Milestones: On Turning Sixty

We have a tendency to mark milestone birthdays more than others. In my last post I described my twenty-first birthday.

I don’t remember my thirtieth birthday—I was too busy with work and child-rearing for the day to make much of an impression. In fact, I remember being bothered more when my husband turned thirty (the same day we moved into our first house) than when I attained that august age some years later.

I remember my fortieth birthday. I was relieved that I had made it into yet another protected class—I could then sue for age discrimination under the Age Discrimination in Employment Act if the occasion ever warranted. (Employment lawyers think that way.)

On my fiftieth birthday, my department at work held a “surprise” party for me. The party itself wasn’t much of a surprise. A colleague had scheduled a meeting with me in her office, and after a few minutes announced that she would escort me to a conference room a short distance away. I knew full well where the conference room was and needed no escort, nor had she had anything to talk to me about prior to our stroll down the hall.

But I was surprised by what I found in the conference room. Not only my co-workers, but my husband. And blown-up photographs of me as a child. My husband had been dragooned into the party preparations, and he, in turn, had talked to my mother about getting the pictures. In 2006, she was still capable of finding photographs that would embarrass me, organizing them, and shipping them halfway across the country. And she delighted in it, as I found out when she called me that evening.

I probably didn’t enjoy my fiftieth birthday party as much as I might have, because I knew what the other attendees did not. Later that afternoon, my boss would announce that I was moving to a special project for several months. My boss hoped that working on the project would keep me from deciding to retire later that year. I thought the project would be a way for me to ease out of the company slowly.

And as I anticipated, I retired at the end of 2006. I wanted to write, and I couldn’t fulfill my dream while working in my corporate role.

A year later I became a part of a local writing group, and I met many wonderful writers in the Kansas City area. Most of them were older than I was.

“Oh, those fifties,” one woman in the group exclaimed in 2008 when we were discussing our ages. I had just told her I was fifty-two. She was in her mid-seventies. “The fifties are so wonderful,” she told me.

I couldn’t disagree with her at the time. Once I had extricated myself from my job, I had embraced the writing life. I didn’t know what I was doing, but I thoroughly enjoyed doing it. I got trained as a mediator and began mediating cases. I found the local writing group and other critique groups and improved as a writer to the extent that I have now published two novels and won some writing contests. I traveled, including trips to visit my parents when they vacationed in Carmel, California. My children were independent and required only occasional hand-holding.

As my older friend predicted, many wonderful things happened in my fifties. In some ways, it has been the best decade of my life. I’ve been freer to do as I please than I ever have been. I haven’t missed the stress of work. I’ve felt financially secure (even though I retired just before the Great Recession).

And yet in many ways it has also been the hardest decade of my life. Even before I had been told that the fifties were so wonderful, I had begun to wonder if my mother was developing Alzheimer’s. A year later, she suffered a serious physical problem. In 2010, she was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, and she went steadily downhill until early 2013, when my father moved her into assisted living. Just after that, my daughter broke her leg. In 2012 my father-in-law died, in 2014 my mother died, and in early 2015 my father died. Along the way, other family members have had health issues. So I have suffered as many losses in the last decade as I ever have.

Yesterday I turned sixty.

I think I’ve learned in the past ten years that every decade has its ups and downs. My fifties may have been wonderful, but they held tragedy as well as dreams fulfilled. As does any period in a human’s life.

So as I face my sixties, I am both optimistic and realistic. There will be great joys and achievements in the years ahead, I hope, and great losses and sorrows, I know.

Oh, those sixties! . . . What will they bring?