I turned 50, kicking and screaming just a year ago. It was honestly traumatic. I was working in a job that I hated with a passion, and was not only miserable myself, I was making my entire family beyond miserable.
I had returned to college when I was 45 and in four short years earned a bachelor's and a master's degree. Mind you, I still had three fairly young children at home so it was challenging - but the exciting kind of challenging.
I had always been a small sort of entrepreneur in order to be able to stay home with the kids. Also, since I didn't have enough formal education at that time, I couldn't have found a job that would have paid enough to cover the childcare/clothing/transportation/taxation expenses it would generate. For us, the answer was clear: I would stay home and sell stuff on eBay and raise the kids. During the gravy-days of those pre-2nd-Great Depression years, this worked out fairly well. Not the greatest financial security, but lots of security knowing I really didn't have another option and that the kids would be better for it.
When my mother died abruptly I entered a new phase of my life. My children were all in school full-day and I was in my middle forties. It was time to finish my education. It had always gnawed at me that I didn't have a college education. I felt like in some way I was a terrible example to my children. My husband had a Ph.D. and I was a high-school drop-out. It wasn't hard for me to figure out that at some point in the future my children would look at me and wonder why I was such a slacker.
So, I took the plunge. I went back to my local City College and picked back up where I had left off more than a decade before when I had started having children. I plunged in and had the best four years of my life. I loved school, I loved almost every teacher and assignment. I found out I had a gift for art history and for writing. I spent hundreds of hours on papers because it was pure joy to do the research and then the crafting of my analyses.
I soon transferred to UCR and then after my B.A. to CSUSB for my M.P.A. I was formally, officially educated now, according to two of the largest institutions of education in the world. My kids were now even older, and I was ready to enter the professional market, specifically in the field of Public Administration. I was supposed to walk in with my smoking new degree and my "mature" abilities and land a local city government job in the range of $50K or so, to start. But it was understood that with my abilities I would quickly earn more.
Did I mention that I started my last class of my education in September, 2008? The day of the big WaMu panic and crash. Yep, I got my fancy education completed about four minutes before the Second Great Depression began.
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