Yes Year - Cheers to 50!

So I’m kind of having trouble with the word FIFTY.

I'm turning fifty today. I don't feel 50.

I don't feel like half of my life is now over and yet that's kind of what it is.

I think mentally I'm struggling with “what do I have left? 20, 25, if I'm lucky 30 years left and the last 30 flew by. I have a daughter who's 28 this year. And yet it just seems not long ago that she was running around the backyard in pigtails. Our youngest is 24 this year, our middle 25 and I just don't know where all that time went.

So, I’m kind of struggling. 

I wonder if women like me struggle more than men.

My husband turned 50 a week and a half ago and he just seems to wear it like a distinguished badge of honor and yet, I don't feel that way.

At the same time, I should be really fortunate I made it to 50. I know people haven't made it to 50 for whatever reason, so I should be thankful that I'm still planted on this Earth and I'm still seeing my children grow and become beautiful, young, confident women who have careers and eventually have families. So, I should be honored that I'm going wear 50 and hopefully I'm going figure out a way to wear it well.

My husband and I talked about turning 50 a lot. We have some friends who are turning 50 this year. One of my friends talked about this year is going to be her ‘yes year’ and I totally took that.

I was like, “you know what it's gonna be our yes year’. 

‘Yes year’ will mean a lot of different things to people, but for Ben and I, it’s saying yes to our friends when they say, ‘Hey we are going to Vegas this weekend, do you want to go?”, and our answer is going to be yes. Or “We're going to try out this new restaurant, you guys want to go next Saturday?”. Our answer's going be yes.

So our ‘yes year’ turned out to be a 50th birthday celebration from May 2024 to May 2025 since we are both turning 50. ‘Yes year’ means we say yes to us. We say yes to things we want to do. We say yes to spending more time with family and friends. Yes, to seeing our children a little bit more because not everyone lives here. Say, yes to splurging on the hotel room or maybe go to the beach on a Sunday night and stay till Monday. Yes, could me a bunch of things, but for us, it means “let's go to that, let's go try that, let's go experience that”.

We we work hard and so we always say, “work hard, play hard”. But this year we're really gonna focus on saying yes.

There has been so many times that our friends have said, “Hey we're gonna go do this for the weekend and we look at our schedule and I'm like do I have enough people that can work the stores? What time can Ben get off work on Friday? But this year we are really gonna focus on saying yes, we're gonna make that happen, yes, we're going to do that.

Each year we do a word of the year. If you follow our journal on our website you'll, see that this year's word is ‘amplify’. It means taking the things we have and the things we build and the things we've accomplished - how do we take them to the next level. 

In retrospect, our word should have just been ‘yes’ for this year because we just want to be present. We want to be in the moment. We want be spontaneous and we want to celebrate the fact that we made it to 50. We're in good health. We have a beautiful family. We work hard for our businesses and careers. We want to say yes to sharing that with our friends and family. Experiencing more things with our friends and family and just overall experiencing things, just Ben and I. 

Along with the year of us turning the big 5 - 0, it is truly our year of becoming empty nesters.

Our youngest daughter is graduating this summer with a master's degree and although she’ll be around a little bit this summer and fall until she moves on to the next journey, we are truly empty nesters. We have three kids through college, which is a badge on all on its own. We're so proud of them but we're really looking forward to this chapter as well.

I guess instead of being worried about what 5 - 0  really means I should just look forward to it and be appreciative that I’m here and look forward to saying ‘yes’. 

Yes. Yes from May 2024 until May 2025.

Cheers to FIFTY!!

 

(Editors note: This entry was transcribed from an audio recording and is meant to read like Darcy talks :) enjoy)