Welcome to Messy Middlescence!

The mission of our podcast is to help ourselves and others in midlife to learn, laugh, cry, and connect with a likeminded community so that we all can improve or ideally thrive through Middlescence / Midlife with all of its changes, challenges, and growth opportunities.

Our podcast, Messy Middlescence, is the result of countless conversations between ourselves, our siblings, our friends as well as countless articles, books and research we have read about the middle years between youth and old age. 

We view the term “middle age” that is generally used to describe the time from 45-65 years of age as a loaded term full of (mostly negative!) cultural connotations, stereotypes and cliches. Tara stumbled upon the term “middlescence”, and we found it a much more accurate and descriptive term for this time.

Like adolescence – middlescence is a time of tremendous change touching most aspects of our lives.  There are the physical and hormonal changes but also many of the rhythms, relationships and frameworks that have dominated our lives for years all start to shift in ways that are unbalancing at best – seismic at worst.

We know we are not the first podcast to explore the challenges and opportunities of these years.  However – our podcast will be different because it is one of sharing, exploring and figuring things out together.

It is messy because we do not have answers, but we hope to discover some.

The additional twist in our podcast is that Tara and Christina are 2 of 7 siblings – currently ages 43-57. Our initial interviews will be with our siblings and their partners. Our family currently encompasses all the different stages of these years and often provide very different perspectives on working, retirement, family and health. We hope you enjoy getting to know our extended family through this process and our podcast.

We invite all those who desire to use their middlescence in a productive and affirming way to join us. We hope we can guide listeners to actively change both their perspective and day-to-day reality of this time.

We also aim to create a community of listeners with similar struggles and questions. 

We hope you will join us!