I'm 52. Both of my kids are now in college and I have spent the past 21 years as a work from home Mom. The empty house and the chance to begin life again is very exciting but it also comes with the reality that I now have 21 years away from the career path I started on before becoming a mother ( International Tour Business). The position I held when I left the industry would now pay me over $90,000 per year. That is if I had stayed in the business all this time and kept my contacts current. I would now have to go into a position as if I were a rookie and maybe work for a kid under 30 who may or may not know as much about the business as I did at their age.
While working from home, I have honed my marketing and design skills and continuued to educate myself and though I feel I could easily walk into a major tour operation and run it again with ease ( anything is easy after raising children), I have two obstacles that would keep that from happening. 1. The huge gap on my resume and my age. 2. We moved to a small college town in the midwest for my husband's work and it is many hours from any large city that even has a major tour company.
It's a new world now and I'm finding that it may be easier for me to figure out a whole new line of work then to try and re-establish myself in the Tour Industry
And then there is the marriage thing... when you've had kids home with you for 18 years or more, the relaxed and spontaneous love life of a couple becomes the hurried and clandestine love life of a mom and dad. With the kids gone, we are rediscovering who we are and it's different because we aren't walking around in perfect 25 year old bodies anymore. We have these "older versions' of our former young, vibrant and sexy selves and I wish I had my old body back.
Self image and dealing with the reality that I am more than half way to 100 is bizarre beyond words. When I close my eyes, I am still in my 20's and I still get "surprised" when I catch my reflection in a store window or a car mirror and I see that I am aging. It sucks. It is not fair and I now understand completely why the saying "Youth is wasted on the young." rings so very true.
I watch kids beating the crap out of their bodies with alcohol and drugs, poking holes in their faces and stretching their earlobes out with metal spacers, permanently drawing on their skin- pictures that 20 years from now they will HATE and they act like it doesn't matter because they can just get a new body when this one is too screwed up. Well, no you can't. You should treat your young perfect bodies like the temples that they are and care for them everyday.
You will be standing in front of a mirror sooner than you can imagine and looking at yourself in utter disbelief that you have passed 50.
Imagine if you were given a car at birth and it was the ONLY vehicle you would ever have to get around the planet in until the day you died. The cleaning and care and maintenance would become critically important, and you'd know enough to not "pimp your ride" because what's cool today is lame tomorrow. And once you get out the arch welder and change the structure- there is no going back to your original perfect vehicle.
Before people do permanent things their bodies, imagine how it will look when they are 97 in a nursing home and their gown has fallen open with their little grandchild watching and they are seeing grandma's giant flower tattoe on her wrinkly shriveled breast that now looks like a huge serious bruise. Yeah. Not pretty.
Being 52 in 2006 is surreal. Everyday, I hear music I listened to as a kid-redone by young artists. John Mayer- Bold as Love. I listened to Hendrix play that when I was in high school! The clothing, the hairstyles, the jewelry- all came righ out of my 1970's closet. Yet somehow-we-the very same people who were totally cool enough to have created and worn all the stuff kids wear today are considered "not cool". Odd isn't it?