My family left town.
My daughter is in Scottsdale where she and her boyfriend are renovating a tiny townhouse. My husband and son are driving to Arizona from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
Let me say first that I love them all with a deep and abiding love. My husband and I have been together, first unmarried with children then married with children, for decades.
Our son and daughter have been the center of our lives since we brought them home from the hospital.
But last night as I sat on the back porch with Cricket, our two-year-old terrier, I was glad they were not here with me.
Tired? There may be many reasons for that
If you read my article, Managing Life Changes in your 50s, you know that fatigue is common among women in their 40s and 50s.
But according to Serrano OB-Gyn in San Antonio, Texas, menopause might not be the only cause of tiredness:
“Even though menopause is a relatively common cause of persistent fatigue in women in their 40s, 50s, and beyond, other issues can cause chronic feelings of tiredness, too. Chronic stress, sleep apnea, poor sleep hygiene, and other factors can interfere with sleep and leave you feeling tired.”
If you Google “fatigue in women over 50” you may be surprised at the one thing few include on their list of causes: FAMILY.
When I got pregnant with my son, I was working full-time, as was my husband. After he was born, I tried to go back to work full-time but I hated it. So I cut my hours back to half-time and took my son to home daycare 4 hours a day.
After my daughter was born, I quit working for someone else altogether and stayed home, freelancing on the side.
When my freelance work became steady, I started taking both kids to a home daycare four hours per day.
This satisfied both my need to have a profession and my wish to be present in my children’s lives.
At 46 I went back to work full-time. My husband, who is 10 years older than me, had just stepped down from his position of 27 years. I remember telling him “you’re the parent on duty now.”
But I’m not sure I really believed that.
Then there’s the housework
Kate Mangino, gender expert and author of the book Equal Partners, reports that in different-sex relationships, women do roughly two-thirds of the physical household work.
She found that women more often handle daily tasks like cooking and cleaning, while men do intermittent chores, such as finances or mowing the lawn.
“This means that the unpaid female role’s to-do list is relentless,” writes Mangino. I can personally attest to this — I don’t do laundry for any family member any more but I cook and clean more often than my husband does. And I’m the one with the full-time job.
Winds of change
As I lay in bed last night, luxuriating in the silence all around me, I decided to lean into the void. And you know what? I like it.
