Are There Third Acts in American Life?

Aaah, middle age.  You meet yourself coming and going.  I'd always heard that age begat wisdom, but what I wasn't prepared for was the notion that it also begats (pardon my conjugation) obsolescence.  By this time of life hopefully you know what you're good at and what you're very good at.  For instance, I am very good (if I may say so myself) at not cooking for my family.  Here's a typical dialogue that happens every year around a major feast:

Them:  So.  What'll we do for (insert your favorite holiday)?

Me:  Hey, I got an idea!  I'll cook.

Them:  Gaaaargh!!!(not an exact translation).  Oh no.  Oh HELL no!!!!!  And then the sound of feet big and small running upstairs to throw themselves out a window.

And that's that.  Each year I'm spared doing something I really don't want to do anyway.  But what of those things I do do well and want to do?  And what of the aforementioned set of things I do do well and want to do can I still be paid for?

That's where  the obsolescence comes in.  Those who know me well have heard me say that there are only two things I wanted to be in life -- a mother and a writer.  And I am.  But in my late 30's another calling emerged, one that is a tributary of mothering (at least for me), and that was teaching.  I became a teacher -- of writing primarily, but not exclusively.  I worked for many organizations, one of the best was Teachers & Writers Collaborative; it has a storied and sterling history in New York's public schools.  I taught (and played) with children and teachers all over the city (except Staten Island).  What an education that was.  A dispatch for another day when I get myself worked up over public education.  (I can feel it coming on.  Don't get me started on No Child Left Behind or Michael Bloomberg or, pause for steam to come out of my ears, Diane Ravitch, who has finally "seen the light".)  But, I digress ...

As I was saying, I taught for many years, some of them when Daughter No. 1 was in high school and I recall having a conversation with Bob Lubetsky, former principal of her alma mater, City-As-School High School.  I confessed that I'd been struggling with the need to remain a writer and the desire to teach mathematics.  I'm still struggling with it more than 15 years later.  (My experience with teaching is that it draws from the same well as writing.  The more I taught, the less I wrote.)

Over the years I've trained myself to accommodate my ambivalence, even ignore it and take the next step.  Today I'm headed over to Southern Connecticut State University for their Graduate School Open House.  I'll probably be mistaken for an adjunct faculty member but I'm going as a prospective student and I'll ask what it would take for someone who got her bachelor's degree in 1980 to get a master's in Mathematics.  I decided I want to teach math although I may be 60 years old before I'm fully qualified to do so.  From this distance it seems like folly if the point is to get a job.  It's not, though, is it?  The point is to answer yet another call.  That never gets old, even if I do.