Julie Rothschild Levi and I have lived nothing alike. She grew up in Minneapolis and I grew up in Philadelphia. She went from editing speeches for Prime Minister Rabin during the Oslo Accords to becoming a nutrition and health writer, then stepped away from all of it to raise her kids. I went from being a TV producer to building a kosher food media company, working through every one of my own pregnancies and deliveries, never once taking maternity leave. Somewhere in the middle of her own detour, Julie became a medical clown, walking into hospital wards to make sick children laugh before she ever did it for a living. I found my way to Aish, doing work I never once imagined for myself either. Neither of us planned any of it. That is probably why we got along instantly.
Julie told me she is fifty seven, and that she has started calling this stage of her life her third trimester.
Her math is not exactly precise, and she will be the first to admit it. If you are hoping to live to 120, as the tradition teaches, two thirds of the way through actually lands you at eighty, not fifty seven. But I do not think the math is really the point. The point is the feeling underneath it: that you are not finished. That whatever you built in your twenties, thirties, and forties was not the whole story, just the first two thirds of it.
Julie spent those decades collecting careers the way other people collect hobbies, speechwriting, health writing, motherhood, medical clowning, and she told me she used to think there was something wrong with her for never sticking to one thing. Then she reframed it. She was not scattered. She had simply lived a life rich in experience, and our culture rewards achievement so loudly that it forgets to notice experience at all.
I asked her the hard question. Are you scared of getting older? She said no, and she meant it. I told her I still am, that I carry this quiet fear I have already peaked, that the window is closing. She didn’t try to talk me out of it. She just told me she used to feel that way too, before she stopped believing there was a window at all.
We ended up playing a game about aging, the kind where you say yes or no with no time to think. Botox. Gray hair. Retiring. Dressing your age.
I do not think either of us has this figured out. I still catch myself scared of the wrong things. Julie still cannot answer, in one sentence, what it means to dress her age.
But I keep coming back to her math, even the part that doesn’t quite add up. If the first two trimesters are the ones you spend building, the third one is the one you finally get to live in. Julie is fifty seven, three careers and one clown costume and six decades of proving people wrong into her third trimester, and she is not slowing down. I don’t know exactly which trimester I’m in. I know I’m not finished either.
Jewish life is beautiful, and this week it looked like a woman who stopped waiting for permission to keep becoming someone new.
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