The Three Handbag Tipping Point

In late 2018 I approached my 50th birthday with, it has to be said, a large degree of trepidation. In the months before my milestone day, a few people asked me how I was planning to celebrate. The truth? I wanted to hide in a corner!

After a decade or so of juggling a demanding job, the needs of two young children and all the other domestic responsibilities that come with family life, self-care had come pretty much bottom of the list and I was worn out, mentally and physically.

At work, an unsupportive, exacting and at times unpleasant manager made my professional life both exhausting and dispiriting. I was well paid but found that I threw money at issues in my home life – generally childcare related - in a sticking plaster strategy that never really worked. Increasingly, there was less and less about my job that I actually enjoyed or found fulfilling.

Health niggles that I had put on the back burner began to be a problem. My sleeping patterns – never great in the first place – were now so erratic that four or five hours a night was my norm. Creaky knees and general all-round unfitness discouraged me from sports like running and tennis that I had enjoyed just a few years ago.

Stuck in a daily grind that seemed unending, I felt like I was on an unhealthy hamster wheel, with never enough hours in the day to get everything done. One day I found myself flinging three of my “current” handbags into the passenger side of the car as I raced off to work at silly o’clock in the morning. I hadn’t had time to sort through each of them to make sure I had everything I needed for the day in one so I brought all three … just in case. Looking back, I’m sure my colleagues may have wondered why I needed to bring so many handbags to the office.

It seemed that I was pouring a huge proportion of my “organised self” into work, with very little left over. It didn’t feel normal to be this distracted. A tipping point, of sorts, had been reached. Something had to change.

And so a few weeks before my birthday arrived, I made the decision – with my husband’s support and encouragement – to go with my gut feeling and take time out from my working life to have a mental break and focus on some different life goals. Scary but exhilarating.

To start with, I embarked on a full health and wellness check-over.

Achy limbs were put through their paces in physio sessions with a stoic Romanian recommended by a friend, who had a remarkable collection of wolf T-shirts, arms the size of tree trunks and an impressive strength pedigree in his family (including Greco-Roman wrestling in the Olympics).

Next, visits to a podiatrist to have my feet examined. To his credit, the young male foot professional didn’t blanch at what I felt were my unsightly looking feet, which had been starved of attention for a fair while. Instead, he assured me that they were not that bad, just in need of regular TLC, insoles and better fitting footwear.

Onto the knee consultant in a well-known sports clinic on the Northside of Dublin. A rather posh English gentleman who told me he spends 100 nights a year in a non-descript hotel on Dublin’s north side, keeping Ireland’s knees afloat. Luckily my scans showed no significant deterioration. Handled carefully, there was no reason why I couldn’t pursue aerobic sports again.

And now to the exercise bit. This I wanted to be positive, energy building and soul-restoring. Although I’ve never liked gyms they are a practical way of staying fit during the winter months and I decided to join my local one. I took advantage of an initial consultation to help me decide on my goals. (This was easy. Lose weight! Get fit!).

Eventually, I decided to focus on three main areas:

Weight and resistance training – it is so important as we age to incorporate strength training into a daily routine. It increases your overall muscle, ligament and tendon strength as well as bone density. Lifting weights or exercising against resistance can also prevent or slow bone-weakening osteoporosis and muscle wastage.
Swimming and running - with my recurring knee injury, I was wary of running, but the key factor here is to have a moderate and manageable pace, and plenty of warming up and down. Cardiovascular exercise raises your heart rate and reduces hardening and blockage of the arteries, a major cause of heart disease and stroke. Swimming on the other hand is a great all-round workout which gives a real sense of well-being that’s hard to equal.
Maintaining a healthy weight - I was dismayed to discover that after a lifetime of being an average-ish size 10 or 12 (depending on the brand) my weight had suddenly crept up to a point where I was only marginally behind my husband on the weighing scales and, according to my BMI calculation, officially overweight. Metabolism slows down during menopause, and on top of this, we often eat more and later and are less active in general. I couldn’t go on blaming the “middle-age spread” for my weight gain so this needed attention too.

For this last one, I have a really simple mantra. Eat less and move more. Complicated diets – and there are gazillions – really don’t work. My less than stellar eating habits, on the other hand, definitely needed to change.

I also discovered Pilates. It’s amazing how much of a difference stretching and simple yet focused “core” work can make.

It’s a sobering fact, but in the next decade, more women than ever before will be aged 50 or older. Women face unique health issues beginning at age 50 and throughout the rest of their lives. Heart disease, osteoporosis, breast cancer and diabetes occur more often in older women than in younger women. Lung cancers cause the greatest number of cancer-related deaths in women, followed by breast cancer, then colon cancer.

So far, so pedestrian?

None of this advice was a revelation or anything I hadn’t seen, read or heard a hundred times before. I knew all this. I’d read the script! The big difference was that I now gave myself permission to put it all into practice.

This was the physical side of things tackled. Lots of changes in habits, small but impactful adjustments and an unapologetic focus on my own needs.

What was a little harder was figuring out the next stage of my career and professional life. I had achieved a degree of success in my previous field but truthfully I was not interested in returning to it and – to be blunt – knew that my age would be an obstacle even if I did, in a relatively youth-oriented profession. I needed to pivot, take some risks, put myself out there and learn about what I really liked to do.

I tried lots of things. I started a blog. I signed up for a start your own business course. I successfully pitched for funding to research a new business idea. I returned to college to upskill. I freelanced.

I attended a few women-only networking events which were fun and self-affirming. I beefed up my online professional profile. I ticked a few things off my “would like to do someday” list. I volunteered. I even applied for a few jobs.

Throughout all of this, I tried to stay true to my own path. I knew I wasn’t cut out to be a full-time stay at home mother. The post-school-run coffees and casual friendships with other parents that I now met regularly were great but not enough. I needed a professional outlet, just not one that took over my life. The Holy Grail? Perhaps. But I kept on trying.

The trickiest aspect of all this of course is finding a balance between being engaged and stimulated by your work but not to the point of excess stress.

And I’m delighted to say that I started a new job a few months ago in the middle of lockdown which is working out much better than I ever could have hoped for. I’m working from home on interesting projects while continuing to spend plenty of time with the family, and indeed, on myself. I earn less but feel better off.

I do realise I’m lucky. But I also feel I created my own luck by being curious, prepared to start over and learn new things.

Many of my friends and acquaintances describe me as brave. I’m not sure that’s entirely accurate. I think I prefer the words resilient and determined. There have been times in the last year or two when I’ve wondered if I would secure half-decent employment again. But I never once regretted moving on from a bad situation.

As for my birthday celebrations? Well, 50 was the birthday that just kept on giving! While I didn’t quite get through my 50 at 50 bucket list it was certainly fun trying. And I now have lots of memories to keep me going through this prolonged staying-at-home period.

My last piece of advice is not to be scared to make changes because eventually – and it can take time – things will work out. Stay true to yourself, be kind to yourself and, above all, believe in yourself and your own unique abilities.

By A Guest Writer, who wishes to remain anonymous, October 2020.