Baby Boomers Defined
By Teresa K. Flatley

What is a Baby Boomer? The short answer is someone born between 1946 and 1964. The long answer is not quite so easy to come up with.

When I launched my website, I decided that I wanted to devote it to Baby Boomers because we have a lot in common. We are fairly far along in our lives, maybe more than half way; we have families of all descriptions and the reality is beginning to dawn that many of the things we thought we’d accomplish will probably not see the light of day. We are a little angry, too, that our generation, which was fated to do it all, has not done nearly enough.

That’s not to say we Baby Boomers haven’t been busy. But a lot of what we have done, I think, has been for the sake of keeping ourselves and our children “busy,” rather than putting enough thought into how we really wanted to spend our time.

Baby Boomers have made a competition out of who has the most frantic life. I’ll just bet that some obsessive-compulsive Boomer somewhere has compiled a list of point values that tell that tale:

Have one child? You get a certain number of points. Two children? The points increase. Taking care of a sick parent? Have a job that keeps you slaving away evenings and weekends? Your points grow and grow, because we really think the person with the most points at the end is the winner.

Unfortunately, we don’t always hold on to our empathy for others as we move through life, so intent are we in showing off our point totals.

Ask Baby Boomer parents with children still at home what they are doing this weekend, and you will hear a litany: “We have a birthday party, and then a soccer game and dance classes and….” Have any of us noticed that we are actually participating in little or none of this?

If our children are grown and gone from home, then we Baby Boomers are often made to feel as if nothing we do will ever be important again. Even though at this point in our lives, we may be fortunate enough to decide for ourselves how we want to spend our time, like attending the symphony or basketball games, trolling flea markets, doing volunteer work or sitting and reading the classics.

But we still feel guilty, thinking that we must be neglecting someone or that we don’t deserve to spend this much time on our wants. But maybe we do.

It isn’t easy for us to look back over the last couple of decades and see the promise we thought we had. In our twenties and even thirties, it was all laid out before us, ripe for the grabbing.

Now that things may be slowing down in our day-to-day lives as our children move on to theirs, it’s a good time to reassess what we have done and what we wanted out of life. There’s still time, plenty of time, to make changes, to set goals, to dream. Going back to school, changing careers, taking that once-in-a-lifetime trip can actually be realized.

Take some time before your next birthday to see what it is you may have wanted out of life, but haven’t yet achieved. You may not be able to do it all, but you can do something. And that may just be enough, even for us Baby Boomers.