Mid-life "what next?"

I am decidedly mid-life and I am still uncertain of what I am doing…what I want to be doing.  It feels so much more abstract than any of my education forecasted. It would be different if I had a degree in philosophy. There isn’t a predetermined path for learning how (and different ways) to think. Of course thinking skills apply, or at least they should apply, to any and all jobs; but a philosophy degree is not expected to chart a clear path from graduation to employment.

Journalism and public health, on the other hand, are pretty prescriptive in the working world. Only for me, they aren’t. 

Instead I’ve dabbled in things and had a multitude of amazing experiences that leave me, in this middle section of my living, wondering where I go next and how I maneuver it all into something that is at least partially profitable as well as meaningful. 

In 2014 my focus is on money. It feels strange to write it. Hell, it feels strange to even think it. Money has never been at the forefront of any working decision I’ve made. I never took a gig that couldn’t at least feed me, but I’ve never really considered how a gig would impact my ability to retire before the age of 90, or even if my job had great (or any) insurance. 

Free of monetary focus/constrictions I’ve been employed in ways that have allowed me to grow (sometimes the hard way) and learn, and experience a world that following a prescriptive path from graduation to retirement might have made more challenging. I acknowledge and appreciate that I can’t but a monetary value on that.

While waiting for my placement for Peace Corps I had a temp job at a big marine and offshore classification company. I started out stuffing envelopes for them and that morphed into taking over a mid-management position in their marketing department that had been vacated abruptly. They liked my work enough to offer me a pretty comfortable salary for a new graduate with only journalism internships on her resume.

My parents were ecstatic. They urged me to consider it. It was “an amazing opportunity.” And it was. It just wasn’t one that I wanted. I had a plan and working at a job I barely tolerated in the short-term didn’t factor into that plan.

And so I worked there until Peace Corps sent my invitation to serve in South Africa and then I hastily said farewell and packed my bags for my first step into the life I was choosing for myself. 

 

Post-Peace Corps I bounced around a bit, trying to reconcile what I’d done and learned in rural South Africa.  There was transition work that reacquainted me with living in America, and then school, and then back overseas. Even then, in my flurry of life changes, I was working plans- short-term though they were: transition and more specialized training.

Each step helped me to know what I didn’t want to do but none of it cemented what I did want to do…not in any way that I could harness and hurl myself into. 

Friends often assume that my decisions are arbitrary. They aren’t. The problem isn’t that I don’t plan, only that my plans aren’t macro. Held alone they have a purpose; a beginning, middle, and end. But laid out as a map for my life and it reads more as maze than directions. 

And what do I do with that now?

Given the opportunity to go back and “do over” I can’t imagine choosing differently. Everything I’ve done has made me- good or bad – into who and where I am. But still I am left in mid-life limbo, wondering not what will happen next but what should happen next. 

Living (and loving the living) in the bay area, where rents are rising even beyond their usual obscenity, I can’t ignore money anymore. I can’t live solely in the experience of things without regard to the expense of them.

And so this year I’m in search of reconciliation between those points: experiential living, conscientious living, authentic living, profitable living. I know it is possible in more than the abstract or anecdotes published in self-help books. I have friends living their versions of that reality (here and here and here… just a few of the easily showcased examples).

The question (and quest) for this year, then, is not “if” but “how”. How do I piece together my micro plans into a macro one. One that builds on what I’ve learned and allows me to think about retirement without panic. How do I weave travel, and food, and diversified duties, and a love of the Bay, social responsibility into my mid-life plan?

Childless Chiding

When I was in high school, and even into my first few years of college, if you had asked I would have told you that I would be married by 25 and had my first child by 28. This insured time enough for my husband and I to have some “us” time. I couldn’t have told you where I would be living or what my job would be or anything other than marital and kid type things, but it somehow felt like a plan.

I’m not 65. I’m not born of the era where marriage was not an option so much as a required destination. I wasn’t anti-feminism, clucking my tongue at all the “poor misguided women” who forsook their intended roles at nurturer and matron to play at being men. Quite the opposite in fact. I was studying journalism and was just beginning to consider going abroad. 

These two identities, globetrotting me and baby soothing me, co-existed but never flushed out into a singular plan. They ran like the Rio Negra and Amazon River – parallel but never mixing. I never wondered if my husband would be willing to follow me across oceans to see what we found there, or if having a child might interfere with those plans.

I also never earnestly thought about having children. Not really. 

When I told people my plan for marriage and kids I was repeating a script that I’d been prepped for my entire life. Everything around me told me that was what people did. My parents were the picture of marital templates (still are) married with two daughters, just like everything around me said they were supposed to be, supposed to do. Sitcoms showcased variations on that same theme. No one ever asked me if I wanted to get married or if I wanted children; generally it was assumed that I would do both and the questions were simply when and how. 

I never questioned that path for myself. I carved out a space next to the things my soul was leading me to and assumed those parallel lives would reconcile themselves. Only they didn’t for me. They didn’t reconcile, not because a woman can’t do all of those things, they didn’t reconcile because this woman didn’t want to do all of those things. At some point in my last two years of university I realized something about myself…I didn’t want kids. 

It was revelatory!

I didn't want kids and there wasn't any particular reason. I like to borrow them - kids with a return policy are my favorite type. People see me playing peekaboo with a child on a bus or nuzzling the neck of a little chubby thing and that is enough for me. I like sleeping in. I sometimes have sleep for dinner. My patience varies. All of those things are true but not a reason...THE reason I don't want kids. I just don't.

All of a sudden my life plan opened up differently. All of a sudden the blank spaces and question marks had space to ferment on their own without a biological clock ticking softly in the background. I didn’t want kids. I didn’t want kids. I didn’t want kids. My personal reproductive inclination had just presented me with a gift. But if realizing I didn’t want children was a gift to my understanding of myself and what I wanted in life, it was also a curse for all the people who presumed what I should want in my life.

My parents were easy. They never pushed me one way or the other. They wanted me to be a strong and self-reliant woman. My realization about children didn’t impact that in any way and so they didn’t have much to say. They simply encouraged my dreams as they always had.

But, oh, the outside world…

In my 20s, people assumed I was simply young and strong headed. “You’ll change your mind.” They’d smile knowingly at me, their voices thick with condescension. Then, as I got older and began to travel more, living stretches of time in other countries, people warned me that I better stay still so that I could find a husband and get pregnant before I was too old – before it was too late. 

“I can find my husband anywhere and I don’t want children,” my standard response, inspired the same stream of headshakers, tongue cluckers, and assertions that “you’ll see”, “you’ll change your mind.”

There were those that called me selfish. I could never tell if the selfishness is because I wasn’t going to give my everything to a tiny squalling – albeit cute and amazing – genetic spinoff and they were; or if it was because I wasn’t doing my part to increase the already exploding population. One person explained it as selfish because I’m “well educated” and have “strong values” and so it was my duty…my duty to share that with a new generation. 

There have been glimmers of openness and acceptance. Over the years my favorite example of understanding my perspective came from a boyfriend.

“Why do you want kids?” I countered.

He didn’t answer me and I assumed he, like everyone else, assumed me crazy or selfish or a few years shy of changing my mind. But hours later he circled back to the conversation and my questions to him. It was immediately evident that he’d been thinking deeply about it.

“I recognize that I want kids for a myriad of reason,” he started. “Part of it is culture and expectation. Part of it is who I am in my family and the family obligation related to all of those other things I mentioned.” He was thoughtfully silent for a few moments and then he added, earnestly and without any condescension at all, “Even so, I still want kids.”

Somehow, in his analysis of his own motivations related to kids he was able to understand mine. He was able to accept that his motivations were his and had no bearing on my own – and in doing so he ceased to judge. He acknowledged that despite all of the pressure his world exerted on him he still had a personal desire to reproduce. He just did. And I just didn't.

My desire to be childless is not an indictment on those who desire otherwise. The idea of family is at once personal and public but it doesn’t have to be divisive and I don’t have to change my mind.

Princess-less

She stared. Slender face. Replete with round red and raised bumps. She lathered and rinsed, blemishes magically erased. Hair wshed and then twisted to the crown of the skull. A few brushes of make-up, a selection of various long and flowing hairstyles and then an array of sparkling dresses – above the knee or sweeping the floor with a thigh high split- sparkles and exposed shoulders.

My 10-year-old niece, just on the cusp of puberty, is brown with woolen hair twisted in dual strands. She resembles nothing of the “game” she plays on the ipad. She is not white, her hair not silky. She doesn’t wear makeup and has never been to a formal dance.

I’d watched a friend’s nieces enamored by the same pimpled face turned “prom queen’s” transformation just a few weeks before. (I had watched them toggle between the prom game and some Disney princess pet salon – the sole purpose was to cyber wash and preen imaginary pets and then adorn them in pink and sparkles.)

I groaned and my sister concurred.

“I hate that game. I delete it and they keep putting it back on.” She remarked.

My niece glanced at her mother and then over to me. 

“Why do you like that game,” I asked.

Her simple reply, “Because it’s fun.”

“What makes it fun?”

She shrugged and continued to wash face and hair and select sparkly gowns, although now with a little less zeal.

“What’s wrong with it?” she asked in a quieter voice than usual. 

“It puts all the emphasis on being pretty - and a certain kind of pretty,” I responded. “Do these prom queens look like you or your sisters? Do they have your hair?”

She shrugged. 

“They also only depict one kind of woman,” I continued. “A woman with long thin features and who wears sparkly dresses. That isn’t the only way to be beautiful and it isn’t the only way to be a woman. And besides, being pretty isn’t everything either.”

She shrugged again and then fell back to her cyber preening. 

I sighed. She is 10. The social politics of gender and identity and racially specific ideas of beauty are pretty heavy topics to broach when all she really wants to do is play a 21^st century version of dolls.

I had to try though. My sister is amused at how heavily I push back against the pink monster. Originally it was my own disdain for the color pink that prevented me, tongue in cheek, from buying my nieces anything in that color. In recent years it has evolved into all out resentment for the shorthand the color pink represents. 

Pink is girly. As I pay more attention to the way we socialize our children, what they are “supposed to do” or not, what colors belong where and even how they play, suddenly I’m preoccupied with the dearth of STEM toys and ideas pedaled at little girls and the surplus of beauty and shopping messages. Who knew I’d be angry that the capitalist machine isn’t pitching woo at little girls (at least not in any way I’d like it to). 

Last year I read a post urging people not to buy sexist toys. It resonated with me. Then I began reading comments and I was dismayed. Part of the piece talked about looking for a Lego set with a female character profiled and the difficulty she had in finding anything other than Princess Leia in the infamous gold bikini handcuffed to Jabba the Hutt. 

Aside from the comments calling the woman lazy for not searching better online for more options, there was the gem that explained, “Yes! And she literally uses his own greed and pro-slavery behavior against him when she *strangles him to death with her slave chain.* If that's not rejecting standard tropes and gender stereotypes, I'm not sure what is.”

Really?

The woman has a six-year-old daughter; while that explanation may be salient I’m not sure it is age appropriate for the cognitive skills of first grader. My conversation with my 10-year-old niece was only mildly more effective than the commenters and I didn’t have to show her a movie or explain a history of misogyny and sexism to her. 

I found myself equally frustrated that people didn’t seem to mind that a singular representation of woman is readily available but anything else requires searching and dedicated intent. They see nothing amiss that an alternative representation of woman – not all representations, simply one that is not devoted exclusively to shoes and shopping and how she looks- is an audacious expectation from anyone, including the mother of a 6-year-old girl.

Like the woman who wrote the original post, this isn’t about “slut shaming” or an insult to women who do have pale oval faces and slender bodies to match and wear makeup and slinky dresses. This is about the ones that don’t. This is about reminding the world that not all little girls want to be princesses-especially if we stop indoctrinating them from birth.