Stuck in the Middle with You
“Life does not have to be perfect to be wonderful.”
I often say that I work with people in their 30s, 40s and 50s who are in the “messy middle” of life. I try to avoid using the term “mid-life” because, well, it’s most commonly associated with the word “crisis” and then people think of red Ferraris and divorce and get freaked out. But seriously, beyond the normal amount of existential dread, there really is so much going on at this time in life— raising kids, working full-time, trying to stay on top of the chores at home and maybe caring for aging family members. There is both the physical work load and the emotional/mental work load of modern life that can be exhausting.
And somewhere in between making time for self-care and making special core memories for the kids, we are also supposed to do all these adulting tasks like saving for retirement and college and making sure we have the right amount of life insurance.
The reason why I know so much about this time in life is because I’m going through it right now too. This post won’t have any math equations, (sad, I know), but it will hopefully give you the opportunity to get to know me and my messy life better.
Our home lies at the foothills of Spencer Butte in Eugene, Oregon.
I live in Eugene, Oregon with my husband, Ted, and our two kids (age 10 and 12). Ted and I met playing intramural coed softball back in 2006. I was anxiously sitting out the inning on the bench while Ted was doing cartwheels in the outfield. Our oppositional natures have evened out over the years— he helped me embrace my “fun” side and I help us pay attention to the important, serious things that might otherwise fall through the cracks. We are a good team.
For the first 13 years of our relationship, we both worked full-time while taking care of our house and having two children. We had the help of Ted’s mom, lovingly called Gramsy by our kiddos, who lived with us when the kids were babies through toddlerhood. She washed and folded a million tiny baby clothes and I remain so, so very grateful to this day for her help. But even with that support, it was still a really busy and overwhelming time in life.
The young Dervin family in Florence, Oregon circa. 2014. I’m hiding my severe fear of tsunamis behind my smile.
In 2017, my career took an unexpected detour. I left a stable job with a good salary to start an in-home daycare and preschool. I was ready for something new that would nourish my soul more than my bank account. Our kids were young and we couldn’t find a daycare we loved, so we partnered with a local preschool teacher friend and became a certified home daycare provider. This was the first time I launched a business and it wasn’t long until we were caring for 16 preschoolers a day with the help of 5 part-time teachers. I learned about everything from choosing a legal organization and setting up a bank account, purchasing business insurance, running payroll and keeping books. Most importantly, I learned how to effectively communicate with my clients: parents who had entrusted me with their single most precious belonging: their child. It was a fun, challenging and exhausting time in life.
Some of the kids of Eco Kids Village, the in-home daycare we operated from 2017-2020.
Everyone has their story about what happened in March of 2020 when Covid-19 shut the world down. Mine is that we closed the preschool and I became a home-schooling mom to my kids, grades Kinder and 2nd. It was so hard to help my 6 year old go to school Zoom school! I needed a project to keep me distracted from all the disappointment of the pandemic. I began making and selling activity boxes for kids with crafts, games and sensory toys. I sold them to my preschool families at first, but then I built an ecommerce shop and was soon shipping them all over the country. It was a really fun pivot and one that felt really good because I helped a lot of families during a pretty miserable time.
Once our kids returned to school, our need for more income brought me back to the workforce and back into finance in late 2021. Shortly after starting full-time with a local wealth management firm, our family was devastated by news that my husband’s mom, Gramsy who helped raise our babies, had stage 4 cancer at age 70. For the last 2 years, we have helped her through semi-monthly chemotherapy. It’s been a hard few years managing the stress, uncertainty and time commitment of supporting a loved one with cancer.
Earlier this Spring, I realized that if I were to stay working in finance, it would have to be as my own boss in my own firm where I could set the vision and culture. So here I am, starting another new business, completely revamping our budget, dropping kids at school and taking on most of the home cooking while my husband works two jobs (he is a freelance consultant on the side of his regular full-time job) and cares for his mom.
I like to collect snarky magnets that make me laugh.
Life right now is super messy and busy and crazy, but it’s also really fun and wonderful. We get to see our kids play in band concerts and basketball games and Ted and I both do work that is challenging and fulfilling. The backyard trees haven’t been trimmed, our HVAC hasn’t been serviced in a few years and our house is nearly always cluttered. We spend way more time watching movies as a family than we do playing enriching board games or going on hikes. We take the dog for walks but haven’t seen the inside of a gym for a long time. And if I wasn’t already educated in finance, we probably wouldn’t find the time or motivation to be proactive with our financial future without outside help.
I’m not a perfect parent, spouse, home-owner or family member. I’m not even a perfect financial planner— there is so much to know and it’s always changing (and I do my best to keep learning!) But I strongly believe that, for my future clients, I will be their perfect partner, advocate and supporter because I can deeply empathize with their life and the challenges of being in the “messy middle”.
We celebrate Christmas and get our tree each year from the beautiful Albertson’s parking lot on 18th and Chambers. Also, this is our dog Ellie.
