Support for women ripening into their second bite of life.

Dear Reader,

Friday night I walked through the hospital doors with a visceral thought:
​shhh… it’s okay, you’ll be mothered here.

I’d been sent to the ER to rule out “the scary stuff” behind sudden vertigo.
Not how I imagined kicking off a weekend.

Last year I came to this same hospital weekly for iron infusions. And strangely—I loved it. Not the needles or the fatigue, but the care.

The nurses knew my name. They tucked warm blankets around my shoulders. They handed me ginger ale—liquid gold in that moment.

Ordinary tenderness can feel radical in a culture that demands we keep pushing, no matter what our bodies whisper. (You can read that love letter here.)

This time, after the tests and the IV, I was sent home with one directive: wait.

Wait to drive, to see how sleepy the meds made me.
Wait to see if things improved over the next three weeks.

For several days, the vertigo demanded total surrender. My mind resisted—grasping at projects, wanting to prove its aliveness through doing.

Even after years of inner work, slowing down that drastically still feels like a fight.
I want to do things, make things, move.

Yet when we yield to what life asks, we remember: to be human is to be held.
By caregivers. By waiting. By the insistence of rest itself.

Rest isn’t falling behind.
It’s opening into a deeper way of being.

So if you fear that slowing down will make you irrelevant or a burden, please know: you’re not alone.

We live inside a system that trains us to equate worth with output. But maybe the real stretch is expanding the space we offer our very human selves.

This is what I offer as a coach—not another task on your list, but a place to be held. A place of psychological rest, right in the middle of the tug-of-war between striving and surrender.

To honor rest doesn’t betray ambition—it deepens it.

This is the work of midlife as I see it: to mother ourselves as fiercely as any nurse, any nap, any can of ginger ale ever could—especially as those who once mothered us may be aging, changing, or gone.

So we can widen the space for our very human, tender, luminous selves.

With love,
Brooke

P.S. On Sunday I’ll share some two-minute ideas for the next time you feel afraid to rest—and I’ll pull a card from Tricia Hershey’s Rest Deck.