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.

Become a Midlife Revolutionary: Walk to Work

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Minneapolis is among the 10 safest cities for pedestrians in the country, the local newspaper announced this week. Seattle was the most safe, Detroit the least among the 25 large urban areas studied.

That’s comforting news, given that I do a lot of walking in Minneapolis and its twin city, St. Paul, where I live and work. But the data ignore the more interesting sociology.

Buried in a recent U.S. Census Bureau analysis of the percentages and characteristics of people who walk or bike to work is an age-related statistic that speaks to the subtle mind shifts that start to happen in middle age.

Although walking to work is most common — no surprise — among young adults with relatively low incomes, it creeps up again among people 55 and older. People like the violin maker who lives across the street from my house and walks more than a mile to work in all weather, or like his wife, a college bookstore manager who commutes a similar distance by foot or bicycle.

People like You Are Hereme, who a year ago traded a 40-mile commute for a walkable distance to work of 1.2 miles. Now, instead of nonstop meetings by iPhone in unpredictable weather and crawling traffic, my commute entails reading sidewalk poetry, admiring the art of urban landscaping and simply getting lost in my own thoughts.

Why walk? Why bother?

A higher percentage of people walk to work in Minneapolis (and, by extension, St. Paul) than in other cold Midwestern cities like Chicago and Milwaukee, according to the Census data. Across all 50 metro areas studied, an eco-friendly commuting method — walk, bike, bus, train — is most prevalent among people who live and work in the same city.

But the uptick in “older worker” walking interests me most — because my experience correlates exactly with the statistics. Walking has become, for me, a social statement, a political action. I walk to work because our neighborhood streets are choked with cars. I walk because I polluted the planet for years so I could enjoy both the city career and the small-town family.

I walk because the United States has become a fat and lazy nation, with obesity rates more than double what they were in 1970 and an average of 2.28 vehicles per household. “We don’t have a parking problem” in St. Paul, a City Council legislative aide told me recently. “We have a walking problem.”

And so, while it would be easy for me to talk about the more balanced perspective that middle age brings — along with the resulting confidence to slow life’s pace, to find my path — in truth I’m not sure that’s why I’m walking more. I walk because “excess” has become the U.S. brand, a hedonism we export to further justify our self-centered shopping and consumption.

I walk because I’m a child of Depression-era parents who raised my siblings and me without air-conditioning, with one TV and with the discipline to turn off lights even back when electricity was “penny cheap.”

I walk because I’m a sucker for the starfish story, and walking to work is one thing I can do, one small difference I can make, in a planet that grows more damaged by the day.

It’s not easy being green

Living an eco-life is more palatable and possible in a granola-eating, rainbow-flag–waving neighborhood with bus lines close by and a grocery store, Thai restaurant and charming retro movie theater within easy walking distance.

Still, walking to work has its challenges, especially for middle-aged women. Discomfort and inconvenience top the list:

  • Walking takes longer than driving, and that’s a pain on Monday morning when I have to be at the weekly staff meeting by 8:30 a.m.
  • It rains in Minnesota, and, of course, it snows.
  • My building has a Wudu station in the second-floor bathroom where Muslim women can wash their feet before prayer, but the closest showers for commuters who walk or cycle are at the athletics facility across campus.
  • My lunch gets squished in my backpack, which also gets heavy with a laptop and a pair of work-suitable shoes inside.
  • It’s harder to walk and wear a skirt or suit — the expected attire for a woman my age. I dress more casually than I’d like because it’s easier to stuff jeans or cotton pants in my backpack than to carry dry-clean-only clothes.
  • You have to plan. I need my car for work — at least that’s what I tell myself when I have an appointment more than a mile away. Instead, I have learned to plan outside meetings at the top of the workday, so I can drive there and back, park my car at home and then walk in. I also meet with people more often by phone.

Most important: I have a tolerant employer who has no problem with me working from home sometimes or varying my schedule. And that’s what a walk-to-work movement will require — flexibility from employers who recognize that a healthy, calm person is a more balanced, productive employee.

The sidewalk art three blocks from my house says it best: I don’t know enough about balance to tell you how to do it. / I think, though, it’s in the trying and the letting go / that the scales measuring right and wrong — quiver and stand still.

Lesson learned: “Walking the talk” is a literal action. By living my values, I may inspire someone else to do the same.

The Oldest Woman in Yoga

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Ask middle-aged women which physical changes have surprised them, and they’ll talk about joints: aching knees, fragile ankles, sore shoulders that restrict range of motion.

The less common complaints are about bathroom habits. “Jumping makes me pee!” says a 56-year-old yoga instructor and nutrition coach. Another woman, 62, says simply “constipation” when asked about the physical change she least expected.

Our skin starts to dry out as early as our late 20s. We begin to lose muscle mass in our 30s. By our 40s, we see parentheses flank our mouths and darker circles beneath our eyes. But for some of us who have been athletic all our lives, the hardest signs of aging are the physical limitations.

“The payback for pushing yourself too hard gets worse as you age,” says Web MD, a valuable online resource for both diagnosis and healing of athletic injuries.

Gayle Winegar, president and co-owner of the SweatShop in St. Paul, Minn. — a Pilates- and strength-based studio that attracts women of middle age and older — agrees that shoulders and knees become more vulnerable with age. And injuries take longer to heal. “You get one injury, and that has a downward spiral. It’s hard to get up to the frequency, intensity and duration you had before,” she explains.

Slow down, you move too fast

Ego invariably is at the core of my athletic injuries. Whether it was the right hamstring muscles I blew out by showing off during a step aerobics class I was teaching, or the advice I failed to heed in my late 40s that middle-aged runners are less prone to injury if they slow down and even take “walk breaks” on their runs, I have consistently yielded to that competitive drive to keep up, win, be the best or — most humbling, in hindsight — to appear younger than I am.

Now, at 57, I finally recognize that if I don’t act my age, I’ll be sidelined.

I practice yoga at Core Power, a high-octane urban chain that attracts primarily young professionals. I joined in February 2011, desperate for the 104-degree rooms and chance to sweat during a typically frigid Minnesota winter. I also wanted Western-style yoga classes that focused more on fitness and rigorous workouts than Eastern philosophy.

Proudly referring to myself as the Oldest Woman in Yoga, I jumped into the most demanding classes, determined to keep pace with the youthful peacocks whose “body art” danced as they flowed through the poses.

Months later, I sustained a shoulder injury from doing the difficult Chaturanga Dandasana (yoga push-up) pose too quickly and with insufficient back and abdominal strength. It cost me weeks in physical therapy and a three-month hiatus from Core Power.

Yoga push-up

Yoga push-up

Older and wiser

Ego is the antithesis of what a yoga practice is supposed to be about. But that pastoral ideal — to “stay on your mat,” to focus solely on your own breath, to resist comparing body types and flexibility — is difficult to practice at a Type A studio like Core Power. And for a Type A practitioner like me.

Then I figured out that injury could heal me, not only the other way around.

When I returned to Core Power, I went to slower-moving, balance-focused classes that don’t include multiple repetitions of Chaturanga. I learned the 26 poses of hot yoga and sought out teachers who are closer to my age. And, just as yoga calls us to take its spiritual tenets with us off the mat, out into the world, I began to look at myself and others differently.

The Oldest Woman in Yoga quit mentally competing and comparing. If the loose skin shows on my lower belly, stretched twice — mightily — by nearly 10-pound baby boys, so be it. To paraphrase Gloria Steinem: “This is what 57 looks like.”

I ask instructors how to modify for my tight hips and weak left shoulder. I warmly greet the young women who clean the studios and bathrooms, and strike up conversations with other middle-aged women.

And, in an effort to focus less on being thin than being strong, I tried a TRX class at the SweatShop.

“I would love to look good in an Academy Awards ball gown, but that no longer is the highest thing on my list,” says Winegar, who founded the SweatShop in 1981, at the cusp of what would become a booming fitness movement. “Now, I want to get up without an achy back or stiff hands or feet that don’t work or a shoulder that doesn’t move.

“Women need different things at all stages of life.”

Lesson learned: I am working to accept my age rather than denying it. If enough of us come to celebrate the inevitable, society may see the wisdom that comes with wrinkles.

Boomerang! What Happens When the Empty Nest Refills

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I didn’t expect to find myself here, one year after I became an empty-nest mother and my husband and I downsized to a smaller house. We moved back to the city, barely a mile from where I work, after raising our two sons in Northfield, Minnesota, a two-college town with open minds and well-funded public schools.

I didn’t expect to become a cliché, the classic Baby Boomer whose grown kids have boomeranged home. And yet, that is precisely where life has landed me.

My boys — or men, as I’m training myself to call them — are living with us again, with their huge shoes and crusty socks and bicycles and soccer balls crowding our 1,500-square-foot house in St. Paul, minus the mud room and second full bathroom we had in Northfield. (Quick! Add a toilet in the laundry room.)

By habit and definition, I am a working mother again, balancing my time between job and family, and failing again, daily, to “have it all.” This time, however, I am called to redefine what “mother” means. Do I sign my reminder notes “Love, Mom” or “Amy”? Why do I write reminder notes at all? After 20 years as the family breadwinner, slogging through a 40-mile commute to my city job, do I sacrifice the yoga practice, time with friends and renewed commitment to writing that an empty nest allowed me?

Financial realities

Other parents struggle with these questions, too. Thirty-six percent of young adults in America ages 18 to 31 live with their parents, according to the Pew Research Center. That’s 21 million “emerging adults,” many of them educated and under- or unemployed. Pew calls families like mine “multi-generation households,” an effect of the still-lingering recession.

An August 2013 article in The Economist about the boomerang trend drew 70 comments — some by young people pointing out the sorry state of the job market, others by snarky “olders” criticizing the Millennials’ work ethic and impractical liberal arts degrees.

I worry whether my sons — both liberal arts majors — will be able to build a career as I did with only a baccalaureate degree. Will living at home, at ages 24 and 19, respectively, affect their social lives and ability to function independently?

Facts rarely assuage emotion. Knowing that other middle-aged mothers are buying milk by the gallon again and hauling three times the recycling to the curb every Thursday doesn’t change my experience — or my feelings about the experience.

Welcome back, Sam and Nate!

Welcome back, Sam and Nate!

So, ever the organizer, I have put some rules in place:

  1. Don’t over-parent. The 6-year-old boy who declared, “You’re not the boss of my clothes” has grown into a 24-year-old man who is working two jobs and recently spent seven months volunteering on behalf of injured animals and at-risk children in South America. He neither needs nor wants his mother overseeing his diet or other details of his daily life.
  2. Set financial expectations. With three active young adults in the house (did I mention the college student and his girlfriend in the basement?), the grocery bills alone would break the budget. The five of us negotiated an equitable system of shopping and paying for groceries; a magnetized whiteboard in the kitchen holds reminders and receipts.
  3. Catch the small stuff before it explodes. I get crabby when I’m the only one scanning the back yard for dog poop or when my small-town sons forget to lock the front door. So I shoot them a text message — simple, to the point and less threatening than face-to-face confrontation.
  4. Get to know them as adults. My college sophomore, an atheist, has shared his strong views about what he considers the hypocrisy of organized religion. He’s been willing to open up — and openly disagree with my free-form spirituality — because his dad and I are genuinely interested in what he has to say.
  5. Claim your alone time. As a careerist whose work kept me away from home a lot, I didn’t think adjusting to the empty nest would be so challenging. But the strange brew of relief and regret, seasoned with the powerful whoosh of time’s passage, left me feeling adrift and powerless for months. Solitary journal writing and teary talks with other mothers got me through it. Now, I don’t sacrifice my hard-earned alone time, even when the only way to claim it is behind a closed door — with the sound of music and my sons’ laughter drifting up the stairs.

Lesson learned: The concept of reframing helps me enjoy life as I age. Getting more time with my sons — at a point in life when I thought I’d rarely see them — feels like a second chance at all the family time I missed.