Author Archives: Amy Gage

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About Amy Gage

A community relations director in higher education and mother of two adult sons, Amy Gage spent the first 20 years of her career as a journalist and public speaker in St. Paul and Minneapolis, Minnesota. The issues addressed in her award-winning newspaper column, "On Balance: Issues That Affect Work and Home," remain relevant today. In "The Middle Stages," she continues the vital conversation about women's work and lives, with a focus on the challenges and contradictions of aging, the mixed blessings of forsaking family time for the more immediate rewards of a career, and how middle-aged women can continue to forge full lives even as their priorities and sensibilities change.

Women and Money: Earn, Save and Spend (in that order)

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St. Paul–based financial educator Ruth Hayden has been giving women the same advice about money for 25 years.

And it’s not because she’s out of touch with the persistent problems of the gender pay gap or the glass ceiling. Far from it. No, Hayden — who literally wrote the book about women and money back in 1992 — is discouraged about how little has changed for female wage-earners in the past quarter century.Ruth Hayden

“I get more sophisticated questions than I got 20 years ago,” says Hayden, whose “Women and Money” classes are consistently sold out and whose four books include one on couples and money. “Women know the language. They know they have to make money. But they’re still deferring too long on investing, and they’re not earning enough.”

Advice may be cheap, but a conversation with the ever-quotable Hayden — a regular with Kerri Miller on Minnesota Public Radio — is like striking gold.

On financial education: “To my toes, I am a teacher. And there are three areas of money I work in:

“One, how do I earn money? Is it enough? Is the income stream sustainable? Because I’ll likely work a lot longer than I thought I would. Two, how do I consume or spend my money? Am I in charge of it? Three, how much do I accumulate? Am I in charge of my savings and investments?

“Without the first one in place — a solid income stream — the other two don’t hold.”

On saving as a necessary discipline: “The biggest risk for women is that we don’t get enough money put away fast enough. Two factors are at work: We don’t earn enough in a job that is sustainable, and we are uneducated about where to put that money. Because we feel incompetent about investing, we ignore it.”

On learning to invest: “Financial advisors tell women to pay off their house. And women like that. They like the concept of home, and they can touch it. But that’s why so many women are living in a paid-off house but don’t have enough money coming in to have a decent life inside of that house.

“Instead of telling women what they want to hear — ‘pay off your house’ — we need to encourage women to come into a field they’re uncomfortable with, and that’s the stock market. It is the only game in town to create money over time that grows ahead of inflation and taxes. All the stock market is, is other people’s businesses.”

On how to have money when you’re old: “I can start a business that I later will be able to sell. Second, I can invest in other people’s businesses, and that’s the stock market. Third, I can invest in real estate, including my own house.

“Men prefer the first one. They assume they will build a business and someone else will highly value it. I like a mixture of the three.”Women invest

On why women resent work: “If you lined up 10 women and asked them this question, they’d say, ‘Oh, no, I don’t resent my job. I have to earn money.’ Then you let the conversation go informal, and it may come out. It’s the resentment at having to do it.

“The women who are always exhausted or resentful about work have an issue with work. Somehow, they expect to be taken care of — and it used to be by a man. It’s not politically correct to say that now. But when I push on this in the women’s class, the room gets very quiet.”

On the ambiguity inherent in making choices: “Very few decisions are either right or wrong. There’s always a downside. That’s how you make a decision: ‘I want this upside, and I can manage and live with the downside.’

“This is where couples get fussed up. They look for a right and wrong. Instead of getting tangled in who’s right and who’s wrong, ask the question this way: What is the upside and what is the downside? Find a process to work through it. Make it a brainstorming session.”

On career vs. job: “When women are really overstressed, they say they’ll work in a flower shop or bookstore. No, those don’t pay well. That’s a job, and a job is temporary. A job is something I wish I didn’t have to do.

“Women need to get more engaged in the way we make money. It’s about learning to develop a career: A career is part of me. A career grows with me. Emotionally and intellectually, I own a career. And then we have to find a way to make the career more sustainable long term, because most of us will be earning money a lot longer than we thought we would be.”

On discomfort with age: “A Twin Cities–based corporation brought me in because their younger employees weren’t enrolling in the 401(k) plan. They showed me a digitized photo of me aged to 80. My brain did not recognize me. If I can’t recognize myself, why would I put money toward that person? Why would I invest money for retirement?

“I recently had a client, at 56, take $18,000 out of her retirement funds to pay for plastic surgery. And she is so happy! But she’s not examining the back end of that choice. Three decades from now, that $18,000 could go a long way toward making her comfortable.”

On women and power: “Women still feel powerless in their lives. When we pull out the credit card and get what we want: In that moment, we feel powerful.”

Lessons from Beyond: the Short, Sad Life of a Small Dog

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I barely know the woman whose dog I agreed to foster so she could go to inpatient treatment for alcoholism. We have a good friend in common. I already own two dogs. So I impulsively said “yes” when she sent out an SOS e-mail to find a caregiver for Max, her mini-dachshund.

Three weeks later, Max is dead — by my decree — and I am left with an empty dog bed and the uncomfortable reality that doing the right thing is, often, a lonely enterprise.Max the Dog

Pets as playthings

I picked up Max at his suburban townhouse on a bitterly cold Thursday afternoon in February. His owner had been drinking. Bright-eyed and chatty, trying desperately to appear normal, she apologized for the messy living room and the urine stains on the carpet.

I collected Max’s things — a kennel, a tattered leash, a grocery bag full of canned dog food and pricey treats — and wished the owner well. I was eager to get out of there and get Max home.

I didn’t ask her about the peculiarities of mini-dachshunds. I didn’t know, for example, that they’re not supposed to climb stairs or jump on and off furniture, something my own robust dogs do routinely. All she told me was that Max hated the cold and that he loved to snuggle under blankets, contradicting the Wikipedia site that pronounced the breed “very active” and thus requiring “frequent walks.”

An inveterate exerciser, I envisioned getting this dog on the right path.

Only 5 or 6, Max had a swaying, tentative gait that suggested he was uneasy — or unfamiliar — with a simple walk. He laid in his bed for hours and seemed to be composed of what my son dubbed “flab and bones.” In fact, the slipped disc that paralyzed him, seemingly overnight, “is often caused by obesity,” the Wikipedia site says.

The pads of his feet were as pink as a baby’s bottom. When we’d lift him outside to pee — before the rear-end paralysis took away that function, too — Max would stand in the snow, frozen in place. I attached a leash to his collar once and he refused to move.

I reached the owner at her treatment facility in California prior to putting Max down, and she told me Max had been “horribly abused” when she rescued him at 4 years old. I didn’t want the details — visions of hind-end kicks have haunted me since I had the dog killed last Thursday — but I ask myself whether overfeeding and inactivity don’t constitute some form of abuse as well.

Bred to be hunters of small animals such as badgers and rats, dachshunds require muscle strength to support their long spines. But in an era when “sedentary” seems to define the human condition, dachshunds have become house dogs, playthings — dressed up in silly sweaters for their owners’ amusement.

“Loved for his long round body and cute stumpy legs,” one website reads, the dachshund nevertheless must be nurtured with fish oil and exercise and specific handling in order to remain healthy.

Maybe we need to enlarge the definition of animal cruelty: Is it only hitting? Starvation? Chaining a pet in a cold, dark basement? Or is it also ignorance and benign neglect?

Life’s lessons

Ultimately, Max’s death will matter only to the woman who adopted him and never got to say goodbye. But I’d like his life to stand for something. Maybe one day, the monsters who made his early years hell will reflect on their actions and feel regret. Maybe his owner will find the strength to stay sober because she’ll want to foster another dog

Maybe I’ll find the courage, finally, to do more than wring my hands and actually volunteer on behalf of abused and abandoned animals.

Unlike giving birth — which is painful, traumatic and yet joyous — witnessing death is just hard and mysterious, and very sad.

It’s my 98-year-old father-in-law thrashing in a hospital bed, hours before he died of pneumonia in the facility where he once was chief of staff. It’s my sons’ godmother, my sister-in-law, lying in a hospice and progressively losing the ability to talk or breathe.

And it’s Max, quietly curling up to die — not “going to sleep,” as we like to tell ourselves to sidestep the moral quandary — only seconds after the vet’s lethal injection. “Bless you,” I told her, “you have a hard job.”

“It’s not all puppies and kittens,” she replied.

A friend who used to work for the Animal Humane Society called to comfort me the next day. She quoted a former colleague who had euthanized many animals: “She told me it was the most important moment for an animal,” my friend said, “and it was her responsibility to give them comfort and dignity.”Countryside logo

My family did that for Max. Dr. Signe Wass of Countryside Animal Hospital did that for Max. And in her own way, his owner did that for Max, too. She rescued him, and loved him the best she could.

Thank God, February’s Over: Bring on Spring!

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The longest shortest month of the year, February makes me wish time away — something  most of us cease doing at middle age.

We’ve had 26 sub-zero mornings in Minnesota so far this winter. February is among the slowest months for local businesses; people would rather be keeping company with their screens.

Native Minnesotans are supposed to take the icy sidewalks and bitterly cold temperatures in stride. But I’ve eaten too much. Gotten off my running routine. And been too distracted and stir-crazy even to finish reading a book.Penguins on ice

Enough. Spring starts in March, and I am holding myself to better habits, starting today:

1) Keep moving. I felt reborn the other day when I ran four miles along Mississippi River Boulevard with a friend I hadn’t seen in months. Yes, it was cold, but I know how to dress for winter running: layer your clothing, go lighter below the waist, wear a black Ninja hood to encase your head and neck.

The sun was shining. The conversation was lively. And I adopted her trick of thinking positive when the going got tough. Rather than “damn, this hill is steep” we’d exclaim to each other: “Look at the view!”

2) Gain perspective. The death of New York Times journalist David Carr on February 12 threw me, as it did many of his former colleagues. I knew Carr, barely, back in the roaring ’80s, when we both worked at MSP Communications. He chastised me once for wearing a campaign button in the newsroom. He swept through a party at my upper duplex in northeast Minneapolis, pronouncing that I had a “nice pad.”

I envied his self-confidence and single-minded ambition. I recognized his talent, even as I viewed it from a distance. I was never brave enough to travel in his pack.

Like others, I was shocked and saddened to read of his collapse. But I also personalized the news in a way that feels ungenerous, both to him and to myself. I didn’t think about the wife and daughters he left behind or his unfinished work in the world.

When I read about Carr’s globe-trotting career, the mark he made on his profession, and his canny ability both to overcome and capitalize on his addiction, I felt small by comparison. Just as I did back then. Only a year younger than he was when he died, I assessed my career and wondered what I have accomplished.

Weeks later — given time, perspective and a review of his candid, pragmatic interviews with Terry Gross on Fresh Air — I recognize that Carr would want his hometown coworkers to be not intimidated but inspired.

3) Build community. A couple of colleagues asked me in January to teach a weekly yoga practice over the noon hour, even though I hadn’t taught for more than a year. We meet in a drafty gym, with no music. We bring our own blocks and other props. We have a varying range of abilities.

And it’s become a high point of my week. They overlook my rusty teaching. I watch then bring courage and humility to the mat. We’re taking risks, and that helps us appreciate one another in a way that simply working together does not.

4) Just do it. I’m grateful for the discipline developed over decades in the workplace. You suit up and show up, even when you’d rather be somewhere else. “My whole life is have to,” Steve Martin declares in Parenthood, a spot-on film I saw the day I learned I was pregnant with my older son.Parenthood

I don’t want to walk my dogs in the minus-zero wind-chill every morning. I don’t always want to visit my mother in the memory-care facility, or shop for groceries, or sort the boxes taking up space in our one-car garage. But I do it, because I have to. And because action is always preferable to riding the merry-go-round inside my head.

5) Write it down. On my best days, I see that obligation gives my life purpose. People count on me. I have a good job and a strong network of friends. I’ve built a family to care for and about.

On the harder days — which was most of sub-zero February — I start the day with a cup of coffee and a journal. Thirty minutes later, the world looks right again.

Then I haul out the long, black down coat and the boots that hold me upright on the ice — and I get on with it, whatever it is, because having places to go and people to see brings me one step closer to spring and beats the alternative of wallowing in the winter blues.