Tag Archives: starting over

GenXers and “Second Acts”

40s are the new 40s, generation x, Goals, good reads, Second Acts, teaching, Uncategorized, , , , , , , , , ,

My husband and I made a joint decision to buy rental properties. We already had one, our former home, and we recently purchased another, strictly for renting out. We did a 180, going from hating being landlords (and doing it all wrong) to searching for more properties to buy and researching forms of alternative financing.

I, personally, have always been into real estate—acquiring, holding, flipping, what-have-you. My husband had always treated my obsession with following real estate trends in and around our home as, at best, a distraction that kept me from my real career, at worst, a waste of our time. However, as a former reader and big fan of the now defunct More Magazine, I believed in the “Second Act.” More’s monthly “Second Acts” featured women, all over the age of forty, who transitioned out of their lives-as-they-knew-them and became something new and different. Some women went from homemakers to corporate giants, others abruptly left the corporate world and started small businesses or nonprofits. One woman, whom I remember quite distinctly, left a high-stress, high-paying job and moved to some expansive property in a wild western state and created a rescue farm. 180s, “Second Acts”—they’re the comebacks of disgruntled GenXers. I’ve been dreaming of a 180 since I read my first copy of More Magazine.

All my husband needed to get on board with real estate investment was the right pitch from the right person. That person wasn’t me. It was, ironically, a Millennial. I will hold no grudges, though, since I got what I said I wanted.

After scraping and struggling and acquiring two Masters degrees, moving from venue to venue, I finally found a teaching environment that I truly enjoy, and recently, things started falling into place. I was offered a full-time position, albeit non-tenured. I passed it up. My big plans as the fall began last year to sample a variety of teaching positions while I held my part-time status at my current college until something big came up… well, it came up. And then it went. My choice. I finally got what I SAID I wanted, but all the while, what I really wanted was my second act.

I’m lucky. I’m lucky that my husband has a career that’s too serious to get taken over by today’s bottom line—new, young, and hungry.   You can’t bullshit your way into what my husband does, and freshly-minted graduates are not necessarily the most cost-efficient or valued prospects. My field, on the other hand, is oozing with cronyism and bullshit. It’s time for my 180.

Believe me, I don’t think that real estate investment is going to make us rich, or that it will be easy. At present, our monthly cash flow from rentals is about $100 a month—see, we rented out our former family home to my best friend and her husband with bad credit for a deep discount last year, just because we didn’t want to be landlords anymore, and we knew they’d take care of the property. Our second investment should yield us a $450 cash flow. That’s $550 a month of tax-sheltered income once we find a tenant. That’s what I make, after taxes, hustling part-time in the classroom. And with rental properties, someone else pays down the mortgage. Why not try this out?

I’ve already learned a lot from our mistakes—I know where the unplanned for expenses come from, I know the value of having a contractor’s license, I know that the city where we planned to invest is getting more expensive (taxes are rising, water bills are rising, lead abatement policies are getting much stricter). I know not to rent to friends or family. My best friend threatens to never leave our property. And why should she? She’s got the cheapest rent in town. More airtight leases, better pre-screening practices—I’m learning it all. On Monday, I am going to tackle my first handyman projects by repairing holes in the drywall and the plaster in my friend’s/tenant’s house so that it can pass a lead inspection and become a legal property again, a service that I will charge my tenants for in the future. It’s like getting another degree, but this time it’s hands-on. Lucky me.

Only time will tell if this new path is really a second act, or if it’s just another short-lived distraction. Well, I shouldn’t say “only time,” as if this venture is not an act of free will. It is. And I’m a little scared. Because life gets real when you take ownership of it, and I’ve been in the habit of NOT doing that.

To Burn Out or to Fade Away–I’ll Take Fade.

40s are the new 40s, Election 2016, Goals, Reflections, Uncategorized, , , , , , , , ,

For most of my life, I assumed that everyone else in the world considered suicide in varying frequencies or degrees. I didn’t know why professionals made such a big, stinking deal over the mention of it, I just learned very early NOT to mention it around certain people and to outright lie to others: Have I had any thoughts of suicide? Nope. Not a one. What do I look like? A crazy person? A weak person? Meanwhile, I would wake up in the morning wondering what it would feel like to jump off a tall building or put a bullet in my head. Quick and efficient stuff I’d think about. None of this slow bleeding in the bathtub nonsense, hoping someone might run in and save me. I always knew that if I actually did it, I’d do it right. I’d do it to get it done. For most of my life I drifted in and out of these fantasies. I could come up with a hundred reasons to hate myself in the course of a day.

It wasn’t until I met my friend Fluoxetine, at the age of 42, that I learned otherwise. Fluoxetine, and the man who prescribes it to me, taught me all kinds of things about how other people can see the world. For instance, some people NEVER think of suicide. Not just once a day or once a month, but NEVER once. These are probably the people who freak out when they hear you mention suicide as casually as if you’re talking about flossing your teeth. They probably feel sorry for people like me who see no other way to see the world. Hell, I guess I would feel sorry for me, too. But I didn’t know anything different. My doctor said freedom from that world, the only one I’d ever known, would feel like a weight being lifted. When my surroundings became more than a fluctuating shade of drab, I would wonder how I could have lived for so long the way I did.

I was skeptical, of course. I’m always skeptical of the therapy trade. But this dude was more than a therapist; he was a doctor who could make a precise diagnosis. He was a man who didn’t pity me or fear for me or for my condition because he knew it was treatable. No drama. No endless talk therapy.

I was one of the lucky ones who reacted positively to the antidepressant right from the start. I remember so clearly driving to the grocery store, exuberantly singing along to whatever came on the radio, and giggling at nothing. I remember walking through the aisles of the store, trembling a little because I just wanted to FUCKING DANCE! That first day was like a pure coke high without the bleeding nose. My doctor said it shouldn’t have happened so quickly, that my body needed time to adjust to it. But I tell you, it happened. I actually wanted to dance in a public place, and I don’t dance, anywhere. It was a sign.

So what’s my point? I guess it’s this: in all those forty-two years, during those times when bleakness would interrupt my thoughts at random and make the whole world seem absurd, I never did it, never acted on the dark fantasy. I seem to have a strong survival instinct. I found ways to adapt to whatever it was, just like I need to find ways to adapt to whatever this is that’s happening now in the world. I need to adjust my perspective, to compensate, maybe to up my dose. I’m considering going full-throttle into hippiedom and embracing peace, learning how to play the guitar, maybe go vegan, never step on a bug. I’m tired of conflict. I’m so damned good it, so good at starting fires and stoking them, but I always get burned.

I’ll Take a Good Compromise

Parenting, , , , , , , , , ,

I grind my teeth.

I don’t know for how long I’ve been doing it. I just know that when my teeth began to fall apart (after forty, of course), my dentist’s hygienist told me quite bluntly that I had the teeth of a seventy year-old.

Neither my dentist nor his candid hygienist explained to me why I grind my teeth. It isn’t their job to explain why. There is no room for preventative psychoanalysis in the straightforward dental profession.  That part, I’ve learned, is my job. And I blame kids.

Here, I could try to go in the direction of one those sadly amusing Mommy blogs, but I’m not a mommy. I’m a stepmother, and that’s a very different experience. I didn’t carry these kids to term, I didn’t breastfeed them. As I neared the big 4-0, I just became a parent to two human beings who had already traveled with their biological parents through the delirium of those early months.

As a consequence, I don’t have a parent’s delusional filter that spares me from taking a child’s behavior too personally. I don’t have that inexplicable love coupled with guilt for bringing them into my mess, the emotional combo that ultimately engenders forgiveness. I feel and think every bump and pothole on the road to these kids’ maturation. And I dread the end of it.

I tried writing about this topic last night, in the heat of my frustration, and the result was just embarrassing. I just can’t do it at night. Correction: I can’t do it well at night. I wrote something, but it wasn’t an idea. There was no resolution. I just vented and then went to bed upset. I still am. I don’t need to explain the action that brought me here. I just think that kids, by virtue of their immaturity and confusion about life, are capable of being hurtful in all kinds of creative ways. You don’t need to be a stepparent to know that.

So I’m doing poorly today in general. I have a slight headache. I didn’t wake up feeling refreshed and thrilled about the daybreak. Rather, I woke up sick and tired from odd dreams, probably a result of the sixteen sandwich cookies I ate in lieu of an alcoholic bender (my trusty, thirty-something method of solving these problems).

One positive spin on this morning, though, is that there are no kids to wake up with me at 6:15, no little people milling around helplessly while I try to process my coffee and bring whatever I’m writing to an abrupt end. I’m not for sharing in the morning, at least until not until I’ve drunk that coffee and sat in the dark in front of a glowing monitor (That’s a side of me that I’m sure the kids’ll remember well into their eighties.). Meanwhile, in an alternate reality about three blocks down the street, their mom is cooking them a wholesome breakfast and showering them with her guilt-love.

Actually, they are good kids. One is a particularly agreeable little soul, sensitive and polite and highly empathetic. The other one, well, he’s a little more “complicated.” But he behaves well, and he plays the part. Whether he’s feeling the love or not (and who knows what he’s feeling), he usually acts like an obedient child. And you know what? That’s something. That’s a lot, in fact. Kids all around us these days, from the store to the soccer games and into our TVs, are acting like disrespectful, entitled little turds. I’m glad to be half-raising kids who don’t act like that.

I’ve often heard from parents and teachers that children at certain stages in their development don’t have to like you, shouldn’t like you, in fact. They just have to respect your rules and your wishes, your sometimes batshit ways of achieving order and routine around the house. And these kids do. They accept me and my vision, even tease me about it. My husband insists that they even like me, even love me, but who knows.

I can’t have it all, so why complain about what I do have? Anger and protests are for those decades past. Mine is, I suppose, for compromise. Because everyone likes an agreeable little soul, even if she is sometimes playing a part. And grinding her teeth.