Yesterday I got to have lunch with a friend of mine who had taken an impromptu trip over from the U.K. Alain and I decided to take her to La Caleche - one of our favorite French Restaurants here in Toulon.
I've blogged about this restaurant before - the food is fabulous and the prices can't be beat! (More about the restaurant in another post.)
While we were talking and catching up on each other's families and what we've been doing, we started talking about life at this stage of our lives. Marjelaine is a few years older than I am, and although she is technically retired, she works as a home care nurse in the U.K. both to keep her skills up-to-date, but also to give herself something to do during the day.
As she says, she does a little gardening, sweeps the floors, does the dishes - but after that, what is there to do?
She also enjoys traveling, and comes to France frequently, as both her sister and one of her sons lives here.
She also has been experiencing the "what am I going to do next" phase in her life, and for her, there are still as many questions as there are answers. We connected when I told her how I was feeling too - the impatience with wasting time on people and activities that I don't enjoy, the general unsettledness and feelings of loss and a sort of fear that I've been experiencing, now that my kids are growing up. (I told her that over the last few months, I've started thinking for the first time about life without my kids being the major focus, and she nodded her head sagely - her boys are all adults, and it was incredibly comforting to be able to talk to someone who understood exactly what I was feeling and going through and had been through it too.) Her advice was to just take it one day at a time, and enjoy figuring out what I want to do, and what I like.
"It will come" she said. I think she's right.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment