Seize the moment
Mother always told you to think before you act, didn’t she? She said, Don’t talk to strangers. Don’t quit. Think twice. Good advice, sure, especially when you’re middle-aged and supposedly sensible. But there are times when you just need to seize the moment. Meet five women who did just that.
Took a road trip by herself in a red Mustang convertible
Roz Oppenheim, 55, landscape designer, Calgary
Life before the leap
Fourteen years ago, Roz Oppenheim, whose last name then was Blumes, drove a station wagon, chauffeured her four kids to hockey and dance practice, and kept a perfect house. Until one day she and her husband were shopping for a car for their eldest son, and she caught sight of a cherry-red Mustang convertible with a white leather interior. It represented everything her life was not. “It’s so fabulous!” she said. “It’s so not me! White leather? With kids?” To her surprise, her husband bought it right then and there, but it sat in their garage. “How can I drive it?” Oppenheim asked herself. The kids hated it because it was so much flashier than the cars their friends’ mothers had. They didn’t want to stand out.
Trembling at the brink
Four years later, Oppenheim’s husband left her, turning her life upside down. For a while, she did nothing at all. But slowly, the Mustang began to make sense, all red, shiny and new. Could it be her rite of passage, her coming out? Or would it be her folly? “You’re crazy,” friends said. But she didn’t listen.
Liftoff!
After sending the kids off to camp for the summer, she packed up and took off on a 1,057-kilometre road trip to Vancouver. With Steppenwolf’s “Born to be Wild” blasting on the cassette deck, she found herself singing, crying and getting a speeding ticket. “The old me would have worried about sunburn and looking messy, and I would never have sung off-key at the top of my lungs, ‘Head out on the highway, looking for adventure and whatever comes my way,’” she says. “The new me was born on that drive. I realized that I was not only going to survive, I was going to thrive.”
