How Do I Want to Spend My Time?
Three Midlife Mawrters share their stories of reclaiming their timeâand making the most of their gifts.
Kay Yoon â00 felt like a âbad Mawrterâ for choosing to stay home with her first child. As a Korean-American, she experienced guilt aggravated by internal conflict: individualism versus an obligation to meet community expectations through achievements that could be abstracted to a title on a business card.
âKoreans are obsessed with titles!â she says, citing cultural networking etiquette. âA business card is a symbol of your stature. If you give your card to someone, or receive a card from them, you need to use both hands [as you would with a gift]. Korean parents say, âRemember, two hands!â the way you remind children to say please and thank you.â
Now 39 with two young daughters, Yoon feels the pressure of âthe ninesâ to complete the decadeâs bucket list. Sheâs currently working part-time in the nonprofit development field, while honoring her personal responsibilities, including coordinating special-education services to accommodate her eldestâs learning differences.
In a time when âterrible headlines about natural and man-made disasters have made me question everything,â Yoon is also pausing to ask, âHow do I want to spend my time? With whom do I want to spend it? What is most important to me?â Sheâs grateful for the Bryn Mawr women who, in her early days of motherhood, sympathized but set her straight, saying, âLook at usâweâre ordinary Mawrters, too.â With a little help from these âthird-cultureâ friends, sheâs reclaiming her authority.
With a background in ballet begun at Bryn Mawr, Berit Haahr â92 had strong legs but felt like âa 98-pound weakling.â Weightlifting with a trainer only resulted in âbig forearms, like a blacksmith!â she says.
Two days before the presidential inauguration, she joined a boxing gym in Ardmore, Pennsylvaniaâsuiting up in gloves, headgear, and hook-and-jab pads to practice the sport-as-coping-strategy. âI thought my head was going to explode from rage,â she recalls. âWhen Iâm boxing, I canât think about anything else. If Iâm not paying attention, Iâll get hit in the head.â
Partnered with taller or heavier boxersâother women, men, and teenagersâHaahr is punching above her weight class and learning a different way to move. Both ballet and boxing focus on footwork, she says, but âballet is about up, and boxing is about down. Ballet is poses, and boxing is movement with minute control. You keep your face hidden. You donât ever stand still but move to avoid the punch. âRoll with the punchesâ is an actual boxing term.â
Now, she measures progress in speed, repetitions, required rest time, and how she feels after a workout. While she works latent muscles to reclaim her power, Haahr (a reading specialist) is becoming a better teacher. As she tells her students, âFor a long time, I was the worst boxer at the gymâsometimes I still am! But I love it, and so I keep showing up to try to get better.â
How do I want to spend my time? With whom do I want to spend it? What is most important to me?
âWriting isnât necessarily about luck or talentâitâs about putting in the effort,â says Rebecca McKillip Thornburgh â80, who, after illustrating 135 books for children, is pursuing an M.F.A. in writing for children at Hamline University in St. Paul, Minnesota. Having mastered the page turn and 32-page picture book layout, she says she âalways intended to write my own work. Now Iâm reclaiming what I set out to do.â
Illustration is always collaborative, says Thornburgh, who conceives of a story in pictures inseparable from the authorâs text. But it was her work on The Shelf Elf series by Jackie Mims Hopkins, which brought her whimsical vision to a straightforward story intended to teach library manners, that convinced her she could create both visual and literary narratives.
Taking a two-year hiatus from the publishing business to practice writing is âboth daunting and wonderful,â she says, âlike stepping off a cliff into this open space.â At Hamline, sheâs exploring âscary, off-kilter, meta-fictive picture booksâ and earning praise for her command of fairy-tale language and her snarky sense of humor. Revisiting a Scottish folktale she first illustrated as a project for her fine art major at Bryn Mawr, sheâs retelling the Tamlane tale in a modern voice that comments directly on the storyâs use of folktale tropes.
In the process, sheâs relying on the delete key to help her revive her sense of play. After all, she says, âWriting is revisingâitâs just sketching and sketching and sketching.â
The same might be said of these Mawrters-in-progress, taking a midlife opportunity to reclaim their time and make the most of their gifts.
Published on: 03/16/2018