by Lisa Congdon
After I passed calculus, I went to my editor and I said, “Okay, I passed, and I have to quit.” And she was so understanding and so supportive, and that really helped me.
Lisa: Other things in your life were changing then, too.
Stephanie: Yes, I realized that my marriage wasn’t really working. When I went home and told my husband (now my was-band) that I was thinking of doing this, his response was, “Well, you didn’t ask me.” And when he said that, I thought, Wow, I understand now. At that moment I understood I had to get out of that relationship. And I said, “I thought you would support me because I found something that I know will make me happy.” And he said, “Well, you didn’t ask me.” And I thought, I don’t have to ask somebody if I can do this to make myself happy. No, I have to go by my gut. And so I had to accept that my twenty-five-year marriage was at an end, which was immensely difficult for me. I’d always imagined myself married.
Lisa: When you began telling people about your plans, how did they react?
Stephanie: I’ve kept every single email from the people that I worked with—writers I worked with, doctors I worked with, other professionals I worked with—who were just so overwhelmingly supportive. “Wow, I can’t say it’s going to be easy, but go for it,” they said. “Wow, I’m so proud of you.” There was just so much support, and I pull that folder out a lot and just look at it. I often go back to that initial groundswell of support and that has really sustained me.
Lisa: Did you encounter any difficulty in the application process because of your age?
Stephanie: Well, none of the American medical schools I applied to accepted me. I was told off the record by an admissions person at a prominent medical school that I was “far too old.” So I applied to school in the Caribbean. I was accepted by Ross University, and I packed up my life and moved to Dominica (the island between Martinique and Guadalupe). It is a third world country, and despite being a diehard New Yorker for twenty years, I loved it.
Lisa: In what ways do you think your experience entering medical school and becoming a doctor in your 60s is different than it would’ve been had you started this path in your 20s?
Stephanie: My age is kind of not present and present. When I’m sitting in a group in a lecture or asking questions, I’m the student, like everybody else who’s 24 years old. Or, I’m in a study group and wrestling over a concept just like everyone else. And then every once in a while, I bump against the sliding glass door, which is like, Oh wait, you’re not going to go out with us and play flip cup or beer pong, because you don’t do that. Students will come up to me and say, “Wow, after the first day of lecture, the professor already knows who you are.” And I say to them that’s because I’m the professor’s age.
The thing I bring is my life experience, and that works for and against me. For example, I have this fancy-pants calculator that I bought because it was a requirement. I had no idea how to use it, so I turned to the person next to me and I said, “I have no idea how to use this. Can you show me?” Part of my success is understanding what I don’t know. For example, that I’m behind when it comes to intuitively understanding technology. But, at the same time, at this point in my life I’m not afraid to be vulnerable and ask for help when I don’t know something. That also works in my favor.
Lisa: That must feel really exciting to be learning so many new things.
Stephanie: It is both exhilarating and terrifying. It’s like I took a leap off a cliff, and the free fall is exhilarating, and not knowing where you’re landing is terrifying—no matter how hard it’s been, no matter what the challenge is.
Lisa: What advice would you give to women over 40 who want to do something new—and I mean like big new, like the change you made.
Stephanie: The difficulty a lot of women have is finding the thing they want to do. I talk to a lot of women who say, “How did you find it? I want to make a big change, too.” There’s a lot of yearning. So if you want to make a change, just be open, and be open to unexpected directions. I mean, a conversation with a friend, when you’re just walking around chewing the fat—it changed my life. What worked for me was that intuitive moment when I realized what I have is this amazing opportunity. You have to be open to the universe putting an idea in your lap. I could’ve easily said to my friend, “Oh yeah, I would’ve gone to medical school, but I can’t do that now because I’m too old.” It’s just needing to be open to it and understanding that, without sounding too woo-woo, the universe is going to send you a message and it’s going to be a wake-up call. Just be ready.
did not publish her writing about Ma, Pa, and the little house on the prairie until she was well into her 60s, a fact little known to many of her adoring fans. The stories of her American pioneer childhood are among the most well known and beloved in the genre of children’s literature in the United States.
Laura Ingalls was born in 1867 in Pepin, Wisconsin. As she would later document in her book series, her family moved frequently throughout the Midwest, settling for short periods in Missouri, Kansas, Minnesota, and South Dakota. At just 15 years old, while living in South Dakota, she began teaching at a one-room schoolhouse, although she never graduated from high school herself. In 1885, at the age of 18, Laura married Almanzo Wilder and quit teaching to raise children and help Almanzo work the farm. The family later purchased land in Mansfield, Missouri, ultimately establishing a prosperous dairy, poultry, and fruit farm.
In the 1920s, Laura began the process of writing a memoir of her childhood, which included stories of survival in the face of cold and lack of food and other harsh difficulties of pioneer life. She eventually shared it with her daughter Rose, who had become a newspaper reporter. Rose encouraged her to publish the memoir, and over many years that followed, Rose helped her mother reshape the narrative for a younger audience. Little House in the Big Woods, her first book, was published in 1932 when Laura was 65 years old.
The book was an immediate hit with readers young and old, and Laura continued her prolific writing career into her 70s to complete a series of seven beloved novels based on her life, the last published in 1943 when Laura was 76 years old. She kept an active correspondence with her fans until her death in 1957 at age 90. From 1974 to 1982, a popular television show based on Laura Ingalls Wilder’s books brought her amazing stories of pioneer life to the screen, delighting viewers and spawning a new generation of Little House enthusiasts.
THE UNEXPECTED, EXHILARATING FREEDOM OF BEING SINGLE AT 41
by
This past September, on the eve of my 41st birthday, I was propositioned by a 20-year-old cowboy I barely knew. “Do you want to have sex?” he said to me, with a directness and confidence that—even though we were in the Bighorn Mountains of Wyoming—would do a New Yorker proud.
Standing alone in the darkness with an unfamiliar man could have been unnerving, but in this instance it was mostly amusing, even heartening. I had been living on a dude ranch for the month of August, disengaging from my life as much as possible after a year of intense highs and lows, and the entire place radiated openness, adventure, and anticipation. Even in the dark, this young man showed the swagger of all the wranglers here, men who wear their jeans exactly the way Levi must have dreamed they should be worn. And yet, despite the cinematic quality of the scene, I turned him down. (Him: “Really?”) Partly because I had to be up in two hours to drive to the airport and still hadn’t packed. But also because over the past year I’d regularly found myself a source of interest to younger men—men traveling the country on motorcycles, ex-marines, graduate students—making this encounter somewhat commonplace. I’d stopped thinking about it as some sort of anomaly, a one-off opportunity I needed to grab or forever lose the chance. I knew what I wanted, and at this moment it was not this.
Had I listened more closely to the tales of some of my unmarried women friends it might not have come as such a surprise that single life after 40 can be full and fantastic and fun. But there’s a distinct lack of celebratory role models
for single women without children, and that lack creates a void where there should be stories—from a distance, the uncharted space can seem very scary, if not downright deadly. Even as our ideas about women and age slowly begin to advance, 40 remains a metaphorical guillotine, as though your birthday will descend, and boom, all the things you value about yourself (or rather, that you have been taught are valuable) are suddenly, grotesquely hacked away, and you are left shapeless and worthless, or worse, invisible. In the stories we tell ourselves about women’s lives, there exists little evidence of what life after 40 for unmarried women without children is actually like; you’d be forgiven for assuming the “now what?” that comes after no marriage, and no children, is a wasteland devoid of love and opportunity to be endured alone till death.
On one hand, this may not be entirely surprising. The single, economically independent woman is a very recent phenomenon—a woman could not even get her own credit card in this country until 1974—and our stories are still catching up with our reality. On the other hand, the stories we do tell tend to render women beyond their childbearing years culturally invisible. (If marriage and babies can be considered a mark of success for every woman, then only the most exceptional women seem able to remain single and childless and have it counted as a triumph.)
I’m particularly aware of this as my friends walk down more recognizable paths of marriage and motherhood. Which may be why, as I left my 40th birthday behind and sallied forth into the decade ahead, I often felt like some sort of pioneer out to explore and settle new land, overwhelmed by the emptiness and total absence of road signs.
Which, I have to tell you, is pretty fucking exhilarating most of the time.
Here’s the thing that has been the most shocking and that no one prepares you for: the freedom. Women today are not taught how to deal with this kind of freedom, any more than women of our mothers’ generation were taught to deal with their own money. We enable others’ freedom—as home keepers, child-minders—but are rarely rewarded for having our own.
Meanwhile, men, or white men, have been taught nothing but. It’s the goddamn ethos of this country: Go West, be free, grow up with the country. As anyone with even a cursory knowledge of American history can tell you, the reality of “Go West” was much different, but the iconography endures. Women, meanwhile, are taught that their value lies in their use to other people: their husbands, their children, or, barring these, society at large. (For so long, implicit in the choice not to have children has been the sense that women are obligated to justify this decision by articulating how they will then devote their lives to otherwise making the world a better place.) They are taught to want to be tied down. Entire media industries and much of the last century’s American advertising complex have been built on this premise. We are taught anything else is either a failure or a danger; men get to adventure, women who venture out must be on the run, to their death more often than not.
However, I am now awash in a freedom I did not anticipate and I feel great, which at times has been unnerving. Am I supposed to feel this great? I possess none of the traditionally recognized keys to happiness: no husband, no children. I am alone, a state that I am supposed to have spent my life trying to avoid. There is so much around me that suggests I should be feeling otherwise that at times I second-guess my own contentment. And yet, when people ask me what I do, I’m sometimes tempted to answer, “Whatever I want.” This is not a boast—I have financial obligations like everyone else, and only myself to rely on for meeting them—so much as a statement of fact and a reminder that I belong to the first generation of women for whom this can be a real truth. But it also feels like I’ve discovered some sort of secret—like, Oh my God, you guys, it’s so great over here and no one wants you to know about it.
Which is also why I bring up the men. One of the things that happens when you step off the path toward marriage and babies is you step into a much wider, more interesting world of men (or women, as has been the case for a number of friends). Of all ages.
Which is not to say it can’t also be really fucking hard to be alone, and sometimes deeply lonely in a soul-shaking sort of way. Inevitably there are the middle-of-the-nights when it is also terrifying. And sometimes it’s just plain exhausting. When you are the person free to do what you want, what you often end up doing is taking care of other people with fewer options. More than once in the past year I have crawled home to my empty apartment emotionally gutted and feeling like I’d been run over by a truck, thinking enviably it’d be worth it to be married just to have someone else who is obligated to deal with my family, and also cork the wine and load the dishwasher.
Fortunately, I’m old enough to know that people in marriages, and with children, feel all of these things (and how much worse is it to feel lonely in a relationship, which is something so few people talk about and so many experience) at one time or another. No matter how often we imagine marriage as the solution to women’s problems, it is simply another way of living.
It was when I was on a hike in the Bighorns this August that it occurred to me I had through an extreme combination of circumstance and deliberate choices, become the very role model I’d been missing. I was out walking alone in the hills, as I did most every day for a few hours, without a phone and only a general sense of where I was (I always told someone when I was leaving in case I got lost and didn’t make it back before dark . . . not a joke), dazzled by the emptiness, hoping to spot one of the coyotes I could hear howling in the early mornings, and vaguely contemplating the strangeness of my current situation. Behind me a line of horses who’d been let out into the hills for the night followed me up and over the rise and down into the valley, as if I’d been their de facto leader. I’m not a person prone to Oprah-like mantras (if I have a mantra at all, it probably involves chocolate and Champagne), but at one point I looked up and thought: Whoa, I love it out here in the land of 40, unmarried, and no kids. Or, to quote Lewis and Clark upon sighting the Pacific Ocean: “O! The Joy!”
Glynnis MacNicol is a writer and cofounder of TheLi.st. Her work has appeared in print and online for publications including Elle.com, where she is a contributing writer, the Guardian, the New York Times, Forbes, the Cut, the New York Daily News, Marie Claire, Capital New York, the Daily Beast, Mental Floss, Outside, Maclean’s, and Medium.
, a now well-known Aborigine artist, was near 80 before she picked up a paintbrush, but once she had one in her hand, she filled canvas after canvas with her bold, vibrant strokes of color. In her brief career, she became one of Australia’s most celebrated indigenous artists.
Minnie was born in the early part of the twentieth century (estimates vary, but her birthdate was likely between 1910 and 1920) in Utopia, a remote part of the Northern Territory of Australia. As a teen, she had a relationship with a married white man and the two had a daughter, Barbara Weir. The couple was jailed, as interracial relationships were considered a crime, and at age 9, Barbara was taken away from Minnie. She was part of the “stolen generation”—Aboriginal children who were forcibly removed from their families and placed in foster care. Minnie, who spoke little English, believed Barbara to be dead. Minnie went on to marry and have six more children.
In adulthood, Barbara, who had become an established artist, found and reconnected with her mother. On a visit to her daughter’s studio in 2000, Minnie picked up a paintbrush and began to create her own canvases, drawing on the traditional body-painting motifs of the Aborigines, but with her own distinct gestural flourish and colorful palette.
Within a year, Minnie had her first solo show of paintings and her work immediately became sought after. Minnie painted prolifically and was known for her vigor—she rose at dawn and worked all day. As the popularity of her work grew, Minnie faced pressure to create. She found comfort and community with her family, encouraging her sisters, also in their 70s and 80s, to collaborate with her on canvases, working together until her death in 2006.
ended her thirty-four-year-long successf
ul career in marketing and corporate communications to become a photojournalist—at the age of 55. Prior to pursuing photography, Paola had been a principal at the first women-owned advertising agency in the United States, Hall & Levine, followed by a nine-year stint as an executive vice president at the international agency Saatchi & Saatchi. Since leaving the corporate world behind, Paola has produced five photographic books and has documented the lives of women in fifty-five countries. Her most recent book, Grandmother Power: A Global Phenomenon, was awarded the 2013 International Book Award for Multicultural Nonfiction and Foreword Reviews’s 2012 Women’s Studies Book of the Year Award, among other accolades. In 2013, Paola was listed as one of 40 Women to Watch Over 40, and Women’s e-News named her among 21 Leaders for the 21st Century in 2014. She is currently working on her sixth book.
Lisa: At the age of 55, you decided to take a year off from your career in communications for photography and travel, and then you never went back.
Paola: I had been working in communications for almost thirty-five years, and the last one of those years I had also been teaching, so I was doing essentially two jobs at the same time. And the result of that was three things: One, I was exhausted. Second, I had earned two years’ worth of money in one year, and I said to myself, Whoa, I just bought myself a year. And third, I had about a million frequent flyer miles and my husband gave me his additional two million. Suddenly I had enough free airline miles to go virtually anywhere in the world, and I could also stay anywhere because they take miles at hotels. I thought, Why don’t I do for one year only what I love most and want to learn next? And so I envisioned this as my sabbatical for a year.