In one picture, Brenda Heist smiles, with round cheeks and dark brown eyes. In the next, taken 11 years later, her face is sad and sunken, framed with stringy blond hair. As disturbing as these side-by-side photos appear, more chilling is the story that catapulted her into the headlines last week.
In 2002, Heist dropped her children off at school and then mysteriously disappeared, leaving family and friends to think she had been abducted and likely killed. But no foul play had come to Heist. None, that is, except of her own making. Awash in self-pity over her broken marriage and finances, she hitchhiked with strangers from Pennsylvania to Florida, where she lived for the next decade, using the name "Lovie Smith," working as a day laborer and, later, a housekeeper. She often resorted to sleeping on the street. Last week, reportedly in part due to mounting health problems, she turned herself in at a Key Largo police station.
Her age at the moment when she erased her identity as a tidy suburban mom and became what some describe as a "beach-bum hippie" seems vital to this story. She left her family and her old life behind at 42.
Ah, to be an American woman in her 40s!
Admittedly, there's a lot of good that comes from four decades of experience. Our skins are thicker; we are more fearless. We prune our list of friends, keeping only the ones who make our spirits sing and no longer feeling the need to be liked by everyone. We don't worry quite as much about our appearance and just sigh with recognition when we are told that we are "more beautiful than we think." If we are mothers, we begin to see the adults our children are becoming, and there is deep joy in that. Plus, it's often in our 40s when the random, misshapen puzzle pieces of our professional lives can come together into a coherent whole.
But, make no mistake; being a woman in her 40s is no walk in the park, no matter how many articles declare "40 is the new 30" or even "40 is the new 20." In our 40s, our marriages change. The honeymoon is long over – as is the blur of activity that caring for very young children requires. It's in their 40s that more people get divorced. Mothers watch their children edge toward and enter adolescence. Month by month, we are forced to concede that those curmudgeons who warned: "Little kids, little problems, big kids, big problems" actually were right on. And it's in the decade of our 40s that college costs suddenly loom large and retirement no longer feels so far away.
In our appearance-obsessed culture, the effects of time become harder to ignore at 40. We gray. Our eyebrows and lashes thin. We start lingering in the drugstore aisle perusing expensive eye creams. Whether or not we've experienced childbirth's effects on our bodies, perimenopause wreaks mischief – sometimes havoc – on our moods, sleep patterns, and physical selves. As Paul Simon crooned, wrangling with midlife: we find ourselves asking "Why am I soft in the middle? The rest of my life is so hard!"
So it makes a tragic sort of sense that Heist was 42 years when she ditched her life. But what was her key mistake? Did she feel like she had permission to hurt others because she'd been hurt? Did the indignities of stretch marks and the unseen, everyday tedium of carpools and emptying the dishwasher overwhelm her? Did she not realize she was more beautiful than she thought?
Even before the people began to look for her, Heist was already a missing person. When she met a few homeless people at the park the day of her departure, she says she was crying and "feeling sorry for herself." Given the opportunity to leave the first half of her life behind, she said she "just snapped" and took it.
In his book Falling Upwards: A Spirituality for the Two Halves of Life, Richard Rohr writes that after spending the first part of our lives defining ourselves and setting ourselves up for a happy adulthood, we will experience crushing disappointment and loss. It might the loss of a job, a marriage, treasured friendships, or an identity that we have carefully wrought. Many of these changes may become the root of our "midlife crisis," particularly a struggle over identity. Rohr says, however, that what appears to be a falling down is actually an opportunity to fall upwards, deepen spiritually, and find new purpose. We aren't forced to take this opportunity; we are free to remain bitter, frustrated, and upset. Even at 40, many of us will have another 40 years ahead of us, though the final half a lifetime will be much different than the first. Brenda Heist's disappearing act 11 years ago broke her children's hearts and thrust them into a new part of life. In interviews since Heist re-surfaced, her ex-husband appears to be a person who has "fallen upward." He says he's forgiven her and describes his gratitude for his children and family in this second part of his life. Now it's Heist's turn – and all of our turns – to surrender our disappointment, self-pity, and fear to a loving God who desires to bring all of us missing persons home.
Grant is the author of Love You More: The Divine Surprise of Adopting My Daughter and MOMumental: Adventures in the Messy Art of Raising a Family. Disquiet Time, a book she is co-editing with journalist and author Cathleen Falsani, will be released in autumn 2014. Find her online at jennifergrant.com.
