- At age 30, I was a single mom to four kids, and my career was on hold indeterminately.
- I'm 51 and probably will never be able to retire — I have the same career goals as my adult kids.
This week was a good one for me. I got the green light for a few article pitches from some different outlets that would net me around $1000 total: one travel piece, one essay, and one listicle about movies that I always pretend I find tedious but secretly love rather deeply.
That $1000 means I can get my car fixed, pay a few bills, and potentially put some money into my almost nonexistent savings account.
I am a 51-year-old single mom of four, and if you saw me, you would not think this was my life. I look like someone with great credit. A middle-aged Gen X mom who is probably already thinking about grandchildren, renovating her sunroom, and leasing a new car because she's tired of her old one. If your mom plays tennis, she probably has a partner who looks just like me.
It's all a lie, of course.
I don't fit into my generation
My face, my blonde highlights, and my summer wardrobe of white linen smacks of bland mortgage stability. I have simply aged into a demographic that does not fit. I have never fit into my demographic.
I became a mom at 21 when everyone else was listening to grunge music and quoting "Reality Bites." I was a single mom of four at 30 when my friends were just hitting their stride in their careers. All of them talked about mortgage rates and patio stones and dinner parties while I packed my kids into our minivan and moved to my hometown to settle in for 20 years of poverty. I worked as many jobs as I could to pay as much of our rent as I could. All the while dreaming of a career I couldn't have. Not then. Not yet.
Not until our life became my story. The life that kept me away from this big career I wanted as a writer became the very thing that made it start to happen for me.
My career is just starting
First, a column in my small town newspaper about us, then a parenting column about us, then essays about us. About me. About divorce and poverty and later being an empty nester missing them. Then travel and really anything at all.
So, to me, this is the beginning. And here I am, out of step again. Driving on the wrong side of the road because these are the years when people start talking fondly about retirement.
I'm not ready for retirement, nowhere near. Probably, I never will be at this rate. I can't see beyond the hope that the book proposal I sent to my agent will get picked up or my essay edits will be approved by Friday afternoon. Can't see beyond the spreadsheet of freelance pitches that I've tossed around the internet like playing cards, hoping someone turns one over.
My adult sons and I talk about the same career goals because we have the same career goals, which are basically climb, climb, climb.
I pretend not to stress about finances
I make cavalier jokes all the time about eventually dying broke but happy, like I don't care about it. Like it's a story that isn't happening to me.
I don't think about my empty savings account until it is 3 a.m., and I suddenly notice a pain in my right armpit and wonder if it's serious, if it's cancer. If this is the thing that will kill me before I have time to get older, but oh yes, that's right, I'm already older.
I swallow down the fear of my reality with this seed of something I've had since I was a kid. Maybe I'm right about myself. Maybe I'm a writer who just didn't get the chance to write for a very long time. That retirement can hopefully wait because the whole of me is not ready for it — not my mind, not my spirit, and certainly not my bank account.