working with emotional eating, I often ask clients to consider their love language—and then practice offering themselves that very type of love rather than waiting for or expecting it from someone else. (Because let’s be real now, expectations are really resentments just waiting to happen.)

It’s simple, and it’s radical: if your language is physical touch, can you offer your body gentleness instead of judgment? If it’s words of affirmation, how can you speak kindly to yourself—not just once, but multiple times daily? If it’s acts of service, what can you do for yourself daily?

Can you write (or even just read) a love letter as gorgeous as “Midlife Woman” to yourself and believe Every. Single. Word? Can you love yourself with that attitude of respect, reverence—and yes, total adoration?

Because at the heart of all this midlife messiness is a woman who is still worthy of love on such a grand and deep scale. Not despite her flaws, her hot flashes, her forgetfulness, or her frustration—but along with them. 

“Midlife Woman” is not just a poem.

• It’s a mirror.
• It’s a map.
• It’s a mantra.
• It’s a love letter.
• And it’s yours, if you want it.

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About the Author:

Liza is a certified Integrative Nutrition® Health Coach, author, and passionate advocate for women’s wellness in perimenopause and beyond. 

Her EAT | Your Way to Health™ and Stewarding Emotional Eating™ programs support women in renegotiating their relationship with food, stress, and themselves, finally coming into full alignment their intuition and entering a season of sacred harvest in place of decline.

You can learn more about Liza here: www.simplyhealthcoaching.com