The Best Third

A new lease on life

I love family blogs. I love hearing about the milestones reached and the adorable things kids do and say. It brings back warm memories about when I was raising my family and resonates now watching my twin grandsons grow and the milestones they achieve as their individual personalities develop. It doesn’t really matter if they are family members or strangers, I am enthralled by the stories of the developmental steps of children, and the miracles and spark that each and every child holds.

The years of my life raising children and being a mom were the best. I loved the relationship I had with each of my three of my children. I was proud when they excelled in school, I was empathetic when they had the inevitable squabbles with neighborhood friends and then difficulties navigating peer groups as they grew older. I spent time teaching them right and wrong, life lessons, and I hoped how to be a good person living life on this planet. A life that could contain both beauty and difficulty. Sometimes at the same time.

Sending them off to college was bittersweet. I knew they were prepared to venture out and start to find their own way while still having our home a safe place for them to return to as they became productive members of the community as well as the people they were meant to become. People who I loved more than anything. As other writers have said, pieces of my heart that were functioning in the world without me, but still somehow part of me.

I missed them terribly. When my son left for school, I still had my two daughters at home. When my first daughter left, I still had my youngest daughter. When she left, I was lost. I had a general plan for the “after”. I found solace in work not for the work itself, but how I could help them achieve their goals. They all found partners and we celebrated three weddings. Beyond that, my goals were to retire, travel with my husband, enjoy my children and the new families they were creating and eventually, grandchildren. That was it. That one sentence was the plan for the last third of my life. After spending thirty years building a life, a career, a family, my plan for the future was reduced to one sentence. The difficult building work was done. Now it was my time.

Except….

The pandemic hit changing the world for mostly the worse for the next two years. I feel that the world is still suffering the effects of it, and will for a long time to come. In my family it meant a lost college graduation. I worked in healthcare, and it meant bearing witness to the terrible devastation it wreaked on those who found their way into the hospital. The fear of getting the disease, bringing it home to my family, and then the relief of a vaccine followed by the dismissal of the entire thing as a hoax and the vaccine as a danger instead of the miracle it was.

The fallout of losing all of my co-workers, my support system during the first year of the pandemic, not to illness, but to leaving for different opportunities. We came through the pandemic battered and bruised, and during a meeting with management, asked for a few concessions to keep us from leaving the organization after being burned out over the previous year and a half. “We will stay, we want to stay, and these are the things that will keep us here.” Those things were a few more dollars an hour, and a better schedule. We were told “no” in no uncertain terms. The exact quote was, “I will staff this place with Locums.” So half of the department left over the next six months for travel positions, more money and better schedules that fit their family’s needs. They staffed that place with Locums for the next four years. Locums, or travelers, who made twice the hourly rate and never took call.

It was a time of loss. A loss of freedom, a loss of control, then losing my co-workers, and then my mother who died in the thick of the pandemic never quite understanding why none of her six children could visit.

Then pandemic related or not, my son chose to estrange himself from our family. I refuse to go into details about this either to defend myself or to vilify him. I will only say that I accepted his boundary and have since developed my own with the help of an excellent therapist.

I will add that the estrangement threatened my very foundation and threatened to destroy my family. I spent months questioning everything I did as a mom. Over and over, I was caught in a vortex that I couldn’t escape. My husband, who was able to compartmentalize, told me I had to “get over it”, my daughters held firm on their boundaries to stay out of it completely as they tried to remain neutral and maintain a relationship with both their parents, their brother, and their niece and nephew. In other words, we all grieved the loss alone.

Feeling totally unsupported and in order to process the pain, I took a traveling job in Maine. It was healing in many ways. However, a week before my assignment ended, the community of Lewiston, Maine, where I was working, experienced the only mass shooting ever in the state as well as the worst one in the country in 2023.

With these ongoing hurdles,I began my journey through menopause and navigating all of the physical, and emotional changes that brings as well as all of the normal relationship changes a family and a marriage endure during this time.

I came home from Maine exhausted, burnt out, and with constant stomach issues and pain in my hands so severe, that I could barely move them. Thrown into that was the extra spice of depression and anxiety.

My daughter delivered twins in September of 2024. They were premies, and I found that my time was much better spent supporting and helping her through this difficult time than working in a job that was slowly stealing my physical and mental health. My last day of work was February 24, 2025 and I officially resigned in May. I spent the time between February and May trying to decide if it was time. Was it too soon? Could I afford it? Did I want to let go of a career I worked so hard to build? Was I ready? It turns out I was, and I haven’t looked back.

Now what? I’m not done yet. I want to help my daughter. Helping her watch her two babies grow over the past year has been tremendously healing for me, and has kept them out of daycare after they both spent over a month in the NICU. A win-win for both of us. I often tell her it’s the best job I’ve ever had, and I mean it. You never stop being a parent no matter how old your children are. I even read you carry their cells inside of you. I love that! It’s a lifetime commitment. That being said, I am not ready to tie my hair which is slowly turning silver into a bun, put on an apron and a housedress, sit in a rocker and wait. Wait for what? The rest of my life to pass by? Death?

This is my introduction to the what now? This whole experiment is about living the last third of my life. How I will transition to that third not in distress, but in wonder that I am still here! Despite of all of the challenges, II have so much left to do and experience! While I know I will not live forever, this is about transitioning into what is realistically the last third of my life and making it the Best Third.