Different Times and Different Goals

When I look back at myself when I was younger I realise that my approach to life was very much socially prescribed. For someone born in the mid 1960s, it was clear targets to hit, namely the house, the marriage, the children and the career. Alongside this a man was a regular pub goer while the woman was taken to the pub on a Sunday ‘for an airing’!! Had I followed that approach to life things would have been very different. However, it was the lifestyle that my wife and I aspired to in my twenties. At pretty much every stage of my journey through my teens and twenties I was subconsciously, and occasionally consciously, trying to follow my Dad who was successful in work, popular outside and seemingly set for a long and happy retirement, although the jury was out as to whether he actually would ever retire because he hated being idle. Sadly he never had a chance to find out as he died of cancer at the age of 60, the age I am now. He was diagnosed around his 60th birthday in January and died in July. Between those two events I was offered the chance to go to Japan as an Assistant Language Teacher. I left the UK on July 23 having said goodbye to him the previous day. He died on July 26 and I didn’t go back for the funeral because he told me not to. As he pointed out with his usual directness, me coming home for the funeral wasn’t going to do him any good and it wouldn’t do me any good! It was at that point that my life path and his completely diverged. Yes, I did end up with the marriage, 35 years and counting, the children, four of them with the oldest being 32 at the moment, the career, 30 years in EFL and EAP and counting, and the house, which we moved into 8 years ago. None of the landmarks were achieved in the order that my Dad would have recognised and none of them would have suited him, but he accepted that I was a very different person. The one thing he was most pleased about, and would be even more pleased about now, was my marriage to Janet who he thought was great. The differences is there very clearly but so are the similarities. Our aims were the same but our ways of getting there were very different and dictated by opportunity, personality and the very different times we lived in.