What eight years in france, three kids and a grandchild have taught me about mental strength..

What eight years in france, three kids and a grandchild have taught me about mental strength..

I came across this list about mental strength and something about it stopped me in my tracks with my coffee this morning...

Because here is the thing nobody tells you when you hit your mid 40s, when the kids have grown, when you have become someone's grandmother, when you have packed up a life and moved it somewhere entirely new and slightly terrifying and completely wonderful.

You realise you have been building mental strength your entire life without ever once calling it that.

Here is my very personal, very honest and occasionally mortifying version of this list. 😄

1. stop expecting everyone to meet your level Took me approximately 44 years and one French prefecture waiting room to truly understand this one. Some people simply cannot. The prefecture cannot. The printer at the prefecture definitely cannot. Peace begins when you accept this fully. And at our age? We finally actually do. 🖨️

2. accept life is unfair and move anyway Three children. I love them with everything I have. They have collectively aged me approximately 300 years and not one of them has ever once replaced the toilet roll without being asked. We are still moving. Still. Moving. 🚽

3. don't beg for love or attention Motherhood teaches you this whether you like it or not. You pour everything into tiny humans who grow into teenagers who look straight through you and then - THEN - they hand you a grandchild. And suddenly you understand that the whole beautiful exhausting chaos was worth every single sleepless second. 💕

4. keep your emotions under control Ha. HAHA. At our age we have felt everything. Lost people. Raised people. Worried about people at 3am in ways that don't have words. We are magnificently imperfect at this and that is completely fine. Ask Lee. Ask the furious farmer in the Corbières. We don't talk about the Coke Zero situation. 🥤

5. stay calm in chaos Late teens party in your house. Dogs barking. Tramontane blowing. Satnav having an existential crisis somewhere in the Aude. Two decades of motherhood means this is now just a Tuesday. I am CALM. Externally. Mostly. 🌪️

6. stop taking things personally France helped enormously here. When an entire country collectively raises an eyebrow at your pronunciation for eight consecutive years you either take it personally forever or you develop a magnificent resilience and just point at the menu.

Also. Being a mother and grandmother means you have grown the thickest and most loving skin imaginable. We know who we are now. Took a while. Worth it. 👆

7. walk away from toxic people without guilt Moving to another country does rather assist with this one. The Languedoc is staggeringly beautiful and considerably less dramatic than several people from a previous chapter of life. At our age we have absolutely earned the right to choose our people carefully and without apology. 🌿

8. focus on solutions not problems Lost asparagus on the way to friends. Found asparagus solution. Solution involved a furious farmer, a sheepdog and ultimately no asparagus whatsoever. But the EFFORT was solution focused throughout and that is what counts. 🌿

9. believe in yourself even when no one else does Nobody believed I could move to France. Nobody believed I could navigate French bureaucracy, learn a language, raise children, acquire dogs, become a grandmother and still find time to spend three days failing to buy fence panels online.

And here is what I want to say to every single person reading this who is over 40 and wondering if it is too late for the next chapter:

It is absolutely not too late. Not even slightly. 🇫🇷

10. forgive but don't forget the lesson The Pastis incident is forgiven. The lesson has been learned. We are not Pastis people and that is final. Also some bigger life lessons that took longer and hurt more. Those too. Forgiven. Learned from. Filed. 🥃

11. don't fear being alone - use it to grow This one hits differently at our age doesn't it.

The children leave. The house gets quieter. And you either grieve the noise forever or you rediscover who you were before the noise started. France gave me back a version of myself I had completely forgotten existed. Quieter. Stronger. More likely to be found staring at a vineyard with a glass of something cold. 🌿☀️

12. detach from what you cannot control The Tramontane. The pool leaves. The teenage parties. The fence panel paralysis. The fact that grandmotherhood arrived and rearranged my entire personality without so much as a warning. Letting go. Getting better at it every single year. 💨

13. protect your peace above everything This is why we fled the teenage party. This is why we have a pool. This is why we live in the Aude between the Minervois and the Corbières watching the vineyards do their thing with a glass of Roséayy and two dogs who also protect their peace extremely aggressively.

At our age peace isn't a luxury. It is a non negotiable. 🐾🥂

14. choose discipline over comfort I chose to move to France at an age when most people said we were mad. I chose to learn French. I chose to try Pastis. One out of three excellent decisions. The Languedoc sun on your face every morning is the best discipline reward system that has ever existed. ☀️

So here is what I want to say to everyone reading this - the parents, the grandparents, the people who moved countries in their 40s and 50s and wondered what on earth they were doing, the ones who are still figuring out what they want to be when they grow up...

Mental strength isn't something the young have a monopoly on.

It is something we have been quietly building through every hard year, every funny year, every exhausting beautiful ridiculous year that brought us here.

Eight years in the South of France. Three kids. One magnificent grandchild. Two opinionated dogs. One very patient husband. Approximately one thousand prefecture waiting rooms.

France didn't just change my address.

It changed absolutely everything else as well. And I would not swap a single ridiculous asparagus-chasing, Pastis-tasting, fence-panel-avoiding moment of it. 💕🇫🇷

Are you on your own accidental self improvement journey? Did moving abroad change you in ways you never expected? I would genuinely love to know...

Jenna xx

Living in France | South of France | Aude | Languedoc | Minervois | Corbières | Life in France | Moving to France | British in France | Over 40 in France | Retirement in France | Motherhood | Grandmotherhood | New chapter in life | Mental strength | Self growth | Moving abroad