I Am Obsessed With The Idea of a Midlife Gap Year
By: Shaunta Grimes
Tags: Life Lessons, Inspiration, Life, Self, Goals

It’s all Kay Bolden’s fault. I read her post about why she’s taking a gap year at 60 a while back and it was like she reached into my brain and flipped a switch that turned on a little light that I didn’t even know was turned off.

A gap year at 60? That’s a thing? Can we make that a thing?

If Kay can make that a thing, then I can make that a thing, too.

Because I didn’t get anything resembling a gap year when I was 18. My dad was still in prison that year. My youngest brother wasn’t in kindergarten yet. I didn’t even get to go to college in 1989, forget taking a year to travel or work as an intern at a publishing house or anything remotely interesting.

The year after I graduated from high school, I took care of my five younger brothers so that their mother could go to college. And I worked at a pizza restaurant. The year after that, too.

Getting pregnant and married when I was twenty-one felt like an escape from a tragically bad period in my family’s life. I ran headlong, as fast as I could, into my own life.

A gap year was not on my radar. If I’d given it any thought I would have chalked it up to something I’d missed. A ship that had sailed, gone with the rest of my late teens.

The idea that I can come back around to a gap year in middle age?

Oh, hell yes. I’m in.

But a gap year has a time.

Between high school and college is one of those times. After college, before you start your life. Maybe after a divorce or between jobs, if you don’t have any children and you have some money saved.

I have to face this truth right now: I’m not in a gap-year season of my life.

My youngest daughter just started high school. My parents-in-law both have Alzheimer’s Disease and are the end of the time when they’ll be able to live with us. I’m the sole source income for our family. My novel-writing career is at it’s beginning, still.

Taking a gap year now would be as poorly timed as it would be if my fourteen-year-old told me she wanted to take the next year to backpack around Europe.

I’m going to have my gap year.

Oh, yes, I am. I can taste it.

After years pouring the bulk of our energy into taking care of our kids and his parents, the Sandwich Generation years will be over for my husband and me soon.

In four years our youngest daughter will be graduated from high school. Maybe she’ll be off on her own gap year or else she’ll be off to college. And her grandparents — one way or the other — won’t need us so much anymore. That’s the terrible nature of their disease.

Maybe that will be the time. I’ll be 52 in four years. That seems like a good time for a gap year.

Or maybe not. I’m not in a hurry.

Taking a midlife gap year isn’t about getting back anything I’ve lost or given up.

My mother pushed pause on her life when she was 24, when I was born. And then she died a week after she turned 48. Now it’s been 24 years and I’ll turn 48 next month.

Her legacy to me has been a life lived without my own pause button engaged.

I have already lived the way I wanted to. I’ve done work I loved. I’ve travelled and had adventures. I’ve made sure my children saw me pursue my passions the way I wish I’d see my mother pursue hers.

My mother’s gift to me was a life lived with remarkably few regrets.

However long it takes me to get to my actual gap year, there will be adventures in the meantime. I’m taking my daughters to Mexico in November. I’m visiting England with my son next year. I’ll take a trip west to visit my family. I have a novel releasing in March.

This is the year when I’ll be older than my mother and it won’t be my gap year, but it will be a year I plan to live intentionally.

My obsession with a midlife gap year isn’t about realigning a life that hasn’t felt like the one I wanted to live.

It’s more about having the time and space and resources to plan for a transition between the giant chunk of my life that was spent taking care of other people — my brothers and sisters, my children, my parents-in-law — and the rest of my life.

Maybe I’ll always be a caretaker. It’s possible that it’s just how I’m hardwired. Maybe when my kids don’t need me and Carole and George don’t need me, there will be other people who will.

I don’t know. But I’ll have a year. My gap year.

It’ll start with a vintage camper, with wings.

I’ve got time to plan from there.