Why I wrote “Not Done Yet”

I wrote this journal in a week. That’s not me bragging — it genuinely surprised me. Usually I sit and stare and rewrite a sentence eleven times. This one just came out.

I know exactly why.

I was thinking back to a very specific stretch of my own life — my kids were late teens, early twenties, and my parents were still alive, living two hours away. Not in crisis, not needing anything dramatic, just… there. Ageing quietly in the background while my kids were doing their own quiet unravelling and rebuilding up close. And me in the middle of both, most of the time completely on my own with it.

Nobody warns you about that stretch. There’s no book for “your kids don’t need you the way they used to, but they still need you, and your parents don’t need you yet, but you know that’s coming, and also — who even are you outside of all of this?”

So I started writing questions. Not gentle ones. Not the kind you can answer with a nice tidy sentence and move on. I wanted to ask myself — and now, ask you — the ones that actually make you sit with the pen down for a minute before you can write anything at all.

Things like: what did you actually do with the years since then? Do you know what you want now, or did you stop asking? What were you really good at, before you got busy being everything to everyone?

I’m not going to pretend this is a light, breezy journal you flip through with a cup of tea. It isn’t. It’s supposed to be a bit uncomfortable. Brutally honest, if you let it be. That was the whole point — I didn’t want to write something easy, because nothing about that stretch of life was easy, and pretending otherwise felt dishonest.

If you’re in it right now — parents on one side, almost-grown kids on the other, and you somewhere in the middle wondering where you went — this was written for you. Thirty-five prompts, seven sections, real space to actually write.

You’re not done yet. Not even close.