Is Middle Age The Moment When You Become Okay With Being a Beginner Again?

On Mother’s Day this year, my husband did something I never thought anyone would do for me: He hit up our go-to sporting goods store (a place I've become very familiar with as a mom of two kids who play sports). Only this time, instead of grabbing a last minute pair of cleats for our kids, he got something for me, a woman who doesn’t have a sporty bone in her whole body. What was in the bag, you ask?  A few new tennis outfits.

For the past year or so, I’ve been thinking of starting tennis lessons. I’ve never played a racket sport in my life, and if my general sense of hand/eye coordination gives us any hints, I won’t be good. Like, at all. Yet I’m intrigued by the possibility of starting totally fresh at something for the first time in so long.

I am dragging my feet big time, and my husband got me the tennis gear as an encouraging push. Yet I’m not signing up for lessons, because ultimately, I still feel uncomfortable with the idea of being outside of my wheelhouse. At the same time, being a true beginner? It seems kind of liberating…and a little bit thrilling.

Many of my friends, especially the ones that are a little bit older than I am, are also dabbling in hobbies, and approaching them as complete beginners. One friend is taking piano lessons for the first time, the other is doing ballet. And all around me, so many women around my age are taking up mahjong.

So what’s going on here? I think it says a lot about how we’re approaching middle-age, what we are craving at this phase in life. I think this especially true of women who are high-achieving and generally really good at everything they do. 

As women, hyper-competence is demanded of us. It feels good to do something, not necessarily for the sake of being good or being successful, but just to do something new. To feel the thrill many of us haven't experienced since our own childhoods: The thrill of being a total, complete beginner again.

Picking up a new hobby — whether it’s an instrument or a sport or a domestic project like gardening or bread-baking — allows us to tap into a different piece of who we are. In new hobbies, we find permission to be imperfect. To learn instead of teach. To let someone else lead the way and run the show. And isn’t that so much of what we crave as women, especially women who reach the point in life when they are running the show in their homes and their careers? 

At the same time, a lifetime of conditioning, of being told we have to be so capable and competent all the time, is nearly impossible to overcome. But I think there’s beauty on the other side of that…and I’m not quite ready to be a total beginner again, but I want to get there. And one day, I think I will.