Life’s Decades - The Fifth 10 Years

Today I am focused on the fifth decade of life. For me - it was mostly in the 1990s and included the melded joys of motherhood and career.

My career required long hours and some travel. Most of the time I could adjust the attention and time for the job to mesh with the needs of my family. There was always an underlying tension between the different aspects of my life but it didn’t seem to escalate to unhealthy levels of stress. I had decided to keep a journal when I first became pregnant in my fourth decade; the original motivation was to record what was happening to me…but a side benefit was that l inadvertently learned to ‘write it down, let stressful aspects go.’ In retrospect - journaling was a key part of my maintenance of well-bing in the most stressful time of my life: the fifth and sixth decades. I still do it (in my seventh decade now) but its primary importance is as a record of my life.

Do people always learn a lot from their children? I certainly did. When my daughter was in kindergarten and first grade, I realized that I was holding her to higher standard of learning than I was myself….and I made some changes. Being a linear thinker (inclination and education), I started using tools like mindmaps to change my pattern. I started reading a wider variety of books and taking notes. The growing content available through the Internet over the decade helped too. In the end, I don’t know that I ever did reach the delta that we expect of children as they learn to read, write and compute in their early school years. It is awesome how much they change in a few short years.

While every working mother probably experiences guilt from not being in the right place at the right time for some incident in her child’s life - the incidents where my daughter made her acceptance loud and clear stand out in my mind more. One such incident was when she was in first grade and there was a parent visit day in her classroom. I told her I was leaving work early to come home and change clothes to be dressed like the other moms rather than in my business suit by the time I arrived at her school (I was working for IBM and wearing a lot of dark blue suits/white shirts at the time). She told me to come in the suit! I did…and looked different than the other parents…but she was accepting (maybe even pleased) with the difference.

The decade seems like a blur of kite festivals, aquariums, museums, national parks, hikes, gardens, ice shows, and music lessons….there were times that we all decided a weekend at home was absolutely required. There were projects to. We finished our basement which was quite a learning experience for us all.

The activity level of my fifth decade was driven by having a child in my fourth decade. Women that have children earlier - or later - could have a different trajectory because of where they are in their career and their level of health. It surprises me to realize that I happened upon very good timing for me!

Life’s Decades - The Fourth 10 Years

Today I am focused on the fourth decade of life. For me - it was mostly in the 1980s and included moving half way across the country from my family for careers (mine and my husband’s) and having a child.

Moving away was wrenching but I was kept so busy - both by work and long commutes - that I didn’t have time to worry about it. Many in the family came for visits. There was a lot to see and our guest room was comfortable. The immediate family was computer savvy enough that we started exchanging email rather than snail mail before the decade was out. Telephone calls were still expensive.

I finally had time to read for pleasure and set a goal to read a book a week (and quickly discovered discount books stores and used book sales at the local library). Now most of my reading is ‘free’ and electronic either through internet resources or the public library. The majority of physical books I read are via paperbackswap…and then I donate the books to the used book sale.

The ten years of education (and ten years of work experience) set the stage for a very productive fourth decade. It included the most technical years of my career and then the step into management of people and projects. The semantic changed from management to leadership sometime during the decade but the core of the job didn’t. The career never was a “9 to 5, leave work at work” endeavor but the increasing responsibility and advances in technology meant that work was not as tied to a location. It happened at home too. The ‘always on call’ happened to me earlier because I was in a technical field. Now the technology is so pervasive that just about every professional feels the integration (sometimes forced) of all parts of life. I remember being incredibly grateful to my husband for buying  a laser printer for me rather than a bouquet of flowers as he had been doing during a particularly rough project. As a woman in a technical, very competitive field - I benefited from supportive family relationships.

When I had my daughter midway through my fourth decade, I took a year off before I returned to work full time and though that would slow down my career trajectory. It didn’t as much as I thought it would since I was promoted about 6 months after returning to work.

Looking back - having the same day care person for 3 years and then Montessori school for my daughter was better and less traumatic than many of my peers. It helped that my daughter was a happy child. We shorten her day away from us by using flex hours (they were new at the time); my husband would flex a bit later in the day to take her in the morning and I would flex earlier to pick her up in the afternoon. We managed to combine some business trips (either mine or my husband’s) with vacations. My daughter actually was puzzled that other children in her Montessori school did not go to Colorado like she did!

One serendipity event that occurred near the end of my fourth decade was on my daughter’s fourth birthday. I came home early to get ready and discovered a water pipe had broken! We got it turned off before too much damage occurred but the muddy path in the front yard that resulted from the repair was so much fun that my daughter often says it was her most memorable birthday ever.