Perseverance: 

A tale of overcoming challenges to achieve a more enlightened life

Amy Sorensen
EPY 711
May 11, 2022
 Table of Contents

I. Prologue

II. Double Trouble

III. Awkward

IV. Bloom Where You’re Planted

V. Epilogue
 I. Prologue

My Dad always tells the story of when he decided to marry my mom.  He visited a close family

friend, maybe ten years his senior and expressed the nervousness of moving forward in asking

my mom to marry him.  It was all so overwhelming. While slightly more avoidant in his

attachment style and compulsively self-reliant, he knew that he loved my mother and wanted to

build a life with her.  At twenty-two, it was a bit staggering to think of supporting a wife and

children and building a life together.  The family friend wisely stated that things just happen one

step at a time.  “First you’ll get married,” he said.  “Then after a while, you’ll decide to have kids

and they’ll come one at a time. You’ll build your life one step at a time and it will be amazing.”

With this wise counsel from a trusted friend, my dad took a leap of faith and asked my mom to

marry him. 
 II. Double Trouble

What are over-active ovaries you might ask? Any mother who has had a fraternal, multiple birth

will be able to explain that her ovaries were working overtime and the result were two (maybe

more), amazing and usually very different children.  Such is the case for me.  While my dad

might have been expecting that life would move at a “one step at a time” kind of pace for most of

his life, what he didn’t expect was that he would have twins straight out of the gate.  The story

continues that dad visited his family friend and told him that he had lied to him.

Thus, began my journey as a fraternal twin. My parents were in their prime relatively

when it came to reproduction.  Mom was 26 and Dad was 22, “the safest and most typical time to

bear a child” according to Sigelman (2018).  Like most fraternal twins, also known as dizygotic

twins, my brother and I are incredibly different.  First, and most obvious, he’s a boy and has the

XY chromosomes that denote his gender. I on the other hand, obviously, have the XX

chromosomes, denoting that I am a girl.  Our differences don’t end there.  While he inherited

blond hair, fair skin and blue eyes from my paternal ancestors, I inherited brown hair, brown

eyes and olive skin from our maternal side.  

Our birth story starts in July 1974.  My brother and I were due to be born September 10

but things started progressing in July.  Worried that my mom would have us too early, the doctor

put her on bed rest.  While my parents were excited to be starting their family, there was also a

lot of stress at this time.  My mom had been working full-time as an Interior Designer and my

Dad was working in the family construction business.  Like some family businesses, paychecks

could be a little sporadic.  This led to some concern for my mom. She had always intended to be

a stay-at-home mom, but was concerned how my dad’s job would provide for the family, not to

mention that they were now doubling their family size in one moment.
 At this time, my mom was also very health conscious. I actually think it was her mom

who was so health conscious. Our grandmother was always looking for holistic remedies that

would bypass traditional medicine, so I’m sure that she was constantly giving my mother helpful

advice in her pregnancy.  She mentioned once that she had refused to take over the counter

medication, including antacids, and remembered eating a lot of papaya tablets to try and reduce

her ever present heartburn.

Mom spent the month of July, in Las Vegas, on bed rest, with the air-conditioner cranked

as low as it would go. By August the contractions were becoming more regular and by August

eighth, my dad had to take mom to the hospital. They were hoping for two healthy births, but

were concerned about us coming a month before schedule.

Labor progressed fairly normally, until nothing happened. Mom was in incredible pain,

no medication for her and nothing was happening.  No crowning, no babies, something was

wrong.  Unsure what to do, the doctors took her in for an x-ray to see what was happening. She

always worried that that x-ray would cause us to be infertile or in some way cause us problems.

But, it was the only way to clearly know what was going on.  The x-ray showed that I was

presenting breech and that my foot was stuck in the birth canal.  While my brother was engaged

normally, he couldn’t get past my foot. It was then that the doctors rolled my mother into the

operating room and did a C-section. Of course, at this time, dad wasn’t welcome in the operating

room, or in the delivery room for that matter.  He mentions that this was an incredibly difficult

experience for him, because he wondered if he would lose us all that night. 

Finally, on the evening of August ninth, my brother and I were born.  They grabbed my

foot and declared me the oldest with my birth certificate stating I was one minute older than

him.  Weighing in at five pounds, I was little, but not completely preemie size, my brother
weighed a whopping six pounds and we were both nineteen inches long.  It took my mother

twenty-seven years to get over her birth experience with us.  She mentioned periodically that she

was unsure if she was really a true mother because she had had to have a c-section.  For her it

was a cause of great shame and led to bouts of postpartum depression for the first few years after

our births.

In pain and stressed that she had somehow birthed us wrong, we spent four days in the

hospital following her surgery.  In those days, c-sections were performed horizontally rather than

vertically at the bikini line.  It took my mother months to regain her muscle strength. It was then

that the grandmothers descended on our home.  With two babies, both grandmothers came to

help my mom care for us.  Our first weeks of life were under the careful ministrations of these

two women.  Mom was unable to produce enough breast milk to support our growth, so they

boiled and washed bottles for formula.  Mom says she cried the day that they went home, dealing

with two infants on her own was a daunting experience, one she wasn’t looking forward to.

According to my mother, our first year of life was a blur of feeding, changing and

cleaning.  Like most babies we grew and progressed on schedule.  Our parents put us on rigid

schedules because dealing with two babies was hard.  If one of us woke up hungry in the night,

the other was changed and fed at the same time.  

My mother was also very concerned about our intellectual development. As an interior

designer, she had read a lot about the role of color in the lives of children.  Being the Seventies,

mom embraced the bright and bold colors that she felt would be most stimulating for our little

minds.  Our room was a slightly wild gingham patterned wallpaper that included orange, pink

and lime green. It was definitely stimulating.

 As we grew, our natures started to change.  I had been the needy, clingy child who would

cry often.  My brother had been easy to console and generally happy.  As we got older, I became

the easier going child and he became more demanding.  Our interests also started to align more

with our gender. My brother loved the construction equipment and would often seek out

opportunities to go to work with dad.  I disliked the dirt and sought ways not to go to work with

dad.  I liked kittens and cooking.  I loved playing with my dolls and stuffed animals.  I loved the

idea of reading and learning and looked forward to trips to the library, long before we started

kindergarten.

When we finally went to kindergarten, my mom made the decision that we would be in

separate classes and that we would have the opportunity to learn independently of each other.

She also decided that she would support one child’s class each year.  In kindergarten, she helped

my brother's class.  My teacher felt jealous, or so my mom said.  What I know is that she treated

me terribly.  She told me I was a bad student, that I was naughty and had to sit with the naughty

children. This was said in front of the entire class and when I tried to experiment or be creative,

like writing my name in cursive or trying something different with the art project we were doing,

the teacher would tell me what a terrible child I was.

The teacher ended up needing surgery and was out of the classroom for several months. 

The substitute finally put me at the coveted good kid table. I was so quiet when she sat me there. 

I didn’t want anyone to realize that I was no longer at the naughty table, but children,

understanding the social consensus of our classroom, that there were good children and naughty

children, quickly told the sub that she had made a mistake. In the area of peer group acceptance,

I had achieved the status of being rejected. I was a bad kid and needed to be at the bad table.  I

will always remember the look of confusion and sadness on the substitute's face. I wasn’t a
naughty kid, but the teacher had made sure that everyone in the class knew who I was and

unintentionally or intentionally labeled me for the rest of elementary school as the kid that

shouldn’t fit in.

What didn’t help, was that my brother was smart, talented and well liked, he was better at

cooperative play and associative play, he had a better peer network. He was generally popular.

This could be related to him playing more with boys than girls, as gender segregation is common

at these ages. Between Kindergarten and third grade, I was lonely.  I was earnestly seeking a

chumship, someone besides my brother, who didn’t understand my challenges in being rejected. 

Off and on new girls would move into our grades and we would become friends, but those kids

would move again and it seemed I had to start at the beginning of trying to build a friendship

from scratch. This went on throughout my childhood.  Me seeking friends, me being rejected by

friends and then a new problem: I wasn’t keeping up at school.

In third grade my mom decided to put my brother and I in the same class to see how it

would go.  It would be easier for her to have just one classroom. The problem was that my

brother and I really didn’t see the world the same way.  He was smart and popular and I was

struggling and felt stupid. I struggled with reading comprehension and would sometimes mimic,

ahem, sort of copy, stories and claim they were mine.  My brother would call me out on it in the

class.  This only increased my rejection. 

During this time, I was beginning to embrace a fixed mindset, I was socially awkward

and rejected by my peers. By fourth grade, I had a clear understanding of my abilities as a

student. Learning was difficult, so I lied to try and appear smart, but I was clumsy about it and

everyone knew I was lying.  The social-conventional rules that I was purposefully ignoring, was

causing me problems with my peers. 

 In my mind I was encouraged to lie because reading and mathematics were difficult for

me. I devised this mechanism for moral disengagement so that I could be ok with the lying.  I

knew it was wrong, but I felt that in persisting with these lies, I wasn’t really cheating, just

fudging things a little. I figured I didn’t have talent, but I desperately wanted to compete and

hang with my brother and the smart kids.  I honestly don’t know what my teachers thought of

me, but I would say most of my teachers thought me to be a nice kid who was a little lazy.

Looking back, I was a friendly, hopeful child.  I did know right from wrong, even if I

stood in the gray most of the time. I didn’t really see the connection between my academic

struggles and my social struggles.  While my parents were strict, they were communicative and

we talked often about my struggles with friends, not necessarily the lying, but they tried to build

my self-esteem.  I don’t know that I had any inherent genetic qualities that made me more or less

popular with my peers, and I definitely didn’t show more competence than others, but my

parents did give me feedback that I was worth knowing, worthwhile and wonderful to them.  My

parents frequently tried to communicate their approval of me and that I mattered to them, even if

I didn’t seem to matter to the kids I went to school with. 

 II. Awkward

Trying hard to appear smart, but not succeeding deepened my belief that I was untalented

and stupid. Additionally, I was a little chubby for my age.  Though my mom loved me and

included me in many conversations and discussions, she continued to struggle with depression

throughout my childhood and into my adolescence.  She had had another difficult pregnancy and

was struggling with choosing to be a stay-at-home mom and dealing with financial struggles that

would lead to an eventual bankruptcy.  This steered us toward several unhealthy eating habits. 

While she prided herself on providing us with vegetables at every meal, our snacks were far from

healthy and our activity habits were abysmal. 

Living in Vegas, we swam almost every day in a friend's pool, but binged on saltines and

butter afterwards. (Just the thought of that snack makes me want to gag a little now, but we loved

it.)  With the summer being over 110 degrees most days, we didn’t go to the park or ride bikes

because it was just too hot.  We went to the library, watched movies and tv shows and tried to

find creative things to do, but this led us to be a little pudgy in comparison to others.  It didn’t

help that I was also uncoordinated, lacked flexibility and did throw and run like a girl. Add to

this rejection by peers and an undiagnosed learning challenge and I was on my way to having

serious struggles.

Then things changed.  About the time I turned twelve school started to become easier. I

chalk this up to the emergence of abstract thought and finally figuring out how to learn.  I was

fortunate enough that while my mom struggled with depression, she also had a desire for us to

learn. She would take us to the library and bookstore and would encourage us to read.  It was

during this time that I finally found a book that I loved and that turned into ten books I loved and

I finally identified myself as a reader.  The gradual progression from concrete operational
thinking to formal operational thinking was expectedly gradual. Slowly, I started understanding

how to learn and comprehend text.  It was in eighth grade that I began to believe I was smart

(again, fixed mindset, but something). 

My eighth-grade reading teacher had had polio during the Korean war, that’s what all the

kids said, and walked with two canes.  His class was highly anticipated among the eighth graders

because all you did was read. He had a decent library in the classroom, and all he expected his

students to do was read each day.  I remember reading things like historical fiction, anything by

Lois Lowry and anything with a strong female protagonist.  One day my teacher invited me to

read Summer of the Monkey’s and I refused.  He was ok with that and let me continue with the

reading diet I had prescribed for myself.  I wish he had encouraged me more, because I probably

would have loved the book and it would have changed my reading life earlier. The highlight of

my eighth-grade year was when we got our state test back.  He asked us to look at the questions

that we got wrong and we were to discuss how we should have answered those questions.  I

scoured my test for my mistakes, but there were no check marks or any marks saying I’d gotten

anything wrong.  I looked at him in confusion and he quietly whispered, “Congratulations, you

got one hundred percent.” He smiled a little but that was it. He didn’t acknowledge what I had

done to the class, I got a quick kudos and that sent me soaring. I had finally done well on a test

and I knew I was a reader, I had concrete proof that I was finally good at something. I would be a

reader from that point on.

Socially, things were kind of getting better too.  I had acquaintances that I ate lunch with

and sat with during class.  I really do think that interaction was enough to keep me going at

school. Bierman suggests that students who have reasonably good social skills can gain greater

peer acceptance over time and I agree that this is true.  I had a small number of friends, but it was
enough.  I also think at this point I went from rejected to neglected.  I wasn’t being tormented for

being the naughty child, or an ugly, fat child; I just wasn’t being noticed at all.

During this time my self-concept was changing.  I was still chubby and struggled with

self-image of myself. During this time, I was trying to build who I was.  My self-esteem was

low, I was self-described fat, though now I’m not sure, I wasn’t the smartest or brightest in my

class, and I tried to be nice, but I wasn’t always successful at that either.  Looking back, I think I

was an average adolescent.  I struggled to understand who I was, I struggled to know what I

wanted.  

During this time, I wanted to do something smart as a job.  I wanted to prove my worth

by getting a worthwhile job that required brains.  I finally decided that I would be a physical

therapist and help people, especially children with physical ailments. Ultimately, I wanted to be

smart.  I wanted to get married and have a family and I wanted to be happy and have friends.

I discovered that science and hypothetical thinking were fascinating to me and I started

considering pursuing science in my later life. My freshman year of high school I was put in a

remedial science class and the teacher was one of the coaches.  There is a stigma about coaches

and this stigma was attached to this coach as well, but surprisingly he was a great teacher.  He

encouraged me to try new things and to be open to science.  The next year I was put with the

regular class of sophomores and had to transfer into my brother’s class.  It was the first time

since third grade that we had been in a class together and it didn’t go too bad.  The teacher

thought it was great that we were twins and would say things to the class like, let’s see who the

smart twin is today.  It was strangely the motivation I needed to succeed in that class.  We both

got good grades in the class, our rivalry had finally done something good for both of us.
 I started trying new things.  I tried out for choir, I played basketball and tried out for a

play. In building this identity, I was trying to find a place to fit in.  Cognitively I was getting

better and better, more and more of my coursework made sense and I was figuring out how to

study.

 I was exploring my identity and who I really wanted to be and I was trying to build a

good relationship with my parents.  While they were a stable presence as a teenager, they were

also incredibly strict and paranoid that something bad would happen to us.  This led me to fight

back against my mom.  Being the oldest my parents didn’t know what was normal or accepted

for kids my age and often didn’t let us just hang out with friends without a purpose.  In some

ways this made my adolescence difficult, in others I see the wisdom of their actions.  While I

don’t feel like I had a perfect attachment to my parents. Sigelman suggests that “a balance of

exploration and attachment is the key to successful development at this age.” While I struggled

to always relate with my parents, especially my mom, I always knew she had my best interest at

heart and wanted me to be successful and happy in life.

During high school I began to cling to our church youth group as a way to increase my

social interactions.  I felt like I finally made friends and was being included, but often those

friends would do things without me, because my parents were really strict. During this time, I

found that I had a level of sociometric popularity among the people who knew me well, I was

liked and valued, but I didn’t have any social status or visibility.  I definitely didn’t excel at

relational aggression. I was the nice kid, most of the time, and tended to stay out of the high

school drama.  In ways, this was nice, in a way I wasn’t included in the group drama and wasn’t

really a part of what was going on.

 As I matured, I began finding boys very attractive.  I was interested in having

relationships with boys, but my parents discouraged me from dating till I was sixteen and then

not seriously dating until after I was older.  I also didn’t find I had many opportunities to date.  In

high school I was never asked out, although I went to several group activities, church dances and

asked boys to girl’s choice dances when appropriate.  I had crushes and fantasized periodically

about those boys, but always broke off the fantasies at the point of sex.  As a teenager I was

taught that sex was beautiful, desirable and something that you waited for in a committed

relationship like marriage. Because of the lack of dating opportunities, I started to believe that I

was undesirable as a dating partner.  I found it hard to believe that anyone would find me

attractive and started to find myself entrenched in a resistant relationship attachment style. 

My new-found desire to be smart led me to apply for college.  I wanted to attend the

same college my mom had attended.  My ACT was ok, but not great, I didn’t understand that you

could take the ACT multiple times and so I didn’t.  I hoped my score was enough to get me in.  I

was smart, right.  I believed this right up until the point that I didn’t get in.  Receiving

the rejection letter was a reminder of how stupid I was.  I sunk back into my fixed mindset

beliefs. I started telling myself that I wasn’t really smart, I just had learned to fake it. I’m grateful

for a family friend who encouraged me to attend another college and a different family friend

who offered me a scholarship and helped me get settled into my new world of adulting.
 III. Bloom Where You’re Planted

I cried right after my first campus tour.  I was almost eighteen and I was going to a

college I wasn’t excited about.  It was a great school, but I felt so much shame that I hadn’t

gotten into the school of my dreams.  Most of my church friends were going to the school I had

dreamed about and I was the rejected one again.  At Christmas after my first semester the church

group had asked us all to speak about our experiences at college.  I spoke well and sat down,

when a member of the congregation prayed to end the meeting he said, “we are so grateful for

these, our students, attending thy university.” The kid next to me poked me and smirked, “All of

us but you.”  Talk about shame in a church setting where people should be trying to be like

Jesus, loving and compassionate. That was far from compassionate. Another reminder of my

rejection.

 My first three years of college were academically a challenge.  I did ok, but I didn’t

completely know how to succeed at school.  I mostly got A’s and B’s, a few C’s and a couple

D’s.  I also didn’t know what I wanted to do with my life.  I took a few science classes and

realized that physical therapy really wasn’t my jam, so what was?  I remembered that I liked

reading and liked teaching people, but I didn’t want to be a teacher.  I also realized that I really

liked writing and understanding how people communicate, so I started working towards a degree

in Interpersonal Communication.  I found the coursework fascinating and I started to feel excited

about my future again. I still was so focused on being smart, it was always so frustrating when I

got a low grade and didn’t succeed in the ways I wanted. I was still growing towards truly

mastering the formal operational stage of thinking.

During this time, I finally found a group of friends that I could relate to.  They were my

people.  We all met while working a summer job at the university and we found that we had a lot
in common. As noted by Sigelman, “young women also continue to form closer friendship ties

than men do.” Our social circle was large, we would get together to watch movies, play games,

go on group dates or just hang out.  As our time in college progressed, more and more friends

began getting married.  Even two of my closest friends married at the end of our third year in

school and another friend completed her degree. With no prospects of dating at that point in my

life, I decided that I wanted to do missionary service for eighteen months and then return to

school.

Bandura suggests that our personality is influenced by situational factors and

changes as the environment changes.  This was true for me.  In a loving supportive environment,

with friends who appreciated my quirks and creativity, I was finally being accepted for the

person I was.  I no longer had a need or desire to lie during my schooling and I came to a more

mature view of morality when it came to school work. 

With this in mind I left for Florida at the ripe old age of twenty-one, with little

understanding of the world outside my west coast, tight knit religious culture. It was during this

time that I began to more fully embrace a growth mindset.  The purpose of missionary service

wasn’t to get a grade, or to get paid for that matter.  The purpose was to grow into a disciple of

Jesus Christ, serve and share His message with others. It was during this time that I learned how

to be more consistent. Sigelman agrees that consistency tends to increase with age.  I had learned

I could make friends and did.  I learned how to work hard and I learned how to study.  This

experience changed my life and helped me build what Erikson termed my individual identity.

This change in environment allowed me to become better than I had ever been before.

Following my eighteen months of missionary service I returned home and decided to live

at home and attend UNLV.  I knew I wanted to study communications and my brothers and
parents were all at home.  During this time, I began to rebuild a friendly relationship with my

brother.  We had both been living separately for five years and coming back together was

actually fun.  It was also during this time that I started dating more than I ever had.

Having built a stronger individual identity, I was eager to meet someone and get married. 

My first year at UNLV was a little disappointing, I met interesting people and dated some, but

nothing serious.  My husband was stationed at Nellis Air Force Base my second year at UNLV

and we hit it off immediately.  Within ten months we were married, I’d graduated from UNLV

and I was expecting our first child.  We both worked, but I wanted to be a full-time mother to our

children, so I left my full-time work for freelance work after our son was born.  This led to what

Sigelman calls the parental imperative in our marriage.  My role was definitely more feminine,

birthing and nurturing our children.  His role was definitely more masculine in providing for our

family. We did strive for equality when it came to child care and housework, so taking care of

our home was never completely something that I was in charge of.

For the next sixteen years I was a mom.  I worked hard at being a good mom, but some of

my fixed mindset tendencies started to creep in. In some ways, I didn’t even realize that it was

happening.  I tried to keep reading, and encouraged my kids to enjoy reading, math, and science. 

I strived to love and support my husband, but there was always a place where, for no fault of my

husband, I began feeling that maybe the only thing I was good at was mothering and

housekeeping, which honestly is really hard and a thankless job.

After finally getting out of the Air Force, my husband went back to college to become a

clinical social worker, and we moved with our young family to Ely, Nevada.  I can honestly say

that a good amount of my growth has happened in the last thirteen years we have lived here.  
 During this time my husband and I talked about evening out our family to six children.

We thoroughly enjoy our family and have loved the journey of having kids and watching them

grow. Our youngest was eighteen months and I was thirty-seven. If we were going to have more

children there was no time to wait. My previous pregnancies had been uneventful, so we figured

that this one would be as well. It wasn’t. Sigelman suggests that “the age of the child who dies

has little relation to the severity of the grief.” Such was the case of our first miscarriage. I started

spotting at fifteen weeks and headed to the doctor to make sure everything was fine. It was my

father’s sixtieth birthday, so we were supposed to be spending Thanksgiving together as a family

at a cabin. My parents had taken half the kids to Idaho with them and we were to follow a few

days later. Instead, I was at the hospital having an emergency D&C.

Our children were not spared in this event, but I would agree with Sigelman, I don’t think

we fully appreciated their grief. Even years later they still talk of this event and the sorrow they

feel for not having another sibling. My parents felt it, and I’m sure that they felt

“disenfranchised with their grief” because they were sad we wouldn’t have another child, and

were struggling with watching us suffer through this event. Sigelman got it right, “clearly the

whole family suffers when a child dies.”

When our third daughter was in fifth grade.  She had struggled through fourth grade in

reading and especially with comprehension and a close friend had suggested that she could do an

Irlin’s screening on her and see if she had some sort of visual processing issue. We set up a date

and time and went for the screening.  She asked me to sit in on the test and part of me wondered

if this was really a legitimate thing until she put a turquoise overlay on top of a paragraph of text

and the words stopped moving.  I was floored.  All those years that I struggled with reading had

been because I have a visual flicker.  Everything flickers like film in a movie projector.  If I stare
long enough at something like a flower I can watch the two-dimensional object bloom. While I

may have struggled with an IQ test as a child, I didn’t have a low IQ, I wasn’t stupid, I had a

learning challenge that made it difficult for me to learn. While Sigelman states that “that it takes

more intellectual ability” to complete and compete in certain fields, my issues weren’t related to

intelligence, I just was hindered in gaining intelligence.  Learning this about myself began to

change how I viewed myself, I was finally starting to get past the smart label, to a label of

persistence.  Even though learning was hard, I still figured out a way to do it and became

successful.

In the last 13 years I have founded, managed and run a non-profit organization, I went

back to school and got my post- baccalaureate certificate in education and have been teaching for

the last six years and I am almost done with my master’s degree.  I can definitely say with

Sigelman that as an adult learner I can rate my class experience as an adult as more enjoyable

than what it was when I was younger. I have also been more successful in getting grades, now

consistently A’s versus the C’s and D’s that were once common.

That persistence has truly paid off, it’s been hard to overcome a fixed mindset and I can’t

honestly say that I’ve conquered it, but I’m striving and I will persist.
 VI. Epilogue

As I am getting closer to my fifties, I am noticing some simple physical declines. I know

I shouldn’t complain, it really isn’t too bad, but I’m finding that my eyesight is changing and I’m

needing reading glasses more and more. I expect in the near future that I will need to be wearing

glasses or contacts full-time. In the next ten years I can see that there will come a point that I

won’t drive at night with confidence and will lose the ease of switching between reading up close

and looking far away. This may be a challenge as a teacher that I will need to address as I get

older.

My hearing is generally good, but I can see the need for hearing assistance in the future

and wonder if teaching fifth graders is good for my hearing. Having lived through masking

during the pandemic and realizing how much I read lips and look for contextual clues as I’m

listening to others. It makes me wonder if the need for hearing aids will come sooner than later.

I have also noticed that my joints and stamina are changing as well. While I know that

arthritis affects 54% of elderly women, I can expect that in the next ten years I will probably

need two total knee replacements from the deterioration of the cartilage within my knees. As

time passes, I expect that I will need to be more mindful of what I am eating and the exercise I

am doing, less for how I look and more for how I feel.

While I am experiencing some symptoms of perimenopause, I imagine that in the next

ten years that I should be in full-blown menopause. I have had friends who have had

hysterectomies or have been going through menopause and have reported the joy of hot flashes

and irritability, but generally I expect that I will go through menopause much as I have faced

other milestones in my life, there will be some moments that will be hard, but generally it will be

another moment of development in my life.

 As I age, I am realizing things I didn’t understand when I was younger. I am beginning

to understand how smart I really am. In some ways it is slowly dawning on me that we are all

struggling with different things and have different challenges, that doesn’t mean I’m not talented

and smart. I also feel that I am starting to move towards the idea of what I am giving to others,

especially to my children and future grandchildren.

In the next ten years I see myself continuing to build my knowledge and expertise. In the

last six years of teaching I have seen that “more experience pays off in more effective memory

and problem-solving skills.” Sigelman also notes that it can take “about ten years of training and

experience to become a true expert in a field,” and I feel that is true. Over the course of the next

ten years I am excited to see the growth that will come as I continue using, honing and

improving my skills as a teacher.

I imagine that in the next ten years I will also experience the death of loved ones and

family members. Already, our family has suffered the loss of my father-in-law and gone through

many of the ups and downs of grieving. I imagine that losing my parents will be sorrowful, my

husband commented that he was surprised how hard the loss of his father was and I imagine that

it will be the same for me.

Persistence is an interesting concept. Over my life-time I have seen its value. I’m been

fortunate to have people in my life who encouraged me to grow. I’m grateful for my parents and

husband who have encouraged me to see myself differently, to see myself as smart and capable.

In my career, I’m grateful for the challenges I’ve had. It has helped me in my career to see

children as possibilities and not the sum of their experiences.