Mind the Gap
6 minute read
Do you ever think about the gap? No, not the none between the train and the platform but one that can be equally as fraught with peril – the gap between where your life should be by now and the way it actually is?
I’m thinking about my younger self – as a middle and late teenager – sitting around with groups of friends, planning, no, guessing, what our lives would be like. Lists were involved and given my first thwarted career choice was being a cartoonist sometimes even illustrations were involved. What I didn’t realise at the time – and I bet none of my friends did either – was just how many shoulds were involved; how these ideas of our own futures weren’t really ours at all but expectations implanted by our parents, teachers, society.
Thinking about it, we never asked ourselves if we wanted to get married, but who we would marry (or, more specifically, what boy we would marry). The question wasn’t if we wanted children, but how many children we would have. Interestingly, I don’t remember careers featuring too heavily either, if at all. What I do remember is that we all had versions of the same life – that by this age we would all be married with at least two children (in their 20s by now) living in South County Dublin (ideally Sandycove or Dalkey) where we could drop in to see each other anytime, with no notice, for endless cups of tea.
Now, before I go on further, let me just state – very clearly – that there is absolutely nothing wrong with this picture, except, perhaps the frequency of the unannounced drop ins for tea. I love South County Dublin and would give my eye teeth for one of the houses in Sandycove or Dalkey that I would walk by as a teen and imagine living in. But the interesting thing – for me at least – is that if I look at the 16 or so girls involved in this planning exercise, I can only think of one whose life looks somewhat like what we all envisioned.
Let’s start with me. Regular readers of Hey Day will know that I fell at the first hurdle – I didn’t get married in my 20s or even my 30s and when I did finally get married at 41, it was to a woman. Add to that the fact that at 48 I don’t have children and at this point don’t plan on having any, I am falling very short of expectations, these shoulds.
I could argue how much I love my “inherited” nieces and nephews from my wife’s side of the family and the children of my friends – many of those friends who sat with me to make these plans. But thinking about those children, the vast majority of them are under ten - not in their twenties - and while some of them have a mum and dad who live in the same place, others see their dads only on the weekend or have two mums or one mum who fills the space where we always thought mum and dad should be.
Let’s move on to housing – a topical crisis of the moment that is hardly ever out of the news. I get an “A” for effort here, since I did manage to get a house in the aforementioned South County Dublin when I was 27, albeit in an area that would never have been part of the plan when I was a teen. You see, my 20s was the decade when I was busiest doing all those things I thought I should be doing: I got the mortgage and had people over for dinner where we all listened to Norah Jones and even got a landscaper to make something out of the tiny back garden including a row of peace lilies that sadly drowned during their first Irish summer. But I haven’t lived in that house in over a decade, choosing instead as I do to live in a rented one-bedroom apartment in New York. I like our apartment – don’t get me wrong – and the fact that my wife and I have both worked from home for over two years without a divorce or a homicide is indicative of the fact that it is roomier than many one beds in Manhattan.
But all of that being said, when that letter comes every October to renew our lease I find myself holding my breath. Unless you’re in a rent-stabilised apartment – as rare as hen’s teeth – unlike Ireland, landlords can basically set the rent at any rate that they deem “fair” friends have had increases of 10, 15, as much as 20% in any given year. We’ve been lucky – our landlord’s version of “fair” is actually, pretty fair – but all the same, there are lots of shoulds and shouldn'ts tied into this that can still come up on any given day, especially if it’s laundry day. As I drag a giant IKEA bag (you know, those awful blue ones) full of dirty clothes two blocks to the laundromat I am telling myself that at 48 I should have laundry in my apartment – or at the very least in my building. And the thing I’ve found about the shoulds is that once they start, they are hard to stop – one leads to another. As well as laundry I should have access to some kind of outside space that’s not the park at the end of the block. I absolutely should have a dishwasher.
With the IKEA bag digging into my shoulder waiting on our ancient lift to creak its way up to the fifth floor, I can find myself ruminating about how I had these things twenty years ago, about how I could have had a pet back then if I’d wanted to. Today I have a lease that forbids me to have even a goldfish (no, not joking) and a landlord who writes stern letters to demand the immediate removal of a window box because it infringes on the building’s policy. On paper, that looks like a raw deal, a step backwards and, for many people, I suppose it would be. But then I catch myself and remind myself that it’s the trade-off to live in Manhattan – a trade-off I have made and that I would make again.
Okay, so we’ve covered partners, family, home, what’s left? Oh yes, money, of course, and careers. As a woman in her 40s, society tells me I am in the highest earning years of my life and that – unlike a man of my age – once I hit a certain point in my mid-50s, my earnings will plateau which in real terms means my income will start to drop. Right now, right at this moment, I should be socking the cash away for my advancing years and if I’m not, then we have a problem.
Well, Houston, I have some news for you - we have a problem.
Like talking about sex, talking about money can be hard so I’m going to take a deep breath and just come right out and say it: at 48 I am earning less than I was at 30. At 30, I was working in a high-level marketing position for a big corporation that paid me the same in euros that I am earning today, in dollars. Even with the conversion rate being what it is at the moment, if I convert those 2004 euros into today’s value, at what is supposed to be the peak of my earnings, I am at least 25% worse off. Instead of working one job, I am now working at least three – writer, writing teacher and part-time fundraising director at a charity – and none of these jobs are offering me a company car or stock options, both of which I had, at 30.
If I was to end this piece here, if that is all there was to my story, under the weight of these unmet expectations - this series of shoulds - I might feel inclined to go and throw myself from my rented window (thankfully, unobstructed as it is by a window box) onto the Manhattan sidewalk below. But thankfully, at 48, I have the perspective to not only be able to laugh at these details but also to see that these facts of our lives – of my life – do not a full picture make. Yes, I was “richer” at 30 in the sense that my bank account was fuller. I didn’t need to pay close attention to the price of things and I would think nothing of spending a hundred and fifty euro on a pair of Seven jeans. But – and I can honestly say this – it was the time in my life when I was also my least happy.
The corporation I worked for wasn’t paying me all that money for no reason, they were demanding of my time, in the office and out of it. Weekends were spent working or recovering from my crazy schedule, the novel I kept talking about writing was not being written. Work time ate into time with my partner, my friends, my family, my time to exercise, to shop, to cook, to spend in that little garden I loved so much. I put on weight, I didn’t feel good. It didn’t matter that I could afford another pair of Seven jeans because the old ones were too tight. What mattered was that my life was a blur, that I wasn’t present in it.
If I look around my groups of friends – the ones who I made those lists and drew those cartoons with as well as friends I met later on my journey – their lives are littered with “unexpected” turns in their career journeys. Around the 30 mark is when I noticed it start to happen with people going back to college to retrain or taking time off to travel or work abroad or do something totally different entirely. Those who stayed in similar careers have often pulled back, taken up night courses, yoga, run marathons. Some have steadily earned more and I congratulate them and applaud them for that but more of us have gone up and down, in and out, as we’ve stumbled and stood up and looked around and found our way again.
As a teenager and a young adult, I didn’t yet have the maturity to know that contrary to the messages I was getting, making lots of money, shimmying my way up the corporate ladder and buying the right house wasn’t going to bring me fulfilment, that it was, in fact up to me to design a life for myself that would do that.
I didn’t know that there was more than one blueprint, that we all need to find our own.
I didn’t know that a pre-requisite for me was that my life needed to include space and time for me to write, regardless of whether that writing would ever be published or not. I didn’t know that much as I loved my garden and my little house with my dishwasher that I wouldn’t love that as much as the freedom of living in New York City, IKEA bags of laundry and all. I didn’t know that I would ever get to utter the words “my wife” or that I would know so many people of my age and older who don’t have children either and that it’s okay, it doesn’t mean that there’s anything wrong with me, with us, because we are not mothers. I didn’t know that in letting go of other people’s expectations for me that I could get quiet and listen to the ones that really matter – the expectations I have for myself.
I am a childless, middle-aged woman, living in a rented apartment earning less than I did almost two decades ago – that’s the truth of it and there’s a giant gap between what my life should be like, and what it actually is. But that gap, as it turns out, is not a problem. That gap is not a void. That gap is the space I get to fill with other things, things I love and work for me – writing, yoga, running, friendship, and love. That gap, as it turns out, is where all the fun stuff happens. That gap is the place I fill with my life.
Yvonne Cassidy, June 2022
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