Tuesday, June 3, 2014

So This is How NOT to Start a Change in Midlife

After 30 years of a happy stable marriage - 15 of which were spent in the same 5,000 suburban house - having finished shuttling 3 kids through colleges, my husband and I decided we needed "an adventure."  Call it 'midlife', call it 'what-the-hell-are-we-doing-in-this-big-house' syndrome, call it whatever you like: we (I) wanted change.  So we got it. 
No: we didn't split up. I love my husband too much and am pretty damn sure he loves me back (according to him I still look like the 'vision' he say walking down that church aisle almost 31 years ago, but I credit that to his stubborn refusal to wear glasses...). 
What we did was leave suburbia for the city. 
We didn't do it the easy way either. We could have just moved 20 miles across the Hudson to NYC, but why make it easy?  Apparently the midlife brain needs challenging, so we opted to put our non-working brain cells into use by making them figure out new, demented, traffic patterns and frustratingly oblique parking rules designed to accrue the largest numbers of tickets. 
Yes, you guessed it:  we moved to Boston!
Doing so, we realized a curious thing - we're actually going backward. We are a dying breed; consummate baby-boomers who believed in the American Dream.  As two low-middle-class kids who fell in love in college, we saved all our pennies so we could marry and immediately afford a mortgage for our very own house in the burbs.  I confess - the American Dream worked.  We live well and are fundamentally healthy and happy.
But we had never wavered from this path, and heard the howl we had only read about in Kerouac biographies beckoning to us.  
We never rented, never lived in an apartment - let alone a city - and, frankly, had no idea what we were getting into.
So, this is what this blog is all about -- learning from our mistakes (and our successes), seeing what works, and what doesn't, and feeling it out alongside you.
It's a brand new world for us and we're embracing it, including this newfangled thing we ironically call social media. 
So, welcome. 
Keep reading, as we've learned, you'll never know what can happen next. 
Good Academic Study on Midlife 

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