LIVING WITH HER

Book II of The Woman Called HER

By Melanie D. Peña

I stopped waiting to go back.

I started learning how to live with the woman I had become.

What happens after you finally meet the woman menopause has been introducing you to?

You live with her.

LIVING WITH HER is the second book in Melanie D. Peña’s deeply personal The Woman Called HER series.

In Meeting HER, Melanie began asking who this unfamiliar woman was.

In Book II, the question changes.

She is no longer waiting for her old self to return.

She is learning how to live inside a changing body, changing relationships, changing ambitions, changing desires—and a life that no longer follows the rules she once understood.

With honesty, humor and an unapologetically personal voice, Melanie writes about the realities women are often expected to handle quietly:

• Missing the woman you used to be without rejecting the woman you are now

• Learning that energy has a budget

• Navigating love when presence, intimacy and connection change

• Wanting sex without performing sexuality

• Motherhood when your daughter becomes an adult

• Ambition, money and success after midlife

• Letting relationships, expectations and identities end

• Caring about beauty without allowing beauty to determine your worth

• Having bad days without turning them into a verdict on your entire life

• Discovering that getting older does not require becoming smaller

This is not a book about becoming perfectly healed, peaceful or transformed.

It is about something more honest.

Learning to live with yourself while you are still changing.

Because eventually Melanie realizes that HER was never a stranger living inside her life.

HER was another version of the woman who had been there all along.

Her.

FOR THE WOMAN WHO…

Feels different but cannot always explain why.

Misses parts of who she used to be.

Still wants love, desire, money, ambition, beauty, adventure and more.

Is tired of being told to simply “accept aging.”

Is discovering that strength at this stage of life may look very different from strength at twenty-five.

And is ready to stop asking:

“How do I get back?”

and begin asking:

“Where am I going?”

INSIDE THE BOOK

PART I — THE WOMAN WHO STAYED

Learning to stop waiting for the old self to return.

PART II — THE LIFE AROUND HER

Love, intimacy, motherhood, boundaries and presence.

PART III — THE LIFE SHE CHOOSES

Ambition, work, money, relationships, joy and letting go.

PART IV — THE WOMAN SHE IS

Bad days, the future, acceptance and finally recognizing HER.

18 chapters of memoir, reflection, humor and brutally honest conversations about midlife.

THE WOMAN CALLED HER SERIES

BOOK I — MEETING HER

She arrived. I did not recognize her. So I began asking who she was.

BOOK II — LIVING WITH HER

She stayed. I stopped waiting for my old self to return. HER was me too.

NEXT — BOOK III: BECOMING HER

Who You Become When You Stop Trying to Go Back.

Digital Edition

PDF ebook

Author: Melanie D. Peña

Follow the journey on Instagram:

@braincapitalbymelanie

You do not have to go back to become yourself again.

Maybe the woman standing here now deserves to be met too.