The workplace isn’t designed for older women

After parenting, many women encounter other invisible walls—elder care, menopause, and age bias—during the very years they should be reaching the top. My kids were finally almost grown, and I was in my late 50s, when my mother started to fall. Not once. A series of falls, each one taking a little more of her, until the word the doctors used was acute. My husband and I drove out into the high desert and hiked, because that is what we do when we can no longer think and have to anyway. Somewhere on that trail I understood the shape of the choice in front of me. I could close the business I had spent decades building and bring her home. Or I could find her a place, which is the gentle phrase we use for the thing that breaks your heart. There was no third door.