I am already 57, my husband will turn 58 soon. We have two children, now both professionals: one is a medical doctor, the other is an electronics design engineer. We should already be able to "retire" from actively working and earning a living, but we continue to work - because we each need to take maintenance medicines for our health conditions. And so we both work. But it is not as if we should be working for the sake of work, and getting a promotion.
I recall when we were younger.
From age 25 to 35, we both worked and were so concentrated in our being able to merit promotion and salary increases that we tended to leave our family to the care of yayas and housemaids. We even tended to have our own circle of friends and went out with them, each of us excluded (he did not invite me to join him and his circle of friends; I did not invite him to join mine).
From age 35 to 45, we more or less were "there." Our consulting business that I had set up was doing great, we had a lot of clients and we were able to tell our first-born, "Okay, go for it. Get on to medical school." and our second-born, "Yes, you can look forward to going to engineering school when you graduate from high school." I also told my spouse to come back home from his work abroad, as our business could already pay him the salary he was getting there. How did I settle the career or family question? Well, we owned our business, and so it was easy to decide to set up a home office. It meant losing a receiving room and a sala, also a dining and kitchen area - all on the ground floor - so that we could set up our home office there. It meant also losing one bedroom on the second floor, so that we could set up our sala/dining/kitchen there - more cramped than it would have been were it in the ground floor. But it worked for me, my spouse and our children. I was mostly home, but still at work - in our home office.
From age 45 to 55, that set up continued: we still had our office at home, but then the number of clients increased and we covered the whole Philippines. Almost a third of the year, we each - or both - had to travel by land, or by sea, or by air, to work on projects for clients located in far flung places. But we were able to say yes. Our children were older. We could leave them alone at home, and we could trust that the two would still be doing their home-school-home routines. They could cook for themselves. They could wash their own clothes. In fact, it was like it were the reverse: they asked us to "check in" with them when we arrive at the place we were going to, and to update them each day how we were doing at our work. Then when we would get home, we would have a really noisy dinner, telling them about our adventures and our close-to-mishap experiences while trying to locate the place of business/operations of a client. No question about it - it was career AND family for me and my spouse, while in the meantime our children were thriving in their tests of independence.
Mommy Fe
