Heather Olson Beal

50-year-old Moms Don’t Have Big Adventures

PUBLISHED IN FOLIO 2026: VOL. 41.

I basically skipped the entirety of any independent adult life I may have had when I got married at 19. I came into adulthood right alongside my husband and my eldest daughter, who was born when I was just 23. I had two more kids at 26 and 29 and was then fully submerged in what we somewhat affectionately called “the tunnel”—the 15-ish year period when our kids were babies, toddlers, and preschoolers, and needed us for, well, everything. It was a tunnel because it sometimes felt crowded; it was a tight space. And it sometimes felt like we maybe wouldn’t ever get out, and we definitely couldn’t see the light at the end of the tunnel, for a long time. It was like the Venn diagram of me as a mother and me as an autonomous person in the world was a circle.

I have so many treasured memories of my kids as babies, toddlers, preschoolers, and elementary school kids. They were charming, towheaded little wonders who filled our days with laughter and sticky messes and insights into the world that sometime stopped us in our tracks. However, I would be lying if I didn’t admit that it was also a slog. Motherhood felt like something I was supposed to be naturally suited and inclined to do (and even enjoy?), yet it often just felt like an ill-fitting full-body skin that I wore 24/7. I often felt like I just wasn’t the right kind of mom that my kids needed. I didn’t snuggle them enough, I didn’t get down on the floor and play with them, I tried hard not to have to play make-believe with them--ever--and maybe I wanted a break from them too often. [In my defense, I did read aloud to them every day. But that may very well have been the only thing I did right as a mother.]

For almost two decades, my familiar refrain was that it was going to be so great to be 48 and have all the kids graduated from high school and gone. I would be an empty nester with so much life ahead of me. I would be able to sit around and read books, uninterrupted! We could travel without being limited by the traditional school calendar. We could go to bed and wake up whenever we wanted. We would finally get to experience all the autonomy and independent living we had missed by getting married and starting our family so early. 

Then, a couple years before my oldest graduated from high school, we started to see a little light at the end of the tunnel. The kids were then 9, 12, and 15. They no longer needed me the way they had when they were younger. They were capable of bathing themselves, brushing their own teeth without reminders, doing small chores, getting dressed, etc. And they were funny. So funny, smart, and witty. They were absolutely delightful. I started feeling some internal rumblings, some misgivings about my long-held empty-nest-excitement. I started feeling like maybe it wasn’t going to be so great after all. Why would I ever not want to spend time with them, every day?

Then, the oldest left for college. I held back tears the first couple times we went into a restaurant and the server asked how big our party was. Out of habit, I would start to say, “Five,” but then had to hold back tears and wistfully say, “Four.” It did not feel fun, at all. It felt wrong. Three years later, my middle daughter flew the coop. I thought round two might be less painful and disorienting, since I’d already done it once and knew what to expect. But it wasn’t. It was sad. As my empty nest grew, so did my disappointment with my empty nest life. Then COVID-19 hit and they all came back home. I know harrowing things happened during the pandemic, but we loved having them all back home together with us. We played games, made crafts, went for walks in the neighborhood, baked treats, laughed, debated politics, and had dance parties in the kitchen. Those few months never would have happened for us if it weren’t for a global pandemic. I felt some survivor’s guilt every time I caught myself reveling in having them all back home for those five glorious months.

One year later, the youngest graduated from high school and moved halfway across the country to attend college. And there I was, 48 years old, sitting in my cavernously empty house, nest fully emptied, wondering how to even be a person in the world without tending to kids’ needs around the clock. It wasn’t liberating; it was dark. I felt like my body’s proprioception was fundamentally damaged, like my brain struggled to connect to my arms and legs so I could just move through a regular day. I felt like Ellen Goodman (in Stabiner, 2008), wondering what to “do with all the antennae of motherhood” and how to manage “the loose wires that dangle after eighteen years of intimate connection” to my children (p. 274). What use was there, indeed, for “the expertise of motherhood that took so long to acquire?” (p. 274).

One afternoon, I received an email from my primary professional association, reminding members of their congressional fellows program. The application deadline to be selected as a congressional fellow—to work in the US Congress for a year—was approaching. I had seen the application before and thought it would be out-of-this-world amazing to have such an opportunity, but I always just shrugged it off, tossing it into the email trash can. I couldn’t go to DC for a year; I had three kids at home. I loved them. They needed me. But this year? I was 48 ½ and had no kids at home. They were gone. The oldest was living in New Orleans, the middle in Baltimore, and the youngest in New York City. So I spent some time putting together my application and just submitted it, on a lark. I can distinctly remember laughing as I told my husband that I had applied for a congressional fellowship in DC. It was absurd; I would never get chosen. They typically selected 2-3 people in the whole country to represent the organization. It was a pipedream. But all I had to lose was the time I spent on the application, and maybe a tiny bit of pride when I was not selected. 

About six months later, I received an email from the association saying I had been selected as a finalist. The next day, I interviewed for the position, and the day after that, they officially offered me the position. I was eating pho with my husband and son (who was home from college for the summer) when I got the email notification. I looked at my phone in utter disbelief. Speechless, all I could do was hold up my phone and show the email to them. Then it was their turn to struggle to find words. I think we all wondered what the catch was, or even whether it was real. I texted my far-away daughters to tell them the crazy news. After learning some of the details, my middle daughter said, “Mom, this is so great! 50 year old moms don’t get to have big adventures.”

Maybe so, but a mere two weeks later, I was on a plane to DC, where I spent a year, living alone, in a little English basement apartment. We have an annual family goal-setting tradition every New Year’s Eve. For years, I had said that I wanted to spend one year living in a big city--and I had even named Washington, D.C. as a possibility!--using public transportation, walking to coffee shops and bookstores, etc. So there I was, quite suddenly, fulfilling that long-held fantasy. I walked everywhere, rode Capital Bikeshare bikes, and used the metro and public busses on the daily. The only other change that rivaled it in terms of overhauling my entire life was becoming a mother for the first time.

Living alone in DC was freeing, but also scary, almost, to wake up every day and have only myself to consult about when, what, and where to eat, where to go, how to get there, when to go to bed, what to watch on TV, etc. You name it, I could decide it, on my own. And no one, and I mean, no one, in the entire city, needed me. Oh sure, I had things to do at work, but none of it was pressing. There was no small child underfoot, asking me for a drink or to make them a grilled cheese sandwich, crying because they didn’t want to go to bed at night. No pre-teen, sulking or scoffing at me for an unknown reason.

While it was an admittedly heady experience to be alone and to call all my own shots, it was also lonely. One weekday morning, I ran outside in my PJs, bra-less, to make sure the trash would get picked up. After pushing the can to the curb, I hopped back down the few steps into my basement apartment, only to discover that the door had locked behind me. There I stood on the sidewalk outside my apartment, on a hot early September morning, in DC, without a bra, with one broken flip-flop, and without a phone or wallet. There was not another person in the entire city who knew who I was or cared about my whereabouts. There was no one I could rely on to help get me out of that pickle. In that moment, “alone” felt pretty synonymous with “lonely.”

Another time, a tropical storm was reaching the eastern shore, with high winds and pounding rain, and my toilet got clogged. It was a one-bathroom apartment. I had no choice but to head out into the storm to try to find a plunger. It was about 9:00 at night and I was alone in an unfamiliar city. I walked about a half mile to the grocery store, but they didn’t have plungers. My next move, as the storm continued to approach, was to rent a Capital Bikeshare bike and ride my bike to the next closest grocery store, which also didn’t have a plunger. Soaking wet, scared, and feeling defeated, I called a Lyft to take me to Walmart, which had a flimsy plunger, which I purchased and which did not unclog the toilet. To this day, I will not reveal to what ends I resorted to get through that toilet-free night. 

Both experiences left me feeling crushed and in tears, with only my husband (who was back home on the other side of the country) to pour out my sorrows, via text. 

I was really, finally, and for the first time in my life, alone.

This was going to take some adjustment.

In short order, I decided that I needed to lean into the newfound freedom and autonomy that I was suddenly swimming in. I needed to learn how to be a person in the world apart from being a mother. I needed to learn how to be alone and not (necessarily) be lonely. And I needed to take advantage of all that DC had to offer in terms of history, entertainment, and public spaces. 

So, I went to work every day and then, at night and on the weekends, I went exploring. I was on a mission to get everything possible out of this once-in-a-lifetime experience. I did what moms do—I kept track of everything. I made a bullet journal to keep track of all of my (not-mom-related) adventures. I had a page for Smithsonians visited, types of cuisine I had tried, the number of metro and bus rides I had taken, the number of Lime scooter and Capital Bikeshare bikes I had ridden, all the DC public library branches visited, independent bookstores visited, steps taken or bike-ridden, congresspeople seen, TV series watched, books listened to or read, little free libraries seen, Ubers/Lyfts taken, Capital Bikeshare stations visited, movies seen, and university campuses visited, among others. 

I started a Facebook page called “HKOB Heads to the Hill” and invited friends and family members to follow along on my adventures. A few hundred did. At the end of my first full month, I published a list of my September adventures and mishaps that I called “September By the Numbers.” Here is that post, in its entirety:

Here is my September 2022 by the numbers:

1 - a cappella choirs I have auditioned for and been invited to join (the Chord of Appeals) 🙂

1 - times in my life I have locked myself out of my apartment without my phone, keys, bra, or shoes.

2 - crying meltdowns I have had (once when I locked myself out and once with the whole storm coming in - toilet clogged fiasco, ha ha)

2 - university campuses I have biked to and walked around (Gallaudet and Howard)

2 - concerts I have been to (Lizzo, string quartet performing T Swizzle arrangements)

2 - I am in the top 2% of Capital BikeShare users. This one surprises me.

3 - public libraries visited (not visits, ha ha, unique branches visited) 😉

3 - weekends I have seen Marin in Balty ❤

4 - movies I have seen in the theatre 

4 - museums I have visited 

6 - the percentage of Capital BikeShare stations I have visited 

7 - books I have read 

8 - Lyfts / Ubers I have taken 

8 - bus trips I have taken 

13 - types of international cuisine I have tried 

13 - hours I have spent riding a bike to get myself around 

14 - metro trips I have taken

37 - miles I have biked to get around 

42 - the actual number of Capital BikeShare stations I have used (6% above)

43 - Capital BikeShare bikes I have borrowed 

52 - hours of training I have undergone 

89.9 - miles I have walked 

224,065 - steps I have taken 

2X - fun I have had / crazy things I have witnessed / things I have learned / amazing street art I have admired and enjoyed 

3X - friends and family I have missed!

And so many people loved it. It was fun! So I did that, every month of the fellowship. It became the organizing principle of my free time—both the adventuring and the documenting. I have some ideas about why I felt compelled to do that.

First, someone once said that Mormons are a record-keeping people. Although I am no longer a practicing Mormon, I was raised and spent about forty years in the Mormon church, so I still do a lot of Mormon stuff. Mormons engage in genealogy, both as a hobby and as a doctrinal practice. I grew up looking at and sometimes even making family trees that went back many generations, carefully copying birth, marriage, and death dates from archival documents—first in pencil, then with a special black felt-tipped pin that we were supposed to use only for that purpose. My grandma used to tell us stories of her grandmother, Synneve, who was from Norway. We had albums full of old photos and other records of our ancestors. We learned to journal from an early age, documenting daily minutiae, special family and church events, and our most innermost feelings about every topic under the sun. We were encouraged to document our lives “for posterity.” As a mother, I had kept detailed baby books and then was an avid scrapbooker, documenting the kids’ daily lives from birth until they were each probably 8 or 10. I have more than 30 fully decorated mostly pastel-colored Creative Memories scrapbooks on shelves in my bedroom wherein their first steps and first words were documented along with their weight and height, vaccinations, and other daily happenings. So maybe the DC adventure list-making emerged from the lifelong practice of documenting my kids’ and our family’s lives. There was no one to eagerly document all my daily comings and goings; once again, it was all me, all the time. I guess I felt like I should have a record of it.

Second, I worry a lot about money. There was a salary associated with my fellowship, but it was still very costly to maintain two households. Furthermore, DC is an expensive place to live and I had no idea how much daily life there would cost me. I fretted a lot about all the additional costs of my DC life: rent, utilities, the occasional Lyft, restaurant food, you name it. So one of my first motivations for starting the lists was to keep track of how much I was spending on food and transportation, with the goal of cutting back in October if necessary.

Another reason why I started documenting everything was because I was so excited about all of my adventures and wanted to share them with my friends back home. In my real life, I live in a small rural town about 2.5 hours away from the next major metropolitan area. Lots of people who live near us spend most of their lives pretty close to home and many have never ventured as far as Washington, DC. My friends and lots of community members were excited to see pictures of my big city adventures and to experience DC through me. Also, I think my misadventures amused them. Even my kids said they wanted t-shirts of the US House, where I was working. They said it was akin to us getting t-shirts of the colleges they were attending; they wanted t-shirts or hoodies of the cool place their mom was working.

As the year progressed, the list-making and “by the numbers” posts became a way to mark my time there. When I put up my February numbers post, I knew I was halfway. Each time I visited another Smithsonian branch or a new DC public library branch (I visited every single one!) and added it to my lists, it was a way for me to feel like I had really done something. It was almost like I was staking my claim, or proving that I had a right to be there. I had done a cool thing or a weird thing or survived some misfortune and had photos and a bunch of quirky lists to prove it. 

We had managed to raise our kids and get them off to college and even grad school. We had moved them into and out of countless dorms and apartments and townhouses and then left them to have new and exciting adventures while we went back to our regular, comfortable lives. But now, I was working in a congressional office as a legislative fellow, in a faraway place, in a big city (whereas I had spent all my previous years in small to mid-sized college towns), navigating a car-less and pretty much friend-less existence, all by my lonesome. My daughter had said 50 year old moms don’t usually have big adventures, but dang it, I was having a grand one and I wanted everyone to know about it!

As the year wound down and I packed up my DC life and went back home and got back into the swing of my real life, I began to think that all the list-keeping was not for everyone else (even though I did indeed enjoy everyone’s fist bumps and high fives and condolences when I experienced an epic failure); it was for me. It was for me to prove, to myself, that I am a person in the world just as me, as Heather Olson Beal, not only as a mother. My now-adult kids (ages 23, 26, and 29) amaze me on the daily. I sometimes can’t even believe I get to be their mother. I miss them in a deep, primal sort of way and look forward with anticipation each time they come home or we visit them. But I am also doing things that are exciting and fun and worthy of documenting. I am moving into and out of places and working at a new place and landing a cool fellowship position and falling off scooters and getting lost and finding myself in a big city. 

Ariel Gore (2000) said that kids need interesting mothers. It’s true: I wasn’t the most nurturing or natural mother. I did not enjoy getting down on the floor to play pretend or Legos with the kids. And I sometimes felt like I had lost my individual sense of self in the immersive mothering experience that lasted more than two decades. But I was still in there, and I was interesting. My nest is indeed empty, but I’m 52 and I have places to go and people to see.

References

Gore, A. (2000). The mother trip: Hip mama’s guide to staying sane in the chaos of motherhood. Seal Press.

Stabiner, K. (Ed.). (2008). The empty nest: 31 parents tell the truth about relationships, love, and freedom after the kids fly the coop. Hachette Books.

🙢🙗🙠

Dr. Heather K. Olson Beal, Professor of Education Studies at Stephen F. Austin State University, earned her doctorate in Curriculum & Instruction from Louisiana State University in 2008. She teaches courses in educational foundations, family-school-community engagement, and educational policy and advocacy. Her scholarship examines the issues of school choice, second language acquisition, and the experiences of women and mothers in academia. She has three feisty, bighearted children who guide and shape her scholarship and teaching.