The Waymaker: Why It’s Time We Named the Woman 'Between'

They gave us three. (And seriously, ‘they’ should have known better!)

Maiden. Mother. Crone.

For centuries these three archetypes are how society has mapped the terrain of a woman’s life — the flowering, the bearing, the wisdom.

But since entering what might be considered the ‘crone’ phase of life, I have to say it doesn’t quite fit, it doesn’t feel right. Not because the term crone conjures up images of a wicked old witch offering Snow White a crisp red apple to bite into (though it does for me!) but more because I would place myself more accurately in the ‘between’ space. A place of unknown territory that exists after Mother but before Crone.

I believe something has happened that wasn’t originally accounted for when the archetypes for ‘woman’ were first created.

We started living longer. Fuller. Louder. We moved through motherhood — biological or chosen or consciously declined — and arrived somewhere the cartographers had never quite named (and to be honest, probably had no idea existed).

Not the ripening of the Maiden. Not the devoted tending of the Mother. Not yet the silver stillness of the Crone.

Somewhere else entirely.

Somewhere that hums and rattles and erupts in flames and rage and sadness once in awhile. Somewhere that wants more.

She knows this place

She is somewhere in her fifties, perhaps her sixties. Her body has crossed a threshold — the hormonal tides have shifted, the monthly rhythm has stilled — and she is standing in a new landscape blinking in the unfamiliar light.

She is not diminished. She is not waiting.

She is still very much here, in spite of every ad campaign telling her that she must ‘fight’ aging rather than embrace it.

She is the woman who shows up at her grandchildren’s school play with tears in her eyes and fire in her chest. She is the one who wakes at 3 am — not from a hot flash but from an idea, vivid and urgent, that has been quietly assembling itself in the dark. She is the one who finds herself saying no to things she used to say yes to automatically, and yes to things she once thought were for someone else, someone braver, someone with more time.

She has dreams. Not the wispy kind that dissolve by morning. Real ones. Plans. Directions. A sense that something in her is just beginning to stretch its legs.

She is also, if she is honest, a little lost, as though her identity has shifted even though there is a familiar smile looking back at her from the mirror, she doesn’t ‘feel’ the same.

Not lost in the way of despair. Lost in the way of a woman who has walked out of a role that defined her for decades and is standing with an old map in hand, realising the map doesn’t show this road (google maps has YET to come by).

She feels the sweetness of life more acutely than ever. A good cup of coffee. The particular quality of late afternoon light. The sound of her own laughter. These things land differently now — more fully, more gratefully, as though a layer of noise has been removed and she can finally hear clearly.

And yet it may also feel like this is a nameless space.

I find myself here too. Its new and scary and feels a bit vulnerable. But it also holds a lot of power.

Introducing the Waymaker

She is the fourth archetype (that I have completely made up). The one with life’s wisdom and skill in a space where society is telling her its time to slow down, that she’s no longer useful.

I call her Waymaker for a reason- she is not finding her way, she is making her way. She is actively engaged in her life and the direction she wants to take, even if she feels unsure, that’s ok, she can be more than one thing at the same time.

Not maiden, not mother, not crone — but the woman who stands between the tending and the wisdom, building and trusting the path as she walks it. The woman who has finished making way for everyone else and is only now, perhaps for the first time, making way for herself.

The name matters. Not because we need labels to live fully — but because naming something allows us to inhabit it without shame. When we have a word for where we are, we stop treating it as a waiting room. We stop apologising for not fitting neatly into what came before or what comes next. We stop carrying the identity of the person we used to be, and allow the whispers of who we really are, authentically, to be heard and cherished.

The Waymaker is not a lesser version of the Crone-to-come. She is not the fading tail of the Mother she once was. She is her own complete and sovereign season. And she is powerful.

How to tell if you are in your Waymaker era

She is post-threshold — her body has moved through the great hormonal passage of menopause (or at least for the most part), and she carries that crossing in her bones. She knows something now that she couldn’t have known before. Not wisdom in the abstract. Wisdom that arrived through the body, through the fire and the disruption and feeling lost in a life and body she felt she had known.

She is in full possession of her voice — or learning to be. For many women, this is the first time in their adult lives that the voice they speak in is recognisably their own. Not the voice of the good daughter or the capable mother. Not the voice that kept the peace or managed the room or spoke to please others. Her voice. And it surprises her (and others) sometimes, how clear it is.

She is still hungry — for experience, for connection, for meaning, for joy. The Waymaker does not accept that appetite diminishes with age. She has, if anything, developed a more refined and insistent sense of what nourishes her and what does not.

She is between — and she is learning to love that. The between is not emptiness. It is potential. She is writing herself into being, one step at a time, and the path she makes is entirely her own.

What the Waymaker needs

She needs to be seen — not as a problem to be solved or a phase to be moved through, but as a woman in the full complexity of her becoming. She needs to be sovereign.

She needs practices that meet her body where it is — not the body she had at thirty, not some idealised body that never existed, but this body, right now, with all its heat and wisdom and surprising capability.

She needs language that honours her experience — writing that says I see you there, in that unnamed space, and it is not a diminishment. It is a doorway.

She needs community. Other women who understand the particular texture of this season — who can laugh at the 3 am ideas and the sudden tears at sunset and the fierce, unexpected joy of finally, finally knowing what you will and will not carry.

And she needs to allow herself permission, perhaps for the first time in this way — to dream, to begin, to claim the hottest chapter of her life not as a metaphor but as a lived reality.