Midlife Musings of a Family Doctor: Why I am Better at Making Mistakes
- Sital Bhargava DO, MS
- 2 days ago
- 4 min read
*Let's take a week off from talking about sexual dysfunction (https://www.rx4trauma.com/post/let-s-talk-about-sex-baby-the-truth-about-female-sexual-dysfunction). We will come back next week to the topic of genitourinary syndrome of menopause (which is a long name for a painful va-jay-jay).
This week, let's talk about mistakes.
By the time you reach midlife, you've made plenty of them. Some are small. Some are expensive. And some become the stories your children bring up every Thanksgiving...along with the other 51 weeks of the year.
Recently, I asked my three kids to tell me about mistakes I'd made that involved them.
My son, clearly the wisest of the bunch, immediately replied, "You've never made any mistakes."
The other two immediately realized he was laying the groundwork for future inheritance negotiations yet proceeded to list a seemingly endless number of parenting missteps I'd made over the past twenty years. A surprising number of them involved vacations.
They're not wrong.
I love planning vacations.
Actually, "love" may be an understatement. I spend more time researching vacations than I do studying for my medical board exams. (Hopefully that doesn't change your opinion of me as a physician.)
I read travel blogs, compare reviews, study trail maps, watch YouTube videos, and convince myself that I've become a local expert before ever setting foot in the country.
Usually, this works.
Sometimes...
...not so much.
On our recent trip to the French Alps, I found what one travel blogger described as a "beautiful family hike with breathtaking mountain views."
The plan was simple.
We would hike downhill through spectacular alpine scenery and then catch a train back to our starting point.
What could possibly go wrong?
About ten feet into the hike, we encountered snow covering the trail.
Now, it was May 31st and we were in the French Alps, so this wasn't entirely shocking. Besides, I'd seen dozens of gorgeous Instagram photos of this trail and didn't remember there being much snow.
"We'll be fine," I confidently announced.
Ten feet later, we reached our first steep, snow-covered slope.
At least it was still downhill.
Convinced this was just an isolated patch, I chose the safest method available: I sat down and slid down the mountain on my backside. Falling and breaking my wrist seemed like an unnecessary side trip on our vacation.
The rest of my family—blessed with more agility and better balance—walked, or in some cases ran, down the slope.
Then it happened again. More snow.
And again.
And again.
The hike became a repeating cycle of dirt trail, snowfield, dirt trail, snowfield, with me alternating between hiking and involuntary sledding.
Eventually, we reached a section where the trail hugged the side of the mountain. The path had disappeared beneath several feet of snow, leaving only a narrow strip of packed snow along the edge.
As we stood there contemplating our options, an athletic young couple confidently crossed the section using trekking poles and ice axes.
I looked at them.
Then I looked at my family.
Then I remembered the gorgeous pictures I'd seen online.
"We'll get amazing photos," I argued.
Four blank stares.
"It'll be good exercise."
More blank stares.
“Well, we have to get to the bottom of the mountain.”
Someone pointed to the gondola above us and said surviving the vacation was probably more important.
Fair enough.
So we turned around, and I spent the next hour retracing my steps, but this time crawling uphill with my fingers dug into the snow.
When we finally made it back to the top, we celebrated our failed hike with homemade peanut butter sandwiches and champagne.
Honestly?
It wasn't horrible.
Twenty years ago, this mistake would have haunted me.
I would have replayed it for days.
Should I have researched more?
Trusted a different blog?
Checked the trail conditions?
Googled "snow in Chamonix in May versus August?"
Maybe.
But none of those answers would have changed what had happened.
We weren't suddenly going to finish the hike.
We weren't flying back to France in August for a do-over.
The mistake had already served its purpose.
It reminded my kids that their mother is gloriously, consistently human. Although I think they are very aware of this.
It reminded me that perfection is an impossible standard—even for someone who secretly keeps trying to achieve it.
And it gave us another family story.
The kind that gets retold around the dinner table.
The kind that grows larger and larger every year.
The kind where, before long, I wasn't sliding down the Alps—I was apparently rescuing the entire family while fending off an avalanche.
That's how family legends are made.
One of the unexpected gifts of midlife is that you slowly stop measuring your life by the number of mistakes you make.
Instead, you start measuring it by how quickly you recover from them. Five days. 24 hours. 3 minutes. The time it takes to gulp down some champagne.
Because somewhere between raising children, juggling careers, navigating aging parents, and wondering why you walked into the pantry in the first place, you realize something important.
You simply cannot get everything right.
Perimenopause has a funny way of reinforcing that lesson.
The brain fog makes you forget names.
The hormones make you second-guess yourself.
Your body starts playing by a different set of rules.
For women who have spent decades trying to be the perfect mother, physician, partner, daughter, or friend, it can feel like we're suddenly failing at things that once came easily.
But maybe we're looking at it all wrong.
Maybe this stage of life isn't teaching us how to avoid mistakes.
Maybe it's teaching us how to make peace with them.
To choose peanut butter sandwiches and champagne over self-criticism.
I’d like to say my children probably won't remember that we never finished that hike, but they will.
They'll also remember me repeatedly sliding down a mountain on my backside while insisting everything was "totally fine."
And hopefully they'll remember the laughter afterward.
As it turns out, the best family memories rarely come from the days that go exactly according to plan.
They come from the days when they don't.
And maybe that's the biggest lesson midlife has to offer.
Not that we stop making mistakes.
But that we finally learn they were never the point.
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