I planned a dream European trip to celebrate my 50th. Within days, I realised I'd made a huge mistake.

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With our youngest child graduating from high school, my husband and I decided to escape Melbourne's winter in favour of summer in the Mediterranean.

The plan was to kick the whole thing off with a fortnight in Morocco, followed by a month each in the Andalusian village of Gaucín, Sicily's Ortigia, and the Greek island of Symi.

We're both seasoned travellers. So we decided to go "authentic" in Marrakech by staying in a converted riad in the heart of the Medina—the city's thousand-year-old walled centre.

Sure, it'd be more of a challenge than staying in one of the luxury hotels outside the city walls. But with GPS, we'd be fine, right?

Wrong.

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That was our first mistake.

Our second mistake?

Thinking we'd be able to find our way around with an old-school paper map.

Hilarious.

Give a toddler a crayon and a blank sheet of paper, and whatever they produce will be more navigable than the thing that confronted us.

North African Medinas were designed to bamboozle invaders. The laneways are narrow and hemmed in by walls too high to orient yourself. You can't see any horizon or landmarks. We were lost within minutes.

Then we fell for the oldest scam in the Marrakech handbook. Tip for travellers: when a helpful local offers to assist, they are likely leading you deeper into the Medina to extract cash from you for guiding you out of the maze.

Cue my husband and me standing in a run-down corner of the Medina with three burly men demanding money.

The effect it had on me was not what the con-men anticipated. Something snapped. I started shouting. I called them every name under the sun. They shouted back. I shouted some more.

People stopped and stared.

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There's a reason the Greeks made their Furies women. That day, I was one of their number. I didn't know myself.

We turned and started walking away. The men followed us for a bit but eventually tired of the chase. I wasn't looking where we were going. I wasn't enjoying the extraordinary things passing us by. I just wanted it to be over.

We kept going until we stumbled upon a photography museum I'd seen on the map.

While my husband was in the bathroom, and I was sitting at an outdoor table in the museum's rooftop restaurant, I started weeping.

There I was, crying into my Orangina as I crossed off the existential horror of that awful first day and realised there were 89 to go before I'd see my children's faces again.

Yes, really. A three-month dream holiday, and I was counting down the days until it ended.

If you'd asked me before we left whether my identity was all knotted up in my role as a mother, I would have laughed myself silly.

I've been a university lecturer, an archaeologist, an art auction house manager, and a journalist. Mother? Just a side-quest, right?

Apparently not.

"They'll be fine without you," friends had said to me. But that was the problem. They would be fine. Because they didn't need me anymore.

Life was thanking me for my service and putting me out to pasture.

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The hormonal rollercoaster of being a woman of a certain age comes with the erosion of the foundations of who you think you are as a person. I was completely unprepared for that.

How is that possible? How many utterly cringe worthy videos about what to expect from puberty did we have to endure? Where's the 'how-to' guide for the other massive hormonal shift half the world's population goes through?

For me, it isn't just about the physical symptoms, although they certainly are a thing. What is it with the itchy ears? And the waking up at 3am? I swear that's where the idea of witches came from.

It was just a bunch of perimenopausal women grabbing a broom and doing a bit of housework in the dead of night.

The biggest issue for me, though, has been the erosion of my sense of self.

For much of my time on this planet, I've been a risk-taker. I'd happily wander down a road for a bit to see where it took me. If I didn't like where it was headed, I could always backtrack and start again.

As time begins to run out, that sense of discovery feels like a luxury, even though it's been a central part of who I am.

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That's what began to bother me.

Perhaps my new truth was that the old me was gone.

As I grappled with the impenetrable laneways of Marrakech's Medina, I was utterly lost, literally and figuratively.

After the less-than-stellar start to our dream holiday, I did get to my Greek island. It was as idyllic as I had hoped. And it was where I began to give concrete form to the things I had been feeling.

They were the birth pangs of my latest novel, Sunday Reilly is All Out of f***s to Give.

Sunday is not me. Not exactly.

Her experiences aren't mine. Not exactly. But she does speak for me, and for all women like me.

Sunday's own Greek island adventure is funny, outrageous, and often ridiculous, because this stage of life is all those things. It's a coming-of-age story about the search for a new chapter full of love, meaning, and purpose after all those things have been stripped away.

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