Zip It. Gracefully.
A lifetime of lessons, and the one still in progress: knowing when to say nothing.
Mick Jagger said in a recent interview with the New York Times that there’s nothing good about getting older. As for the wisdom you’re supposed to gain, he put it this way: “I forgot all my wisdom. I might have had a couple of pearls drop, but I’ve already forgotten what they are.” Mick is quite a bit older than me, so maybe that’s true for him, but I have all of mine. Every last painful piece. I am a wise older woman with something to offer, and the ones who need it most are certain they already know better.
I learned what I know by making mistakes. Then making the same one twice, to be sure. Sometimes a third time, just to shame me straight. I made money decisions that still make my stomach drop when I remember them. I let deals sit on the table because I was scared, and watched other people pick them up and turn them into houses and successful investments.
Looking back now, the biggest lesson isn't any single decision. It's that every one of those mistakes got made under duress. Under stress, with what felt like a gun to my head, because I hadn't stopped to think it through, and by the time I realized it, I was already stuck living with it.
The only time I bought a house, it was with my ex husband, and the red flags were staring me straight in the face. I was in my early thirties and was too too blind to see them. The truth is I saw them and chose to ignore them, because my heart wanted something more than reality was offering. I didn't want to see the bad stuff. The house was in the Hollywood Hills, up on a hill in Outpost Canyon, with a view of the Hollywood sign right from the master bedroom. It was dreamy. The nightmares were right there too, as plain as day, and I looked straight past them.
When escrow was about to close, we were told there was a problem holding up the sale. The woman who owned the house below ours was suing the company that owned the property, claiming the house was encroaching on her land. The story gets better. The company convinced us to move in and rent while they cleared things up, they promised. Why would we agree to that? Because we’d already given notice on our lovely rented house in Burbank, and I’d already packed. So we moved in.
During that time, the home inspection turned up foundation problems. The house was slipping down the hill. And there was a strange buzzing sound in the quiet of the night. Bees. Thousands of them, an entire colony nesting inside the walls.
We got out of the sale and had to find somewhere to live, two kids in tow. Back to renting. We never bought another house, because we’d already burned through our borrowed (thanks mom) down payment on legal fees, inspections, and rent. Lesson learned, and to say that one stung is both literal and true.
My list of mistakes and missed chances is long, and every single one taught me something I now know in the core of my being, the way you know not to touch a hot stove twice. Staying in relationships I should have left in the first year, not the twenty-second. Getting into the wrong relationships, especially business ones. Waiting to finish my bachelor’s degree until after having kids, when life was a lot more complicated. Not planning for the future because it was so far away, or so it seemed.
But the real wisdom dropped toward the end of my twenty-two-year second marriage, when I was already planning my exit strategy. I knew I had to take care of myself, and that the stress of running my own business was a gamble I wasn’t willing to make anymore. So I went back for my master’s degree, started teaching part time while doing public relations for a large PR firm, became a feature writer for the local daily paper, wrote a music column, and did a music segment on a morning radio show. All of it added up to one guarantee: I wouldn’t be the woman staring down a shutoff notice or unable to fix her car if it broke. I was getting wise fast. It didn’t take long before I was hired full time as a professor with lifetime benefits and a real salary.
I’ve been married to a doctor for twenty one years now, and he has always made a lot more money than me. But having my own salary, pension and health insurance is its own kind of freedom.
I just wish the knowledge had come sooner. Maybe that’s the real sting of wisdom built on a mountain of mistakes: watching people you love bury themselves under their own.
Some of the lessons I learned earlier than I wanted to, by watching my parents lose money they never had to lose, raising us like the next disaster was always a week out. It usually was. We never owned a home. My parents were terrible with money. We had nice cars, but some of them sat in the garage hiding from the repo man. Neither of my parents had gone to college, so an education wasn’t something they pushed on us.
Then our father died, and our mother found herself without a house, a savings account, or a college education. She was smart and wise enough by then, a woman in her early fifties, to know she was done making mistakes. She went to UCLA and became a paralegal. She moved up in administration at her job at a hospital, with a pension and real benefits, and got savvy with her money for the first time in her life. My sister and I admired her for it. We welcomed her wisdom with open arms.
My own wisdom? Tread lightly, because not everyone wants it.
And I have to say, this burns. Finally, after all that tuition paid in mistakes, I'm wise, just in time for the ones who need it most to think they know better. Some of the people I love ask, and I'm grateful for it. Others are certain they've already got it figured out, and I'm the one with the answers standing there anyway.
My best friend and I talk about this frequently, watching your kid walk straight into a decision you already survived, financial, romantic, whatever form it takes, and knowing exactly how it ends. Not guessing. Knowing. You’ve lived the scene before, you know every line, and still you have to sit in the audience and watch it play out. My sister said it best: “We’re so smart now, and they don’t want to listen.” We learned from all of it, and now we’re sitting on this pile of knowledge while our kids look at us like outdated software, like we haven’t already been exactly where they’re standing.
It’s almost funny, in a slapstick comedy kind of way. It’s like Wile E. Coyote running off a cliff. He knows exactly what's coming, keeps going anyway, and the fall is inevitable and expected every single time. That's basically this whole story in one image, watching someone walk toward an outcome you can already see.
Being a wise woman is hard work. It’s like working for a boss you know you’re smarter than and having to keep your ideas to yourself anyway. You’re full of knowledge you have to sit on, not out of defeat, but out of respect. Or self-preservation. Or probably both. I remember being twenty-something and rolling my eyes at my own mother’s warnings, not because she was wrong, but because the only way I was ever going to believe her was to feel it land on me first. I've still got the flattened-accordion bruises to prove it. Advice is information. A bad decision, lived through firsthand, is proof.
So I’m working on learning to zip it. Zip it good. Kind of like the Devo song, but with new words. Keep my mouth shut. I'm learning to watch people I love make the same money mistakes I made, and bite down on the urge to save them from a lesson that might be the thing that shapes them, or breaks them. I’m learning to keep quiet about the idea that college is a waste of time, knowing I would have given anything to have gone to college when I was younger. I don't know anyone who regrets getting an education, but I know plenty who wish they'd gotten one.
It doesn’t feel like wisdom, this silence. It feels like standing still while someone you love walks toward a wall. But maybe that’s the real final exam of being a wise woman. The collecting of the lessons is easy. Life hands them to you whether you want them or not. The exam is what you do once you have them. Can you hold a truth in your hand and not force it into someone else’s?
I don’t have this figured out yet. Some days I zip it beautifully and gracefully, like a woman who’s made peace with things. Other days, I scream into my pillow.
And then I think about my mother, not the version who had to borrow money to get the lights turned back on, or cover a bounced check, but the one she became after, the one who'd already paid for her wisdom. I think how badly I wanted her voice in my ear when I was drowning, and I wonder if someday the younger ones in my life will want mine too. Not now, not while they’re still proving something to themselves, but someday, at their own kitchen table, glass of wine in hand, notebook open, ready.
Until then, I zip it. Eyes closed, heart open, watching in complete horror.