Recently, when I was visiting my forty-eight-year old sister, Kathy, in the suburbs of Flower Mound, Texas, I was surprised when several of her friends, whom I had met briefly before, called hoping to see me before I headed back to Costa Rica, where I’ve been living for the last six months. Although I was flattered, I didn’t understand their enthusiasm to see me again. Maureen, Nancy, and Susan all showed up the next night, and as we gathered on Kathy’s back porch for a glass of wine, they encircled me with questions about my life. But still, I couldn’t understand what they found so interesting about me. I’m just a 46-year-old woman who ditched her high-paying job as an event producer in New York City and moved to Costa Rica to write a novel. Of course, I also had to learn Spanish, navigate jungle life, scorpions, and potholes, and find a new way to earn income, but my past reinventions had prepared me well. I knew that any big change would come with even bigger challenges, and that I would have to find a way to overcome them.
The women, like my sister, are all in mid-life and have in common that their children are going off to college. A window of opportunity is opening for them. They are about to have something they haven’t had in twenty years – time. They look at their lives, their husbands, their own accomplishments, and wonder: Could I make a life change too?
Susan wants to know what motivated me to leave my lucrative event production job?
“After years of eighteen-hour days producing drug launches for pharmaceutical companies, I realized I just didn’t care enough about the industry to justify putting in those kind of hours. It made me wonder, what if I dedicated that kind of time to something I really did care about?”
Nancy wanted to know if I missed my ‘Sex and the City’ lifestyle?
